Reason governs history: the cunning of reason

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 · 1831The real is rational: Spirit realises itself in history.

What it claims

History has a meaning, even when it looks like a "slaughter-bench": it moves towards freedom. Hegel calls this way of seeing a "theodicy", a justification of God.

Why

History's goal is freedom, and it is achieved through people's passions and interests, which serve reason without their knowing.

In short

"Reason governs history: the cunning of reason" is an argument by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (lecture notes, 1840 ed.)) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: progress). Its claim: History has a meaning, even when it looks like a "slaughter-bench": it moves towards freedom. Hegel calls this way of seeing a "theodicy", a justification of God. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (lecture notes, 1840 ed.)

Valid with an implicit premise

Mind the source: these Lectures are not a book by Hegel. They are lectures given five times between 1822 and 1831, published after his death by Eduard Gans and then by his son Karl Hegel, who merged his notes with students' notebooks. His thought, not necessarily his exact words. (The phrase "cunning of reason" also appears in his own hand, in the Encyclopaedia, § 209, but about purposiveness in general; that text is not yet in our corpus.) The idea: history is not a series of accidents. It has a goal, freedom, and reaches it even through people's selfish passions, which reason "sets to work for itself".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where reason governs, history moves towards freedom through passions, and yet misfortunes remain meaningless: real progress, but one that justifies none of what it cost.

Valid with P4. It is the heaviest premise: it asks us to accept that individual sufferings "take on meaning" in light of a collective goal. Without it, one can accept that history progresses towards freedom while refusing to say its victims suffered for something. P1, for its part, is not proved in these Lectures: Hegel refers to his Logic.

Analogy. In an anthill, each ant follows its small interest, and yet the anthill gets built. For Hegel, great men (Caesar, Napoleon) pursue their ambition but unknowingly carry out something greater than themselves, then "fall off like empty husks". The question is: does the anthill justify the crushed ants?

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Objection anticipated in the Lectures: history as a slaughter-bench attacks premise 4

Look at history: wars, ruins, happy peoples destroyed, virtues sacrificed. It is a slaughter-bench. Speaking of a rational goal in the face of so much suffering is indecent.

Hegel replies

Hegel Reply in the Lectures (lecture notes)

The text does not deny the slaughter-bench: it is precisely in front of it that thought asks "to what final aim" these enormous sacrifices were made. And it accepts it: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned; the Idea does not pay the price of existence itself, the passions of individuals pay it.

Theodor W. Adorno 1966

Adorno refuses to see in history a road to freedom: he writes that no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but that there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. For him, universal history must be construed and denied at once; the unity Hegel sees in it is that of a growing domination over nature, then over men.

The debate goes on (our summary) Hegel accepts the sacrifice of individuals for the sake of an end; Adorno, after Auschwitz, holds that this end does not exist and that the unity of history is that of domination. Before him, Dostoevsky through Ivan Karamazov already refused that a final harmony could justify the suffering of innocents. Hegel's defenders recall that he explains history without saying each crime was good. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: can an end of history give meaning to the sufferings that lead to it, or is that meaning an unacceptable consolation? Hegel accepts the price; Adorno refuses it. Open point.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II, ch. 17 1844 · attacks premise 2

The idea of humanity progressing towards ever greater perfection contradicts itself: an infinite time has already elapsed before every moment, so everything that was to come with time should already be here. History goes nowhere; it repeats the same suffering in other costumes.

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1844, after the author's death (1831).

The debate goes on (our summary) Hegelians reply that the argument targets endless progress in infinite time, whereas for Hegel spirit has a history that begins and a goal already reached in principle.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: can history have a goal if time has no beginning? Hegel died before Schopenhauer's book and no reply from a specific defender is retained here. Open point.

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 1846 · attacks premise 1

It is not reason or spirit that drives history, but the material production of life. Making history the work of the Idea is standing the world on its head.

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1846, after the author's death (1831).

The debate goes on (our summary) Yet Marx keeps from Hegel the idea that history has a direction and laws of development: it is this shared point that Popper will attack.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: is what moves history spirit or material production? Hegel died before Marx's objection and no reply from a specific defender is retained here. Open point.

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies 1945 · attacks premise 1

There is no knowable "law" or goal of history: that is "historicism". Believing that history carries out a rational plan leads to excusing the victors' force and sacrificing individuals in the name of the future. Popper sees Hegel as one of the fathers of totalitarianism.

a defender replies

summary: their text is not yet in our corpus see the argument

No reply possible: objection raised in 1945, after the author's death (1831).

Walter Kaufmann defender of the argument · 1951

Summary: Kaufmann replies that the portrait of Hegel as a father of totalitarianism rests on quotations cut from their context and on second-hand sources. He points out that freedom is at the centre of Hegel's philosophy of history.

The debate goes on (our summary) Most specialists judge Popper's reading very unfair: Hegel puts freedom and the right of subjectivity at the centre. But the underlying question, can we know the meaning of history?, remains open. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Shared debate: Popper sees in Hegel's philosophy of history an excuse for the force of the victors; Kaufmann judges this reading built on isolated quotations. On the underlying question (can a meaning of history be known?), open point.

What today's voices say

Defend it

Slavoj ŽižekHe keeps Hegel but reads him against the optimistic reading: a good idea almost necessarily turns wrong, and only a second attempt may succeed.

Criticize it

Steven PinkerAsked whether his picture of progress hides a Hegelian belief that history moves forward, he says nothing could be further from his view: it rests on plotted data, not a force in history.