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Time and History in Hegelian
Thought and Spirit
Time and History in
Hegelian Thought
and Spirit
S A L LY SE D G W IC K
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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In memoriam
Graham Bird
Axel Kopido
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Judith Jarvis Thomson
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction1
1. History and Human Finitude: Kant versus Hegel 18
1.1 Kant on World History and Finitude: Introduction 20
1.2 Principal Theses of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History” 23
1.3 Comparing Kant and Hegel on World History: Points of Intersection 35
1.4 Hegel versus Kant on World History 39
2. Hegel’s “Philosophic” Approach to World History 45
2.1 Three Methods for Considering History: Original, Reflective,
Philosophic47
2.2 Resolving the Contradiction Between Original and
Reflective History 58
2.3 Our a priori Idea of History must Submit to the Test of History 65
3. Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History 67
3.1 The Necessity of History: Three Initial Interpretations 69
3.2 History’s Necessity: Further Precision 73
3.3 External versus Internal Purposes 89
3.4 On the Subjectivity and Resulting Externality of Kantian Purposes 93
3.5 Conclusion: The Idea of Freedom Gives History Its Necessity 95
4. Hegel’s Fatalism as a Theory of Freedom 98
4.1 Ancient versus Modern Conceptions of Necessity 101
4.2 Reconciling Ourselves to Necessity: Three Interpretative Proposals 108
4.3 Conclusion 113
5. Freedom’s Necessary Limits 117
5.1 Human Freedom: In but not Reducible to Nature 118
5.2 Freedom: Achieved versus Given 124
5.3 Generating Freedom’s Content 128
5.4 Contingency in the Course of Human History 132
5.5 Conclusion 137
6. Thought’s Temporality 139
6.1 Preliminary Evidence of Hegel’s Commitment to Thought’s
Temporality143
6.2 The Knowability Thesis 151
viii Contents
6.3 Hegel’s “Philosophic” Method Revisited 158

6.4 The Realizability Thesis: The Actuality of the Rational
and the Rationality of the Actual 161
6.5 Conclusion: A “Rose in the Cross of the Present” 166
7. Coda: Permanence in Hegelian Thought and Spirit 169
7.1 Roles for Permanence in Hegel’s System 171
7.2 Further Roles for Permanence 174
7.3 Philosophy’s Debt to Its History 178
Works Cited 183

Index 191
Acknowledgements
This book has been about a decade in the making, and I have accumulated many
debts along the way. I began turning my attention to the philosophy of history
during a research leave in 2011–2012 as a Humanities Institute Fellow at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. In the first half of 2015, I had the good fortune to
spend a semester at the Freie Universität of Berlin, thanks to the Fulbright Scholar
Research program. I enjoyed a further research leave at the Freie Universität in
the spring of 2017, supported by the generosity of the Alexander von Humboldt-
Stiftung and my hosts Professors Georg Bertram and Dina Emundts. In Chicago,
I benefitted from conversations especially with Mark Alznauer, Karl Ameriks,
Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, Nicolás García Mills (who gave me extensive com-
ments on Chapter 5), and Rachel Zuckert. Over the years, my thinking about the
subject matter of this book has been enriched as well by conversations with fur-
ther friends and colleagues, including Giulia Battistoni, Willem deVries, Thomas
Khurana, Daniel Feige, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Stephen Houlgate, Claus Langbehn,
Francesca Menegoni, Dean Moyar, Angelica Nuzzo, Julia Peters, Terry Pinkard,
Paul Redding, Michael Rosen, Birgit Sandkaulen, and Allen Speight. I am also
indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press whose sug-
gestions guided me in making improvements to the manuscript. I owe thanks to
my editor, Peter Momtchiloff, for his professionalism and encouragement. Finally,
I wish to express my love and gratitude to my two most constant personal sources
of support, Peter Hylton and Robert Sedgwick.
Earlier versions of some of my discussions have appeared elsewhere. Chapter 2
draws heavily from my paper, “Philosophy of History”, Oxford Handbook on 19th
Century German Philosophy, eds Michael Forster and Kirstin Gjesdal (Oxford
University Press, 2015), 436–452. Material of Chapter 3, section 3.2, appears in my
papers, “Two Kantian Arguments for the Speculative Basis of our Science of Nature”,
in Ethics and Religion between German Classical Philosophy and Contemporary
Thought, eds Luca Illeterati and Michael Quante (Padova University Press, 2020),
39–57, and in “Remarks on History, Contingency and Necessity in Hegel’s Logic”, in
Hegel on Philosophy in History, eds Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 33–49. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 of Chapter 3 draw from my
paper, “Innere versus äußere Zweckmäßigkeit in Hegels Philosophie der
Geschichte”, Hegel-Studien 51 (2017): 11–28. Material from my paper, “Reconciling
Ourselves to the Contingency that is a Moment of Actuality: Hegel on Freedom’s
Transformative Nature”, makes its way into Chapter 4, section 4.1. In Wirklichkeit:
Beiträge zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Hegelschen Philosophie, eds Luca Illetterati and
x Acknowledgements
Francesca Menegoni (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2018), 249–261.

Finally, Chapter 5 draws from three papers: “On Becoming Ethical: The Emergence
of Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, in The Freedom of Life: Hegelian
Perspectives, ed. Thomas Khurana (Berlin: Der Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter
König, 2012), 209–227. Published in German as, “Die Emergenz des sittlichen
Charakters in Hegels Philosophie des Rechts”, Akten des Hegel-Kongress Stuttgart
2011, Veröffentlichungen der Internationalen Hegel- Vereinigung, Bd. 25, eds
Gunnar Hindrichs and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag
2013), 513–527; “Our All-Too-Human Hegelian Agency”, Palgrave Handbook of
German Idealism, ed. Matthew C. Altman (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 648–664;
“Hegel’s Encyclopedia as a Science of Freedom”, Cambridge Critical Guide to Hegel’s
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, ed. Sebastian Stein and Joshua Wretzel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 28–45. I thank the publishers of
these works for their permission to reproduce the above-mentioned material.
Abbreviations
In the body of this work and in footnotes, I provide page references first to English and
then to German editions of primary texts, and separate pages of the two editions with an
oblique (/). Below, are the abbreviations I use for works of Kant and Hegel that I cite most
frequently. I list the English translations I most often consult (and occasionally modify).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Although I have consulted Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie
der Wissenschaften (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968– ), my references to Hegel’s works in German
are to the Werke in zwanzig Bänden, eds Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969–1970). I have chosen to cite the Suhrkamp
edition because it is the edition my readers are most likely to have at hand.
Aesth I Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. I, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975).
Vorlesung über die Ästhetik I. In Werke vol. 13.
EL The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris
(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1991). This is a
translation of the third edition of Hegel’s Enzyklopädie (the Philosophische
Bibliothek edition of 1830, an expanded version of his first edition published
in 1817).
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic
Outline: Part I, Science of Logic, trans. Klaus Brinkman and Daniel O. Dahlstrom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrissen (1830), erster
Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik. In Werke vol. 8.
EG Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrissen (1830), dritter
Teil: die Philosophie des Geistes. In Werke vol. 10.
PH Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988).
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. In Werke vol. 12.
PhG Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. and trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018).
Phänomenologie des Geistes. In Werke vol. 3.
PR Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen Wood
xii Abbreviations
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im

Grundrisse. In Werke vol. 7.
SL Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press
International, Inc., 1991).
WL I Wissenschaft der Logik I. In Werke vol. 5.
WL II Wissenschaft der Logik II. In Werke vol. 6.
Theol. Early Theological Writings: G. W. F. Hegel, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
Frühe Schriften. In Werke vol. 1.
Immanuel Kant
References to Kant’s works in German are to the Akademie edition [“Ak”], Kants gesammelte
Schriften, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–1942).
In the case of the Critique of Pure Reason, I provide the pagination of the “A” and “B”
Akademie editions, respectively.
CJ Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

Kritik der Urteilskraft. In Ak vol. 5.
CPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
Kritik der reinen Vernunft. ‘A’ edition in Ak vol. 3; ‘B’ edition in Ak vol. 4.
Idea “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View”, in On History:
Immanuel Kant, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-
Merrill Company, Inc., 1963), 11–26.
AK vol. 8.
Introduction
“Nothing in the past is lost [to philosophy] . . .”

