"No one ever conceived of a more sophisticated and dynamic philosophical history than Hegel. His system is built around three fundamental ideas."

Sam Haselby

In summary ...

First, the key to human agency is self-consciousness. For people to be doing anything in any real human sense is to know what we are doing as we do it.

Secondly, self-consciousness is always a matter of locating ourselves in a kind of social space of ‘I’ and ‘we’.

Third, there are ways in which things can go better or worse and we can make it possible to become new, different and better versions of ourselves. But what we can make of ourselves depends on where we are in history.

... but what we can make of ourselves depends on where we are in history.

Hegel’s search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox: freedom is coming into being, but is never guaranteed

Read the whole thing at Aeon : What is history? Nobody gave a deeper answer than Hegel

Thinking Allowed

This is a People First post that was originally on the People First domain. It has been moved here as part of my domain consolidation program. It’s a steady and slow WIP as I check each entry, so do please bear with me.