(G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History)
A conspicuous feature of Hegel’s major works is that they are developmental

narratives. His narratives are moreover progressive: they invariably advance from
less to more perfect, abstract to concrete, indeterminate or empty to determinate.
In some of Hegel’s writings (for example, his lectures on aesthetics and on the
history of philosophy), the developments quite obviously track stages of ‘real’
chronological progress, from one historical epoch to the next; they tie moments
in the history of ideas to actual figures and events. There is development even
when Hegel’s discussions seem barely connected to world history. Although his
most abstract work, the Science of Logic, contains very few references to historical
figures and hardly resembles what we would typically consider a history of logic,
Hegel nonetheless describes its principal object, the “Concept [Begriff ]”, as
unfolding in stages. The story has a beginning, middle, and end; it is unified by a
certain plot. The Concept itself and our knowledge of it is presented as a series of
transitions from abstract and empty to increasingly concrete or determinate.
Hegel discovers development everywhere: in organisms, in our concepts,
philosophical systems and assumptions, and in our freedom. It is safe to say
that development in the form of transitions from lower to higher stages or
moments is a key feature of his entire system. There appears to be a connection,
too, between his interest in development and his commitment to the “dialectical”
nature of “everything”, for dialectic seems to be what moves the various pro-
gressions along.1
Why is it so important for Hegel to structure his various philosophical works
as developmental narratives? Is this simply a stylistic preference? Has he con-
vinced himself that he is more likely to capture his readers’ attention if his discus-
sions are written after the fashion of coming-of-age stories, or Bildungsromane? Is
1 “Everything around us can be considered an instance of the dialectical [Alles, was uns umgibt,
kann als Beispiel des Dialektischen betrachtet werden]” (EL §81A1). Here, and frequently in this work,
I quote from an “Addition [Zusatz]”, in this case Addition 1. The Additions to Hegel’s texts are compi-
lations of student notes taken during his lectures; they should not be assumed to represent his words
verbatim.
2 Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit
this how he hopes to ensure that even his dauntingly abstract Science of Logic will
be a lively read?
It might be thought that, especially in the case of Hegel’s most obviously histor-
ical works, the answer to these questions is relatively banal: he structures his dis-
cussions developmentally because he is a philosopher who takes a serious interest
in history. He immerses himself in studies of the past, discovers differences in the
thinking of his predecessors and contemporaries, and sets out to catalogue the
vast variety in the history of ideas. This explanation becomes even more plausible
if we add to it an acknowledgement of Hegel’s faith in progress. It then seems that
we can account for his preoccupation with the past by noting his confidence that
the present is an improvement. Whether the focus of his attention is religion,
logic, or living organisms, his story is not one of mere change but of growth. He
looks back and records development in order to reassure us that, despite the
abundant conflict and suffering in our midst, the arc of history is bending towards
justice. He aims to establish that there has been progress in our thinking, in our
self-consciousness and freedom.
No doubt, Hegel was both keenly interested in history and convinced that it
contains evidence of progress; but there is nonetheless more to say about why he
crafted his major works as developmental stories. Although he defends the
thesis that his own age is in significant respects an improvement over the past,
his purpose in structuring his philosophical works as progressive narratives
is presumably not just to please or comfort us. His motivation is as much
metaphysical as it is practical. That is, Hegel intends his developmental
accounts to reveal something significant about who we are as thinking, willing
natures. He wishes to demonstrate that, in a certain respect, our reason and
freedom themselves have ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ forms. Expressed differently, he
undertakes his study of past or ‘lower’ forms in order to establish how there
have been advances in the nature of human thought or reason itself and in our
resulting freedom.
It is this metaphysical lesson that I am principally concerned to explore in the
present work. If we assume, as I think we should, that Hegel is committed to the
assumption that there is development in human reason itself, then questions such
as the following arise: Is it his view that everything about human reason develops,
including the features that distinguish it as a capacity from our other capacities?
Or, does he rather hold that what develops is merely our idea of reason, or per-
haps reason’s laws and concepts? And how does the development come about?
Development cannot for Hegel be the product of mere chance, if by this we mean
that there are no necessary connections among thoughts or events. If there are
only accidental connections, then there is nothing by means of which we can dis-
cover a pattern or unifying idea; and without a pattern or unity, there can be
nothing identifiable as development. There has to be a pattern, but how and out of
what does the pattern emerge?
Introduction 3
Hegel sometimes conveys the impression that he is convinced not just that
there is a pattern but that the pattern is set in advance. It is as if he takes the pro-
gressive unfolding of our thought and freedom to be predetermined, perhaps
planned—or at least as if planned—by a sub specie aeternitatis or divine intelli-
gence. After all, he frequently describes his developmental tales as unfolding with
“necessity”.2 He refers to his philosophy of history as a “theodicy [Theodizee]”—a
“justification of the ways of God”—and portrays world history as the “march of
God in the world” (PH 16–18/26–33, 39/53; PR §258A). He compares the journey
of Spirit to the growth of a plant whose properties are originally contained in a
simple seed (PH 82/75; EL §161A). Spirit’s “first traces [ersten Spuren]”, he says,
“virtually contain all history” (PH 21/31).
There is a long tradition of interpreting Hegel in this way, that is, as committed
to the thesis that the course of reason’s development is to a significant extent fixed
in advance. Whether cast in theological or in secular terms, the basic idea is that
the basic forms or concepts of Hegel’s Logic and philosophy of Spirit have a pre-
determined content, a content set by nature or pure reason or perhaps by a tran-
scendent and all-powerful cause (a “puppet-master”, as Stephen Houlgate aptly
terms it).3 On this reading, Hegel awards history no role in generating our most
basic laws and concepts of reason or freedom. History is the theater in which the
predetermined forms unfold. In some instances, history supplies the impetus for
their activation or expression.
This general line of interpretation motivates for example Karl Marx’s charge, in
The German Ideology, that the Hegelian deploys presumably ready-made ideas in
its consideration of nature and human activity, and in this manner “descends
from heaven to earth”.4 It underlies John Dewey’s remark, in The Quest for
Certainty, that Hegel locates the human mind and its forms wholly outside
history, “outside what is known”, and therefore clings to a “spectator” theory of
knowledge.5 The assumption that Hegel considers the mind to have pre-given and
fixed concepts and laws is evident in contemporary readings as well. It shows up,
for instance, as resistance to the suggestion that basic Hegelian concepts (such as
Being and Essence) are empirical or changeable.6 It is responsible, too, for a cer-
tain skepticism about the thesis that Hegelian freedom, rather than an inborn
2 The “immanent development [inneren Gang] of Spirit”, Hegel asserts in his Lectures on the
Philosophy of History, is “necessary [Notwendige]” (PH 28/41).
3 In Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), 38.
Frederick Beiser provides a useful overview (and critique) of such “Platonic” readings of Hegel in
“Hegel’s Historicism”, in Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. F. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 276–278.
4 In Part I, section A.
5 In The Quest for Certainty (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), 23.
6 In “Hegel and Brandom on Norms, Concepts and Logical Categories”, Stephen Houlgate chastises
Robert Brandom for ignoring the special status of certain Hegelian concepts, namely those that “con-
stitute the implicit preconditions of the employment of empirical concepts”, 143. In German Idealism:
Contemporary Perspectives, ed. E. Hammer (New York: Routledge, 2007), 137–152. Houlgate would
capacity responsible for unchangeable a priori laws, is an achievement that is

highly dependent upon historical forces.7
As I hope to establish in this study, however, the necessity Hegel attributes to
Spirit’s and reason’s development is not evidence that he endorses the assumption
that our basic forms or concepts have a predetermined content, a content that is
determinate enough to significantly fix in advance the course of world history. On
my reading, Hegel argues instead that the advances are propelled forward by
causal and/or conceptual interactions that obtain between our powers or faculties
and the actual world in which they get expressed. Borrowing his vocabulary, we
could describe this interaction as occurring between what is “rational [vernünftig]”,
on the one side, and what is “actual [wirklich]”, on the other. What Hegel’s devel-
opmental narratives reveal is that even reason’s most abstract products—the laws
and concepts that appear maximally stable and unchangeable—come into being
in response to real events in human time, the time we measure by calendars and
clocks. Although he frequently describes the advances as proceeding according to
reason’s or Spirit’s “immanent” nature or principle, I will argue that this claim is
consistent with his commitment to the thesis that this actual world, this realm of
generation and destruction over which we possess only limited control, has a sig-
nificant role to play in moving the progressions along.
I can now provisionally formulate my central objective in this book. My aim is
to specify the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that
human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this
temporal order of nature and history. Hegel’s concern with our reason’s develop-
ment conveys not just his fascination with the past but his interest in how reason
responds to and is anchored in and shaped by its past. On the reading I defend,
Hegelian reason has its basis not beyond but rather in our actual world; it is
indebted to its past for what it essentially is. One of my main challenges will be to
make this thesis precise.
In a moment, I will expand on what I mean by the “nature” of reason and free-
dom, but I first want to mention a corollary to my central thesis. Although Hegel
argues for the “necessity” of reason’s development, he also appreciates that much
that happens in this actual world is outside our control. In his view, the necessity
of the forward movement is compatible with forces that are in this respect acci-
dental or contingent.8 As we will see, the compatibility Hegel sets out to defend
therefore seem to be on the side of those who insist that certain concepts are for Hegel absolutely a
priori. I assess the extent to which Houlgate is right about this in Chapter 6, section 2.
7 For a good recent example of this debate, see John McDowell’s critique of Robert Pippin’s
“achievement” interpretation of Hegelian Spirit, in “Why Does it Matter to Hegel that Geist has a
History?”, in Hegel on Philosophy in History, eds R. Zuckert and J. Kreines (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 18, 21. I return to this issue in section two of Chapter 5.
8 It is not the case, then, that Hegel is out to eliminate contingency entirely. In defending this posi-
tion, I ally myself with, among others, John W. Burbridge, Hegel’s Systematic Congingency (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 190; Emil Fackenheim, Religious Dimension: “the entire Hegelian
Introduction 5
should not be understood as obtaining between two distinct forces (necessary

and contingent) operating side by side, as if on parallel tracks. Rather, the forces
are compatible because, although distinguishable, they are somehow intimately
interconnected.
As for the “nature” of Hegelian freedom and reason, I mean to refer, first, to
their being as capacities. In the case of freedom, for example, I argue that Hegel
describes our freedom as a faculty indebted to this actual world for its origin. Our
freedom has emerged out of our ‘lower’ animal powers (such as feeling and
instinct) and owes its properties to this developmental process. Human freedom,
then, is for Hegel a natural (versus “noumenal”) power. Its features and function-
ality are produced in human time, and we can give an account (a history) of its
emergence, as Hegel does especially in his anthropological reflections.9
This is one respect in which our freedom’s nature is indebted to what is actual,
and I consider Hegel’s defense of this assumption in Chapter 5. By the “nature” of
freedom and reason, however, I also mean to refer to the products of these powers.
I argue in addition, then, that Hegel holds that the laws and concepts of our
freedom and reason come to be as responses to the interactions of real, tempo-
rally located thinkers with events occurring in this actual world. His position is
not just that laws and concepts of our freedom and reason show up in historically
locatable institutions such as practical laws, systems of philosophy and religion,
and the arts. He holds, in addition, that manifestations or expressions of reason
and freedom rely for their very being on the engagements of real, temporally
located thinkers and agents with nature and history.
To convey the gist of the line of interpretation I will be defending, it may help
to describe my project as that of exploring the implications, for Hegelian reason
and freedom, of his one-world ontology, or monism. Hegel nowhere denies that
we take ourselves to be capable of imagining worlds other than or outside this
philosophy, far from denying the contingent, . . . seeks to demonstrate its inescapability” (p. 4, see also
p. 19); Dieter Henrich, “Hegels Theorie über den Zufall”, Kant-Studien 50 (1958–1959): 131–148;
Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, see especially, 18; Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel:
Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. L. During (New York: Routledge, 2005); Terry Pinkard,
Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2017); see also Paul Redding, who characterizes Hegel’s system as “radically fallibilist”,
in Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 228f.
9 A moment ago, I characterized Hegel’s concern as “metaphysical”. My point in that context was
that his developmental narratives serve not just practical ends but are intended to reveal something
important about the very nature or being of reason and Spirit. My reading of Hegel nonetheless
belongs among those typically classified as “non-metaphysical”. The “non-metaphysical” reading
assumes that Hegel’s system avoids reliance on a purportedly transcendent or extra-temporal reason.
Of course, this leaves open just how and to what extent Hegelian reason is of nature (or naturalized).
Leaving that complication aside for now, the non-metaphysical (or anti-Platonic) reading has a long
list of adherents, and much has recently been written about Hegel’s “naturalism” especially by those
who read Hegel as much more of an Aristotelean than a Platonist. In this work, which foregrounds
Hegel’s philosophy of history, I have been most influenced by the views of Emil Fackenheim, Stephen
Houlgate, Walter Jaeschke, Joseph McCarney, and Terry Pinkard.
actual one. He grants that we can in a certain respect coherently articulate the
idea, for instance, of a noumenal realm lurking behind this empirically accessible
realm of phenomena. On the interpretation I defend, however, Hegel holds that
even our thoughts of other possible worlds are rooted in and therefore beholden
to this actual world. None of us is able to wholly transcend our time in thought.
For this reason, none of us can generate an idea of a world beyond this one that is
entirely adequate to its object. Strictly speaking, then, it is not possible for us to
think about other possible worlds.10
As I just mentioned, my proposal that Hegelian reason and freedom are
indebted to and anchored in this actual world should not be taken to imply sim-
ply that it is in this actual world that these capacities manifest or express them-
selves. I am making the more controversial suggestion that, in a certain respect,
these faculties owe their nature to this actual world. This thesis is more difficult to
clarify as well as defend. We can appreciate some of the difficulty if we bear in
mind that the thesis cannot be reformulated as the suggestion that the nature and
content of human reason cannot for Hegel be fully accounted for with reference
to the physical forces governing nature and human behavior. On the interpreta-
tion I argue for here, reason emerges out of nature, on Hegel’s account, but it does
not reduce to nature in the following respect: human reason is significantly dis-
tinguishable from our other natural powers and not a mere species of instinct.
Human reason is anchored in nature, and in exercising it, we cannot completely
abstract our way out of this actual world. Nonetheless, our reason sets us apart
from other animal natures insofar as it endows us with special powers that they
lack, namely the powers to reflect and abstract, powers responsible for our self-
awareness and freedom.
Not only does Hegel avoid a reductive naturalism of the kind I just sketched, he
should also not be classified as a shallow historicist. For reasons I elaborate in
Chapter 3, it is not his objective to persuade us that the products of our reason
and freedom simply mirror the choices and preferences of temporally located
agents, whatever those choices and preferences happen to be. Hegel insists that
his histories of freedom and reason are more than mere records of actual prefer-
ences and opinions regarding what is good or true. He repeatedly tells us that, in
10 The Hegelian thesis that none of us can wholly transcend our time in thought provides the basis,
I believe, for his critique of “empty formalism”. In charging that, for example, Kant’s supreme moral
law or categorical imperative is an empty formalism, Hegel acknowledges Kant’s motivation for
defending the law’s emptiness. Kant needs the law to be empty of content, because he seeks to estab-
lish its universal and necessarily validity. In fact, however, the law “presupposes content”, Hegel argues,
because it rests on historically contingent assumptions about the nature of our freedom, assumptions
he believes world history has progressed beyond. For Hegel, any effort to defend the “emptiness” of
reason’s laws or concepts must fail precisely because human reason is in the world rather than beyond
it. I defend this interpretation of Hegel’s empty formalism critique in, “Hegel on the Empty Formalism
of Kant’s Categorical Imperative”, in A Companion to Hegel, eds S. Houlgate and M. Baur (Blackwell
Publishing, 2012), 265–280.
Introduction 7
arguing for the rationality of the actual, he is not voicing his allegiance to
“positive” accounts of the origin of our norms. Instead, he holds that there can
be independent rational standards for judging our philosophical systems and
practical laws. To put this point differently, Hegel’s system preserves a certain
dualism between “is” and “ought”. He insists that he can rationally justify his thesis
that human freedom has been making progress in its journey through time.11
Among the many challenges we will face in this work is that of explaining just
how Hegel can defend his commitment to independent rational standards. At this
point, we can provisionally suggest that a judgment can qualify as genuinely inde-
pendent, on his account, without deriving its authority from outside human
history—from a transcendent or God’s eye point of view. Hegel wishes to con-
vince us that our power of thought affords us enough abstraction to yield stan-
dards for judging that are based on reasons rather than mere preferences.12
Independent rational standards are possible, but independence does not require
total transcendence.
Structure and Argumentative Strategy
This completes my summary of what I intend to argue in this book. Again, the
general interpretative picture emphasizes the debt of Hegelian reason to what is.
The basic idea is that, for all its power to shape and master reality, reason’s nature
is also shaped by forces of nature and history, on Hegel’s account—forces over
which we have little or no control. As I read him, Hegel paves the way for the his-
torical materialisms of Marx and others who call into question a certain concep-
tion of human reason’s autonomy, and ask us to appreciate the extent to which
ideas are responsive to and anchored in material reality, whether real economic
forces (Marx) or psychological drives (Nietzsche, Freud).13
Those familiar with the secondary literature will appreciate that I am far from
alone in defending this general line of interpretation. Others have stressed the
11 An influential expression of the charge that Hegel was a positivist seeking to justify the reaction-
ary Prussian practices of his time appeared already in 1857, in Rudolf Haym’s Hegel und seine Zeit.
Similar charges made their way into the writings of prominent figures such as Marx and Engels, the
late Schelling, Alexander Kojève, and Karl Popper. I return to the topic of Hegel’s alleged positivism in
Chapter 3, but for a good summary of the charges that Hegel was a positivist and apologist for the
status quo, see Jon Stewart’s “Hegel and the Myth of Reason”, in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed.
J. Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 306–318. Another useful resource is
Shlomo Avineri’s now classic, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge and New York,
Cambridge University Press, 1972).
12 In Chapter 5, I say more about this distinction between preferences or desires and reasons, and
suggest that Hegel considers the distinction to be one of degree than of kind.
13 Marx did not understand his historical materialism to be indebted to Hegel, but I believe this is
because he misinterpreted Hegel. For a good overview of the Hegel/Marx relation, see Allen Wood’s
“Hegel and Marxism”, in Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. F. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 414–444.
extent to which Hegelian reason is “in” rather than “beyond” this actual world, as
a product rather than mere master of it; and some of their names appear at vari-
ous points in my discussion, including in notes 8, 9, and 18 of this introductory
chapter. If the present work makes a genuine contribution to Hegel scholarship, it
will not be because my conclusions about Hegelian reason and freedom are radi-
cally new; it will instead be because of the particular way in which I support them.
The strongest evidence in favor of my interpretation may be that it provides a
powerful tool for making sense of other central Hegelian commitments. In par-
ticular, it allows us to explain not just Hegel’s unique conception of freedom, but
also his views about the nature and limits of our knowledge as well as his insist
ence upon the “rationality” of what is “actual”. I expand on each of these
points below.
The structure of my argument is as follows: My chapters divide into two parts.
I begin with the less difficult and less controversial task of arguing for the way in
which Hegelian freedom is temporally conditioned. Then, in my final two chap-
ters, I expand that argument to defend the more ambitious claim that Hegel holds
that all our thought is indebted to this actual realm as well. In addition, I specify
some respects in which the temporally conditioned nature of thought is for Hegel
consistent with its also enjoying a certain permanence.
My discussion of Hegelian freedom begins with two chapters devoted to his
philosophy of history. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History is one work in
which freedom is the focus of his attention. The very “substance [Substanz]” of
world history, he says, is “Spirit [Geist]”, and Spirit’s “essence [Wesen]” is freedom
(PH 19f./29f.). In the service of defending my thesis that Hegelian freedom is
indebted to the realm of the actual for its nature, I compare features of Hegel’s
philosophy of history with Kant’s. I use this comparison to identify the unique
respect in which Hegel departs from Kant in assigning development, even contin-
gency and temporality, to human reason itself.14
No doubt, some will regard my decision to foreground Hegel’s philosophy of
history as inauspicious, given that that part of his system seems especially deserv-
ing of criticism. For reasons that others have abundantly laid out, a number of
these criticisms are entirely warranted. After all, many of Hegel’s purportedly fac-
tual claims about world history are, at best, naïve or uniformed and, at worst,
positively bigoted. I have in mind, for instance, his condescending portraits of the
“childish” ways of Africans and Asians, and his hardly impartial preference for the
“superiority” of the “Germanic peoples”.15 To these offenses, we can add Hegel’s at
14 For a powerful further defense of a developmental, dynamic nature of Hegelian reason, a reason
indebted to nature, see Karen Ng’s recent, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
15 For two recent, balanced discussions of Hegel’s Eurocentrism and racism, see Chapter 3 of Terry
Pinkard’s Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2017), and McCarney’s Hegel on History (London: Routledge, 2000),
Introduction 9
least apparently problematic representation of the relation of the individual to the

State, for he sometimes seems to imply that the triumph of Spirit requires what
we might reasonably judge to be unacceptable sacrifices of individual freedom,
sacrifices that deprive agents of self-mastery and require acts of unreflective
submission.16
There is cause for concern, then, about what appears to be Hegel’s disregard for
individual rights as well as his tenuous grasp of historical facts and sometimes
highly dubious reconstructions of the historical record. I foreground his Lectures
on the Philosophy of History, however, for the valuable methodological remarks
contained in its introductory paragraphs.17 On my reading, the Introduction to
the Lectures gives us instructive clues to Hegel’s general philosophical approach.
He indicates in these pages, for example, how he understands the nature of his
subject matter. We learn that he classifies freedom, or Spirit, neither as a straight-
forward object of empirical investigation nor as a product of pure reason.
Likewise, he reveals that the tools he takes himself to have at his disposal in
embarking on his “philosophic” study of world history are neither purely empiri-
cal nor purely a priori but an unusual combination of both. The same may be said
for the specific kind of knowledge he expects his reflections to yield.
In his Introduction to the Lectures, Hegel explicitly acknowledges the peculiar
nature of his hybrid approach; he asks us to appreciate that his approach even
appears self-contradictory. He furthermore notes, however, that there is in fact
nothing self-contradictory about it, and that in the course of the work, he will
clarify why this is so. By means of these introductory remarks, Hegel lures his
reader into the project of determining just how the empirical and a priori aspects
of his philosophic method can harmoniously coexist. Here, as in so many other
contexts, he challenges us to discover how what initially looks like a straightfor-
ward contradiction is instead some kind of “identity”.
My middle chapters (Chapters 3 through 5) take clues from the Lectures as a
basis for identifying basic features of Hegel’s theory of freedom. Again, my goal is
to specify the sense in which Hegelian freedom is temporally conditioned. To this
end, I argue in Chapter 3 that Hegel’s commitment to the “necessity” of Spirit’s
development does not imply that he holds that its journey is settled in advance.
As I suggest in Chapter 4, he defends a version of fatalism. Curiously, however,
142–151. Another fine treatment of Hegel’s racism, which includes a review of important commen-
tary, is Patricia Purtschert’s, “On the limit of spirit: Hegel’s racism revisited”, Philosophy and Social
Criticism 36, no. 9: 1039–1051.
16 For a recent compelling expression of this line of criticism, see Birgit Sandkaulen, “Modus oder
Monade. Wie wirklich ist das Individuum bei Hegel?”, in Geist und Geschichte, eds L. Illetterati and
F. Menegoni (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2018), 155–178.
17 My point is not that it is only in the Lectures that one can find support for the line of interpreta-
tion I develop here. Hegel’s methodological remarks in the Lectures, however, have the advantage of
providing evidence of his commitment to the temporally conditioned nature of reason in a concise
and compact way.
his fatalism is consistent with a robust theory of human freedom as genuinely

transformative. In Chapter 5, I argue that Hegel’s account of the transformative
nature of our freedom is compatible with his insistence upon freedom’s necessary
limits. I try to make precise the respect in which he holds that our freedom is
limited in that it is anchored in and therefore indebted for what it is to nature and
history.
In my final two chapters, I apply this line of interpretation to Hegel’s system
more generally. On the account I defend, the method he claims to bring to his
treatment of world history illuminates how he understands his own philosophical
enterprise and the nature of human reason overall. The methodological remarks
in his Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History help demystify
assumptions he brings even to his more abstract works such as the Science of
Logic. My thesis is that, for Hegel, thinking—whatever its object—is neither
purely observational nor purely rational. The same is the case for the tools of our
thinking; they, too, are neither purely empirical nor purely a priori.
The final two chapters of this book defend this more ambitious and controver-
sial thesis. My argument relies principally on an appeal to coherence. I suggest
that if we fail to appreciate the respect in which Hegel is committed to thought’s
temporality, we give ourselves no means of accounting for some of his other basic
philosophical commitments. First, and very roughly, we cannot explain features
of Hegelian freedom.
Hegel insists that thought and the will are not separate faculties. I argue that
the temporality thesis is central to Hegel’s unique conception of our freedom, and
that this gives us clues as to how we should understand his view of the nature of
thought as well. Second, the premise of thought’s temporality allows us to demys
tify certain Hegelian claims about the nature of our knowledge. In particular, the
temporality thesis is key to his effort to persuade us that we can indeed know
ideas of reason that are considered off limits by others (such as Kant)—ideas of
our freedom, for example, of world history’s purpose, and even of the “thing in
itself ”. Finally, the temporality thesis allows us to account for Hegel’s commitment
to the “actuality of the rational”, that is, to the realizability, in world history, of our
ideas of freedom, purpose, and so forth. I say more about each of these points in
my chapter summaries below.
Some implications of my argument
My interpretation depends on the assumption that Hegel breaks from a long tra-
dition of thinkers who insist upon drawing a sharp line between purely empirical
and purely rational modes and objects of inquiry. Without denying that some
objects of thought are more abstract or formal than others, he argues that there is
Introduction 11
a sense in which no object of thought—not even the Logic’s “Concept [Begriff ]”—
is wholly formal or non-empirical. To express this implication differently: there is
no great divide, in Hegel’s philosophy, between his systematic and more historical
works.18 It might seem reasonable to consider the project of the Science of Logic as
of a completely different order, for instance, than that of the Lectures on the
Philosophy of History or Lectures on the History of Philosophy. On the interpreta-
tion I defend, however, Hegel recognizes no legitimate philosophical basis for
sharply separating these two kinds of works. Clearly, the objects of the Logic are
more abstract than the objects of world history. But in his view, if we confine our
attention to these differences, we overlook what stays the same. We fail to grasp
that at the basis of all inquiry is a distinctive account of what it is to philosophize,
and of what it is more generally to think and be a thinking nature. From the
abstract nature of the objects of the Logic, we draw mistaken lessons about the
abstract nature of Hegel’s approach to the Logic, about the kind of thinking or
philosophizing he brings to that work. In that context, as in any other, his reflec-
tions are of course those of a thinker located in time. Hegel appreciates—and
wants us to appreciate—that the thoughts he brings to his subject matter are
therefore indebted to what comes and goes in human time.
In proposing, then, that the method Hegel enlists in his world historical inves-
tigations contains clues to his method and idealist orientation overall, I mean to
imply that his Lectures on the Philosophy of History can guide us in grasping the
precise respect in which he considers human reason to be temporally or histori-
cally conditioned regardless of its specific object of study. The methodological
assumptions he brings to world history give us insight, that is, into his overall
view of what it is to think and be a thinking being. In effect, my suggestion is that
Hegel’s “philosophic” approach to world history supplies a model for how we
should understand his account of human thought or reason in general and the
resources he avails himself of as philosopher reflecting on various subjects. In this
regard, his philosophy of history is not a peripheral part of his system; nor is it
separable from or inconsistent with the rest. His world historical reflections on
how Spirit’s development is “fated” or unfolds with “necessity” can help us demys
tify similar remarks that appear in other contexts, for instance in his discussion of
the “moments” of the Concept or in the development of various sciences. It can
help us understand, in addition, the role he assigns contingency in his system.
Hegel’s world historical reflections illuminate not just the method he employs as a
philosopher reflecting on these matters, but also the status he believes he is
18 As Walter Jaeschke suggests, Hegel sets out to overcome the gap between the purely rational and
the purely historical. In “Die Geschichtlichkeit der Geschichte”, Hegel-Jahrbuch (1995): 363–373.
Along similar lines, Beiser writes that Hegel “rejected any sharp distinction between the a priori and
the a posteriori”. See his Introduction to the 1983 edition of the Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 8.
entitled to award his bold claims (about the “end” of history, the “Absolute”, and
so forth). They help explain the significance of development for his enterprise,
and his insistence upon the “dialectical” nature of everything.19
The above characterization naturally leads us to wonder how far Hegel intends
us to take his claim that dialectic or development is in everything. Is nothing
stable in his system? Does he set out to convince us that there is development
even in reason’s or freedom’s most fundamental concepts and laws? Are they,
too, subject to change? Does the Hegelian system give us no universal and
necessary conditions or eternal truths whatsoever?20 These are among the
questions I address in my final chapter. Hegel sometimes seems to represent
himself as adhering to a narrowly Heraclitean worldview in which everything
is in flux. Curiously, however, he at the same time undeniably acknowledges
the reality and necessity of permanence. I argue that Hegel reserves a place for
permanence (of various kinds) in his system. He discovers traces of permanence
in the conceptual developments he discusses in the Logic. He discovers permanence
in this realm of generation and destruction as well, just as he finds evidence of
rationality in what is actual. Hegel nowhere argues that it is possible to wholly
expunge permanence from thought or from the comings and goings of agents
and events in this temporal order. As in the case of necessity and contingency,
permanence and temporality harmoniously coexist. If we want to discover
precisely how Hegel thinks their coexistence is possible, we need to understand
these terms and their relations in a new way. On the interpretation I defend,
however, the fact that we must do so attests to the remarkable originality of
his thought.
19 I am hardly alone in urging that we appreciate the significance of history, or of his philosophy of
history, for Hegel’s system. This is a central theme, for example, of Houlgate’s Freedom, Truth and
History. In “World History and the History of the Absolute Spirit”, Jaeschke remarks that we should
understand Hegel’s “entire system” as “a philosophy of history”, 103. In History and System: Hegel’s
Philosophy of History, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984),
101–115. McCarney, too, describes Hegel as “beyond all comparison, the historical philosopher, the
one for whom history figures most ambitiously and elaborately as a philosophical category”. In Hegel
on History, 7; see also 19. In “Hegel’s Historicism”, Beiser writes that “[h]istory cannot be consigned to
a corner of Hegel’s system”, 270; see also 276. Michael Rosen makes the case that, for Hegel, “philoso-
phy itself comes to be seen to have a historical character”. See his “Die Geschichte”, in Handbuch
Deutscher Idealismus, eds H. Sandkühler et al. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2005), § 8.9.3. More recently,
Eric Michael Dale defends the thesis that, “[n]o philosophical thinker makes history itself . . . more
central to the development of his thought than Hegel does”. In Hegel, the End of History, and the Future
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 16.
20 In “Hegel and Historicism”, Clio 7, no. 1 (1977): 33–51, Stanley Rosen urges us to acknowledge
that Hegel’s many bold assertions about the “totality” of history support the conclusion that he “is not
a genuine historicist”, 37. Hegel’s Logic, for instance, is “not simply a ‘theory’ constructed . . . by a his-
torical being, or the expression of a historical perspective”. I argue here that, although Hegel undeni-
ably makes extravagant-sounding claims about history as a totality, he can coherently defend such
claims without attributing to himself the power of transcending his own time in thought. Even Rosen
grants that Hegel is out to “reconcile” eternity and this-worldly temporality, 39. Everything of course
depends on how we understand Hegel’s strategy for securing this reconciliation.
Introduction 13
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1: History and Human Finitude: Kant versus Hegel
Hegel repeatedly warns us against conflating his treatment of practical normativity

with that of the positivist for whom our norms are mere reflections of our actual pas-
sions and desires. He argues instead that what is rational is in some respect irreducible
to what is actual. It might therefore seem that Hegel belongs squarely in the rational-
ists’ camp and on the side of Kant in opposition to reductive empiricism. But Hegel’s
treatment of practical normativity and the freedom upon which it is based resists easy
classification. In this chapter, I compare the Kantian and Hegelian approaches to
world history in order to identify some distinctively non-Kantian features of Hegel’s
conception of freedom and its laws. I begin by considering the extent to which the two
philosophers share a sensitivity to the accidental and non-rational aspects of human
affairs. Kant insists upon the a priori status of his idea of the purposive development of
world history; his idea, he tells us, is a product of pure reason. Nonetheless, he acknowl-
edges that there is much that happens to us that is contingent, and much that motivates
us that reflects the finite and highly changeable—even irrational—side of our nature.
Kant’s philosophy of history is therefore highly attentive to the reality of human finitude,
that is, to the limits that constrain us in our efforts to know and to act. I suggest that
Hegel’s appreciation of the extent of our finitude goes a step further, and that this can be
explained with reference to the particular way in which he discovers finitude in human
reason itself. As I set out to demonstrate in this work, he is committed to the assumption
that our reason—and the freedom it affords us—is in significant respects indebted for
what it is to this actual world, to the comings and goings of nature and history.
Chapter 2: Hegel’s “Philosophic” Approach to World History
At first glance, Hegel appears to follow in Kant’s footsteps in characterizing his idea of
the purposive development of history as “a priori”. We discover in this chapter, how-
ever, that he at the same time asserts that his “philosophic” treatment of world history
must pass the test of actual history. Hegel is committed to the assumption, in other
words, that his unique philosophic approach is somehow both a priori and empirically
verifiable. This presents us with the challenge of explaining how he can represent his
method in these apparently incompatible ways. I suggest that the solution to this
puzzle sheds light on his unique conception of human reason and freedom. As I argue,
Hegel aims to persuade us that these special capacities and their products are in some
way a hybrid mixture of the priori and the empirical.
Chapter 3: Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History
It is tempting to suppose that, in describing the purposive development of history as

unfolding with “necessity” and according to a divine plan, Hegel signals his intention
to defend a Leibnizian-style theodicy. His insistence upon history’s necessity might

then seem incompatible with my interpretative thesis that he takes human reason and
freedom to be anchored in and therefore indebted to the realm of the actual. In this
chapter, I raise doubts about the proposal that Hegel holds that the course of world
history, and likewise reason’s special concepts and laws, are settled in advance. He
argues that events of world history are linked by an idea of purposive unity, an idea
that accounts for history’s necessity. In doing so, however, his intention is not to
endorse a thesis of predetermination but rather to give us an alternative to the
Epicurean view that everything that happens is governed by chance. With Kant, Hegel
appreciates that unless we can connect what happens by means of a unifying idea or
concept, we undercut the very possibility of narrating world history. Since Hegel is in
addition committed to the assumption that the idea of unity that links events of world
history is a specific idea of human freedom, we arrive at the paradoxical-sounding
conclusion that it is a specific idea of freedom, on his account, that is responsible for
history’s necessity. I furthermore explore Hegel’s reasons for characterizing that idea of
freedom as “objective” rather than “subjective”. He awards the idea objectivity at least
in part because he takes it to be verified by history itself. This gives us further indica-
tion of the respect in which concepts of reason are in his view at once a priori and
empirical. In addition, we move closer to clarifying Hegel’s reasons for considering
himself entitled to assert, in yet another departure from Kant, that the idea of history
is more than an item of speculation or faith.
Chapter 4: Hegel’s Fatalism as a Theory of Freedom
In the service of further demystifying Hegel’s commitment to history’s necessity, I

dedicate this chapter to the question of how its necessity can be compatible with our
freedom. We discover that, much like his “philosophic” approach to world history
which he characterizes as both a priori and empirical, human freedom for Hegel has a
hybrid nature as well. As he portrays it, our freedom is a genuinely creative and trans-
formative power; it does not therefore simply reduce to nature (it is not simply an
expression of our natural drives and passions). But although genuinely transforma-
tive, our freedom is a power that is nonetheless in and of nature. It is transformative
without being transcendent; it affords us no capacity to wholly abstract away what is.
My defense of this line of interpretation begins by clearing away the charge that
since Hegel endorses a fatalistic account of history’s necessity, he can be no true friend
of freedom. In this chapter, we once again consider the suggestion that he is commit-
ted to a thesis of predetermination. Hegel undeniably endorses some version of fatal-
ism; he also insists, however, that his fatalism is not “blind”.21 Minimally, a fatalism is
blind, for Hegel, if it cannot be known by us. But fatalism is in addition blind, in his
view, if it is merely “external” and as such incompatible with a specific account of
freedom. In a nutshell, Hegel’s remarks about the fate of world history express his
21 In his §342 of his Philosophy of Right, for example, Hegel writes that world history is “not the
abstract and non-rational [vernunftlose] necessity of a blind fate [blindes Schicksals]”.
Introduction 15
endorsement of the premise that history’s course is to a significant extent our fate, that
is, significantly up to us. I defend this interpretation with the help of passages in which
he weighs the relative virtues of “ancient” versus certain “modern” or “Christian” con-
ceptions of fate or necessity. Hegel is intrigued by the stoic recommendation that we
“reconcile” ourselves to our fate, but he also urges that this reconciliation to what is
should not be understood as an endorsement of quietism. On the contrary, the atti-
tude of reconciliation that he wishes us to achieve rests on an assumption about the
transformative nature of our reason and the freedom it affords us. There can be a har-
mony or reconciliation of the “is” and “ought” in this world, according to Hegel, pre-
cisely as a consequence of our reason’s transformative and creative power. Human
reason is in and of this world, but it nevertheless has the capacity to normatively gov-
ern this world. We are not forced to follow those “moderns” or “Christians”, then, for
whom a harmony of the actual and the ideal or rational is only to be discovered in a
world beyond this one. Thanks to our faculty of reason and resulting freedom, we can
indeed shape our fate. Hegel is convinced that we can do so, even though he also
grants that there is much that is contingent that happens to us.
Chapter 5: Freedom’s Necessary Limits
In this chapter, I further illuminate and explore implications of Hegel’s claim that our
freedom is anchored in nature, or more broadly, in the realm of what is. Our freedom,
in his view, is a natural capacity, a capacity we possess not as “noumenal” natures but
as animals endowed with special powers of abstraction and reflection. Hegel in addi-
tion argues that freedom’s products (that is, its concepts and laws) are indebted to
nature and history in some way. Freedom’s content is not pre-given or innate; it is
acquired in human time and in the course of world history. Our idea of freedom
develops, as does our understanding of the conditions of our freedom’s satisfaction.
This development is propelled forward by interactions obtaining between our natural
capacity for reflection and concrete forces of nature and history, forces not entirely
within our control and in this respect contingent. I argue, in addition, that it is only
with reference to Hegel’s appreciation of this debt of our freedom to the contingencies
of nature and history that we can understand his argument for how we can both know
our fate and secure its compatibility with a freedom that is genuinely transformative.
Chapter 6: Thought’s Temporality
It might be objected that the previous chapters establish at most that Hegel aims to
persuade us of the appearance of contingency in world history, an appearance that
hides history’s real necessity from view. What my discussion seems to have missed,
according to this objection, is that history on Hegel’s account unfolds in keeping with
a preset plan, a plan to which he believes he has privileged access. In response, I argue
that in suggesting that Hegel considers contingency to be a mere appearance, this
objection in effect attributes to him the assumption that there is something behind the
appearances—something that remains for the most part hidden, or at least hidden
from all but the select few. But Hegel repeatedly expresses his frustration with those
who assert that there is an unknowable necessity or essence lurking behind what
appears. He is in addition impatient with philosophers like Kant who, having drawn
the limits of human knowledge, go on to claim that they are nonetheless in a position
to draw those limits “absolutely” (or, what is the same, to know with necessity what is
and is not beyond them). Of course, Hegel could be inconsistent; it is possible that he
means to argue that although others have no right to profess this kind of absolute
knowledge, he does. In this chapter, I further defend my suggestion that contingency
on his account is not just an appearance but rather a real force to be reckoned with.
Contingency is an essential feature of the actual world in which Spirit resides and to
which it is indebted.
It is in this sixth chapter that I turn my attention to what I earlier identified as the
second and more ambitious aim of this book: to argue for the centrality of temporality
for Hegel’s overall system. My foregoing chapters defend the thesis that Hegelian free-
dom or Spirit is temporally conditioned. Beginning in this chapter, I suggest that this
thesis about Spirit’s debt to forces of this actual world extends to Hegel’s system in
general. It is not just Spirit, on his account, that is indebted for its content to the tem-
porally ordered comings and goings of this actual world, but all our thought as well.
My strategy for defending this more ambitious claim relies principally on the
assumption that there is an underlying coherence to Hegel’s system, and consistency
among its central commitments. More precisely, I argue that unless we grant that
human thought is temporally conditioned in the way I just outlined, we cannot explain
Hegel’s endorsement of the following three key assumptions: The first is his freedom
thesis which implies that our freedom, although anchored in nature, is nonetheless
genuinely creative and transformative. I argue that we cannot account for the creative
and generative capacity of human freedom, as he portrays it, unless we sufficiently
appreciate the role of temporality in his system. The second is his knowability thesis,
his assumption that we indeed can cognize the ways of fate or Providence. Here, too,
I suggest that Hegel’s claim that we can know Providence follows from his commitment
to temporally limited nature of thought. This is my argument, as well, regarding his
realizability thesis, that is, his commitment to the “actuality” of what is “rational”.
Chapter 7: Coda: Permanence in Hegelian Thought and Spirit
If all our thought is for Hegel temporally conditioned, and if he judges that contin-
gency is a real force to be reckoned with rather than just an appearance, what are we
to make of those passages in which he remarks that it is the business of philosophy to
concern itself with what endures, with the “eternally [ewig]” or “absolutely [schlech-
thin] present” (PH 82/105, EL §86A2)? How, too, are we to interpret his claim that,
despite its developmental history, Spirit has a certain “immortality [Unsterblichkeit]”
and should be thought of as an “essential now [wesentlich jetzt]” (PH 82/105)?22
22 Why, too, does he write in the final pages of the Phenomenology that the way to “absolute knowing”
requires Spirit to “set aside its temporal form [Zeitform]” (¶ 801)?
Introduction 17
Assertions such as these convey the impression that Hegel awards permanence a
special place in his system, but how?
The role of permanence in Hegel’s philosophy could itself easily be the subject of a
book-length treatment, but I confine my task in this brief, final chapter to offering a
few reasons for why his treatment of permanence is compatible with my suggestion
that he discovers movement or dialectic in everything, even in our most basic thought
forms. As is often the case, what at first appears to be an inconsistency in Hegel’s
thinking turns out to be a philosophically promising idea. It is undeniable, for
instance, that he directs criticisms at the law of identity; at the same time, however, he
acknowledges that fixed meaning is a condition of intelligibility. And although Hegel
is eager to draw our attention to the phenomenon of progressive development and to
the dialectical transformations in our concepts, he nonetheless discovers a certain
permanence in these progressions. I suggest that Hegel discovers a permanence that is
not just compatible with but is indeed implied by his commitment to the temporally
conditioned nature of our thought and freedom in at least the following respect: in the
advances of thought and Spirit, new forms invariably build upon old ones, upon what
came before. In building upon and responding to what came before, new forms not
only negate but also preserve what came before.
I conclude with the proposal that this assumption that something is preserved in
part explains Hegel’s remark that “[n]othing in the past is lost” to philosophy (PH
82/105).23 His thesis that any new stage or advance is indebted to what came before
implies that no instance of progress can be an absolutely new beginning, generated
out of nowhere. And this claim that no advance in human thought and freedom can
be generated out of nowhere can equally well be understood as expressing a commit-
ment to the fundamental assumption I attribute to Hegel throughout this work: that
our thought and freedom are in significant respects anchored in and therefore condi-
tioned by the temporally ordered comings and goings of this actual world.
23 “Alles ist ihr [Philosophie] in der Vergangenheit unverloren . . .”

1
History and Human Finitude
Kant versus Hegel
With this chapter, I begin the project with which I will be preoccupied
through Chapter 5: my defense of the temporally conditioned nature of Hegelian
freedom. In these pages and in Chapter 2, I focus primarily on Hegel’s philos-
ophy of history. This is for the two reasons I mentioned in my Introduction.
First, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History belongs among those works
in which freedom is his primary object of concern. As he says, it is in the “theater
of world history” that human freedom or “Spirit” has its “most concrete reality”
(PH 19/29). Second, the Lectures contain important methodological clues to
his overall philosophical approach.
My aim is to derive from Hegel’s philosophy of history justification for the the-
sis that, on his account, human freedom is temporally conditioned. The thesis is
by no means obvious; indeed, Hegel sometimes seems to give us reason to think
that the opposite must be the case. That is, he at times appears intent upon con-
vincing us that the course of world history is settled from the start by forces orig-
inating outside human history, forces of Providence or fate that are to no extent
responsive to what happens in this actual world. In certain discussions, Hegel
conveys the impression that world history is a closed and predetermined system
that imposes order onto temporally located agents without itself being in any way
impacted by what actually happens in ‘real’ time.
Beginning in the present chapter, I set out to accurately assess Hegel’s sensitiv-
ity to the finitude of our freedom. By the “finitude” of freedom, I mean its limits—
limits that reflect its responsiveness to contingencies of nature and history. Does
Hegel discover finitude in human freedom at all? If so, in what way and to what
extent? Because Hegel describes human reason at the highest state of its develop-
ment as achieving a certain “eternity” or “infinity”, the answers to these questions
are hardly obvious.24 And if we compare features of his philosophy of history
with Kant’s, the conclusion seems forced upon us that although Kant gives us
24 See, e.g. Hegel’s remark in the Lectures that Spirit “belongs to the dimension of eternity”
(PH 98/141). In EN §258A, he is said to describe “the Idea, or Spirit” as “above [über] time”. See also
EG §386A.
Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit. Sally Sedgwick, Oxford University Press. © Sally Sedgwick 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192889751.003.0002
History and Human Finitude 19
abundant evidence of his appreciation of the finitude and fragility of our nature,
Hegel does not.
As is perhaps already apparent, I am going to defend a different conclusion. In
this chapter, I put in place the first steps of my argument by comparing Kant and
Hegel’s approaches to world history. As we will see, the two philosophers share
key assumptions. Both give us a progressive narrative of the development of our
freedom, as well as a largely optimistic assessment of the prospects for moral
progress. Both acknowledge that conflict is an essential driver of the forward
movement. In addition, each appreciates that, although progress would not be
possible without the exercise of our reason, we are rational natures who are also
animal natures, and our reason is by no means always in full control. We must
contend with accidents of nature and history, as well as with our bodies and their
associated desires and drives. For both Kant and Hegel, our reason is what is
quasi-divine about us, but it is nonetheless finite in significant respects.
In sections 1.1 and 1.2, I lay out a sympathetic account of Kant’s philosophy of
history. We will see that there are good grounds for portraying him as deeply sen-
sitive to the reality of human finitude. His general philosophical program seems
to rest on a modesty Hegel cannot rival. Kant, after all, never claims to be in pos-
session of “absolute” knowledge; he takes it to be one of his principal tasks to
remind us of the limits to what we can know, and he vehemently insists upon the
necessity of submitting our reason to “critique”. Regarding his reflections on the
progress of world history in particular, he asks us to be mindful of their merely
“conjectural [mutmaßlich]” nature.25 He warns us against supposing that the plan
or telos of world history is accessible to our knowledge.
An initial comparison of the degree to which these two philosophers appreci-
ate the fact of our finitude would therefore seem to yield the result that Kant is the
indisputable winner. It is Kant, not Hegel, who steers clear of improbable and
pompous-sounding declarations about the “actuality” of what is “rational”, and it
is Kant who insists upon drawing a sharp line between the domains of faith and
knowledge.
The challenge I begin to take on in this chapter, then, is that of arguing that all
is not what it seems. I will suggest that Hegel is in significant respects more atten-
tive to the reality of our finitude. The fact that this is so shows up in the precise
way in which he discovers finitude in our reason (and in freedom) itself. That is,
Hegel’s attentiveness to the reality of our finitude is revealed in the way in which
he—in contrast to Kant—considers these faculties and their products to be tem-
porally conditioned.
25 See Kant’s essay, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (“Mutmaßlicher Anfang der
Menschengeschichte”), published in 1786. In volume 8 of the Academy edition.
1.1 Kant on World History and Finitude: Introduction
In these first two sections, I draw evidence of Kant’s sensitivity to human finitude
from his philosophy of history. Because his 1784 essay “Idea of Universal History”
is sufficient to make this case, it will be the center of my attention. In that essay,
Kant’s concern with the phenomenon of our finitude is evident both in the ques-
tions he asks and in the answers he supplies.
In this first section, I introduce the topics of “Idea” that we will consider in
greater detail in section 1.2. I begin with a brief sketch of what Kant identifies as
his principal objective in “Idea” by indicating the main concerns motivating his
discussion. I then highlight features of his method for deploying history in
addressing the essay’s central questions.
1.1.1 The Task of “Idea”
Kant’s task in “Idea” can be stated very simply: it is to defend his answer to the
question: Is humanity progressing? By progress, in this particular context, Kant
means moral rather than scientific or technological progress. By moral progress,
he has in mind advancement in the service of achieving a “cultured” and “civi-
lized” human condition and thus in the expression of and respect for human free-
dom (8:26). Kant describes this kind of progress as progress towards the
achievement of a “universal cosmopolitan condition” (8:28).
1.1.2 Kant’s Motivation
Kant’s investigation in “Idea” is motivated in large part by what for him is a practical
worry—a worry that rests upon his somewhat somber view of human nature.26
He gives expression to that view already in the second paragraph of the essay:
26 The practical motivation behind Kant’s “Idea” essay has been emphasized by many commenta-
tors, including W. H. Walsh, The Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New Delhi: Cosmo
Publications, 2008), 123 and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980), 6. Allen Wood acknowledges the “practical” motivation of “Idea”
but argues that the essay’s “primary focus” is “theoretical”: it is to “make sense” of human history as a
teleological process. See Wood’s “Kant’s Philosophy of History”, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other
Writings on Politics, Peace and History, ed. P. Kleingeld (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2006), 254. Another author who emphasizes this theoretical aim is Katerina Deligiorgi, in
“Actions and Events and Vice Versa: Kant, Hegel and the Concept of History”, in Internationales
Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 10, eds D. Emundts and
S. Sedgwick (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter Verlag, 2012), 177.
One cannot resist [erwehren] feeling a certain indignation when one observes
[human] deeds and omissions on the great stage of the world and finds that
despite the wisdom appearing now and then in individual cases, everything in
the large is woven together out of folly, childish vanity, often also out of childish
malice and the rage to destruction; so that in the end one does not know what
sort of concept to form of our species. (8:18)
Kant’s remarks here can hardly be described as those of a starry-eyed romantic.

Already in this introductory paragraph, he reveals his sensitivity to our limits.
One “does not know what sort of concept to form” of the human species, he
says, because we humans have corrupted our history with multiple acts of “folly
[Torheit]” and “malice [Bosheit]”.27 Kant raises concerns about the prospects for
moral progress precisely because he is all too aware of the imperfections of
our nature.
The question of moral progress arises, for Kant, not just because of obvious
blemishes on the historical record; it arises for the further reason that human ani-
mals are uniquely creatures about whom it is appropriate to pose the question
concerning progress. Only human animals are capable of progress, in Kant’s view,
because only human animals possess free will. Although non-human animals
exhibit some degree of self-motion and even ingenuity in adapting to changing
conditions, non-human animals do not strictly speaking choose their actions.
They cannot do so because they are governed wholly by instinct. Kant insists that
nature endowed exclusively human animals with reason, and reason is “a faculty
[Vermögen] of extending the rules and aims of the use of all its powers far beyond
natural instinct” (8:18f.). In giving us reason, nature also gave us the “freedom of
the will grounded on it” (8:19).
Finally, Kant takes there to be a genuine question about progress because the
concept of progress implies a pattern of behavior or activity. In the context of the
“Idea” essay, as I just noted, the pattern is one of moral improvement. Kant asserts,
however, that it is far from clear that human history gives us actual evidence of
any such pattern. It could be plausibly argued that the lesson we should derive
from our history is that what governs human activity is mere whim and arbitrari-
ness, and that the “idiotic course [widersinnigen Gang]” of our history reveals no
sign whatsoever of a unifying plan or purpose (8:18). For this further reason,
there is for Kant a real question about whether there has been moral progress in
the course of human affairs.
27 Kant makes similar remarks in “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” published two years
later, in 1786. The “thoughtful person is acquainted with a kind of distress [Kummer] . . . when he con-
siders the evils that so heavily oppress the human species, without hope of improvement” (8:120f.).
1.1.3 Kant’s Method in “Idea”
Despite his rather dark portrayal of human nature, Kant’s answer to the main
question of the “Idea” essay is ultimately a hopeful one. He observes that
humanity has come a long way; we are already “cultured” and “civilized”, he says
(8:26). Although he grants that there remains room for improvement, he seems
convinced that, overall, the trajectory of human history is headed the right
direction. So far, the historical evidence suggests that there is progress towards
civic freedom and enlightenment, towards the achievement of a “universal cos-
mopolitan condition” (8:28).
Because our central objective in this chapter is to highlight principal respects
in which Kant and Hegel part ways in their treatments of world history, it is
especially important that we examine Kant’s description of how he thinks he is
able to justify this hopeful outlook. As we will see, his means of justifying his
vision of moral progress is markedly different than Hegel’s. The difference
shows up in the kind of evidence Kant believes he can offer in support of his
assumptions. It shows up, too, in how he characterizes the method of his histor-
ical investigations.
We will consider these differences in detail beginning in section 2, but several
points are worth anticipating. Kant observes in the first paragraph of “Idea” that
his evidence is at least in part empirical. He approaches the subject matter of
world history much in the same manner, he says, as the natural scientist
approaches her subject matter, namely by sifting through the empirical data for
evidence of patterns or regularities. Kepler “subjected the eccentric paths of the
planets . . . to definite laws”, and Newton “explained these laws by a universal natu-
ral cause” (8:18). Kant likewise conceives of his task as that of setting out to estab-
lish whether patterns can be discovered in the vast diversity of human affairs. He
hopes his study will reveal more than a “planless aggregate [planloßes Aggregat]”
or “confused play [verworrenen Spiels]” of events (8:29f.). He aims to determine
whether a history of human affairs is strictly speaking possible, that is, whether
there can be a “narration [Erzählung]” of the appearances of freedom in human
actions (8:17).28 Kant ends up concluding that if we take the long view and focus
on the species rather than the individual, we can indeed discover signs of moral
improvement in the apparent chaos of events (8:17).29
28 As Walsh observes in The Philosophy of History, by “history” in this context, Kant does not mean a
mere “chronicle”, that is, a “bare recital of unconnected facts”, 33. Kant instead intends to provide a
“significant record” or “narrative of past actions arranged in such a way that we see not only what hap-
pened but also why”, 22. Others who have emphasized this point include Manfred Kuhn in “Reason as a
Species Characteristic”. In Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide,
eds A. Rorty and J. Schmidt (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), 68–93.
29 In his Second Thesis, Kant makes explicit his reasons for looking for evidence of moral progress
in the history of the human race as a whole rather than in any particular individual.
At the same time, however, Kant insists that his project in “Idea” is in a certain
respect not empirical. His project differs from that of the proper historian in that
it is a “philosophical” attempt to work out a universal history (8:29). As he puts
it, his idea of world history is “to some extent [gewissermaßen] based upon an a
priori principle or guiding thread [Leitfaden]” (8:30). It is the work of a “philo-
sophical mind [philosophischer Kopf]” and not intended to displace a “properly
empirical history” (8:29).30
In section 1.2, we will consider more closely Kant’s discussion of the eviden-
tiary basis of his idea of world history. It will then become clear that the motiva-
tion for the “Idea” essay derives not just from his sensitivity to the imperfections
that invariably accompany human action, but also from his assumptions about
the necessary limits of our knowledge. In his view, historical investigations can
rely upon empirical evidence up to a point, but we cannot expect to get definitive
answers to our questions by this means. The inquiry into world history must rely,
in addition, on an a priori “guiding thread”. The reason for this is not just because
the past cannot be directly observed. As we will see, Kant holds in addition that
principal claims of a philosophical consideration of history are not susceptible to
empirical confirmation.
1.2 Principal Theses of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History”
My objective in considering central theses of Kant’s “Idea” essay in this section is

to aid our comparison of Kant and Hegel and thereby identify essential similari-
ties and differences in their approaches. Both hold that there can be a philosophy
of history; they therefore agree that it is possible to discover order in the chaos of
human affairs. Both, in addition, tell a positive developmental story about that
order, a story of gradual moral improvement. As I mentioned a moment ago, the
two philosophers nonetheless part ways in two fundamental respects. In contrast
to Hegel, Kant denies that either history or science can ultimately justify his idea
of progress. In denying this, he appears to qualify as the more modest of the two
thinkers. There is furthermore a difference in how they each evaluate our pros-
pects for realizing our moral ideals. Although Kant insists that we never know
that we are progressing, strictly speaking, he is convinced that his philosophy of
history can at least console us or give us grounds for hope. In contrast, Hegel
asserts that we can know that we are making progress. Not only that, we can be
30 The novelty of Kant’s enterprise of attempting an a priori history is emphasized by Walter

Jaeschke in “Die Geschichtlichkeit der Geschichte”, 365. In doing so, Kant took an important first step
in overcoming the traditional gap between purely rational and purely empirical modes of inquiry.
Hegel developed Kant’s innovation further, Jaeschke argues, with his more radical appreciation of the
historical nature (“Geschichtlichkeit”) of reason.
confident that what is “rational [vernünftig]” is already realized or “actual

[wirklich]”.
Our first order of business will be to highlight key features of Kant’s philosophy
of history and explain more fully how he arrives at the two conclusions I just
mentioned, namely that his idea of history is unknowable but can nonetheless
give us hope. Among other things, this will require us to take a closer look at his
methodological commitments and the metaphysical assumptions upon which
they rest.
1.2.1 A Teleological Approach to History
As I just noted, Kant argues in “Idea” that world history reveals the presence in
human affairs of a certain pattern, in particular, a pattern of moral improvement.
As he puts it, the course of human affairs is more than a “planless aggregate”
(8:29). Kant in addition takes the thesis that history exhibits a pattern to imply
that we can discover evidence of purpose in human affairs. In his First Thesis, he
introduces us to that idea of purpose.
Curiously, the First Thesis makes no mention of human nature or history
specifically. Rather, it posits the existence of purposes in animal nature overall.
According to the thesis, which Kant explicitly identifies as “teleological [teleolo-
gisch]”, “All natural capacities of a creature are determined to evolve completely and
purposively” (8:18).31 The suggestion is that, over time, nature exhibits not just
change but development. In development, changes are somehow related, as if
coordinated to serve a common goal. According to this thesis of purposive
development, what happens to the natural predispositions of creatures amounts
to more, then, than a matter of “comfortless chance [trostlose Ungefähr]” (8:18).
In his Third Thesis, Kant credits nature itself (or as he later writes, “perhaps a
wise Creator”32) with the assignment of purposes. This assumption is striking for
a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that he thereby seems to contradict
his suggestion later in this same discussion that purpose in human nature or in
human affairs is the work of reason, not nature. If we consider Kant’s remarks
more closely, however, we discover that there is no contradiction. In crediting
nature with the assignment of purposes, his message is that nature (or a “wise
Creator”) is responsible for the overall purposive distribution of natural capaci-
ties. We therefore have nature to thank for the very fact that we have reason. It
remains up to us, however, to decide how to use that faculty. If we use our reason
31 In this context, the thesis is about “creatures [Geschöpfe]” in particular, but Kant elsewhere
defends the view that purposes must be attributed to nature as a whole. See, e.g. his discussion in CJ
§64. I have more to say about this in Chapter 3.
32 Kant mentions a “wise Creator [eines weißen Schöpfers]” in the final sentence of his Fourth
Thesis (8:22).
properly, then we are entitled to take credit for aiding the development of moral
progress.
But what are we to make of Kant’s bold suggestion that nature’s assignment of
faculties is purposive? He stresses this point in his Third Thesis, where he writes
that, “Nature does nothing in vain [überflüssig]”; in the use of “means to her ends,
she is not wasteful [verschwenderisch]” (8:19). In ascribing purposes to nature,
Kant implies that nature possesses unusual powers, powers significantly different
in kind from blind mechanical causes. This is a central assumption of the “Idea”
essay, and it is worth exploring more closely; for Kant’s reliance on a causality of
purposes has important implications for his philosophy of history overall.
Kant argues that mechanical causality cannot warrant conclusions about
design or purpose. Mechanical causality implies that for any event, x, there is a
temporally antecedent causal condition (or chain of conditions), y, without which
x would not have occurred. If what we are explaining are events in nature, the
causal conditions in play are natural forces governed by Newtonian laws of
motion. In his Critique of Judgment, written six years after “Idea”, Kant illustrates
both the application and limits of mechanical explanation. We marvel at the phe-
nomenon of flight, for instance, and we mechanically explain that phenomenon
by identifying its antecedent causal conditions; among other things, we study the
structure of birds’ wings and their interaction with aerodynamic forces. But if we
restrict ourselves to a purely mechanical explanation, the most we can say is that
it is “to the highest degree accidental [im höchsten Grade zufällig]” that these
forces converged to produce the phenomenon of flight (CJ §61 [360]). That is, a
purely mechanical explanation cannot justify the hypothesis that nature struc-
tured birds’ wings for the purpose of flying.
In Chapter 3, I explore Kant’s reasons for arguing that mechanical explanation
(whether of nature or of world history) itself requires the idea of a causality of
purposes. My present objective is simply to highlight his assumption that, if we
seek evidence of purpose, we need to rely on something other than a purely natu-
ral or mechanical form of causality. As he argues in the Critique of Judgment,
natural scientific investigation cannot by itself warrant claims of purpose. The
concept of purpose, in his terminology, is an “idea” of reason. Like all ideas, in his
technical sense, it refers to an object that cannot be encountered in experience.33
The assumption that nature is purposive or designed, then, is not one that can be
justified either by ordinary observation or by our scientific investigations into
33 “Ideas” are concepts for which “no object of experience can be given” (CJ §77 [344f.]). Even back
in 1785, in the first of three reviews Kant published criticizing Johann Gottfried Herder’s 1784 work
“Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit”, Kant writes that, “the unity of organic
force . . . as self-constituting with respect to the manifold of all organic creatures . . . is an idea that lies
wholly outside the field of empirical natural science and belongs solely to speculative philosophy” (8:54;
my emphasis). I return to Kant’s criticisms of Herder below, especially in footnote 38.
nature. For this reason, the idea of purpose is unknowable from a scientific or
theoretical point of view.
In the context of his philosophy of history, Kant’s treatment of the idea of pur-
pose is the same. If we discover purpose or progress in human history, it is
because we assume that what happens in history is more than the result of the
accidental convergence of necessary conditions. In effect, we presuppose a non-
natural form of causality.34 We presuppose that what happens is not just, or not
always, a matter of chance, and that there is “regular movement [regelmäßigen
Gang]” or meaning in the course of human affairs (8:17). The discovery of regular
movement or a pattern is necessary if our aim is to provide a history or “narration
[Erzählung]” of our subject matter. As we know, Kant sets out in the “Idea” essay
to discover in human affairs one pattern in particular, a pattern of moral progress.
This is his aim, even though he insists that moral progress is an idea of reason and
as such unknowable.35
1.2.2 On the Function Nature Has Assigned Human Reason
In the early paragraphs of “Idea”, Kant describes the specific function or purpose
nature has assigned our reason. He insists, first, upon distinguishing reason from
instinct. He notes elsewhere that, initially, instinct provided our sole tool for sur-
vival. “In the beginning”, reason had not yet begun to “stir”, and human animals
were guided “by instinct alone” (8:111).36 In “Idea”, he remarks that with the
awakening of reason, we gained the ability to “extend” [erweitern] the “rules and
aims . . . of natural instinct” (8:18). Unlike instinct, our reason is malleable; it can
develop in response to “effort, practice and training” (8:19).
Kant furthermore asserts that nature would not have given us reason had it
intended us to be governed solely by instinct. This is an implication of the Third
Thesis: “Nature has willed that man . . . should partake of no other happiness or per-
fection than that which he himself, independent of instinct, has created by his own
reason” (8:19). Had nature intended us to be guided by instinct alone, she would
have endowed us more generously—she would have given us the “horns of the
bull” or the “claws of the lion”. Had this been the case, however, our faculty of
reason would never have been awakened into action. The emergence of reason
thus owes a debt to what Kant refers to as the “parsimony [Sparsamkeit]” of nature
34 We do not (or more precisely, cannot) observe purposes in nature, Kant asserts at CJ§ 75 [399].
See also CJ§§ 64–67.
35 As Karl Ameriks argues in “The Purposive Development of Human Capacities”, the “idea” to
which Kant refers is not historically contingent but rather has a “kind of Platonic status” as an “atemporal
ideal”. According to Ameriks, Kant intended his “Idea” essay as an alternative especially to Herder’s
historicist tendencies. In Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical
Guide, eds A. Rorty and J. Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49, 52.
36 The passage is from Kant’s 1786 essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”.
(8:19). Nature’s parsimony is responsible for the fact that, especially in conditions
of scarcity, we rely on reason to secure our needs, such as the need for nourish-
ment, safety, and defense. Nature assigned reason not just the task of aiding our
survival and making our lives more agreeable, but also for allowing us to progress
out of the “greatest barbarity” to the “inner perfection of our way of think-
ing” (8:20).
Thanks therefore to nature for . . . the jealous [mißgünstig] ambitious vanity, for
the insatiable desire to possess and control. Without nature, all of humanity’s
most precious natural capacities would forever remain undeveloped and
dormant [ewig unentwickelt schlummern]. (8:21)
Kant explicitly argues in this passage that the purpose of nature’s parsimony is to
stimulate our reason’s development. This assumption gives rise to the further
question: Why did nature, which does nothing in vain, not assign instinct the task
of securing our inner perfection and freedom? Kant reveals his answer further on
in his discussion. The fact that it is reason rather than instinct that is responsible
for the advance of human nature beyond its “animal existence [tierischen
Daseins]” is precisely what allows us to take credit for moral progress. Nature
endows us with instinct, a force we are powerless to oppose; we can neither train
nor alter it to suit our varying needs and situations. As I mentioned a moment
ago, Kant holds that reason, in contrast, is capable of development. Given “effort,
practice and training”, reason can be trained to “progress from one level of insight
to another” (8:19). Reason is therefore ours to control, at least in certain respects.37
The fact that reason is within our control allows for the possibility that we can
assume responsibility for its operations. We can suppose that the production of
our well-being and the perfection of our capacities is in some measure the result
of our own work. It is thanks to nature’s parsimony—thanks, that is, to the fact
that she did not give us the “horns of the bull” and thereby stimulated the devel-
opment of our reason—that we can make ourselves “worthy [würdig]” of our
well-being (8:20). In short, nature’s parsimony gives us the opportunity to boost
our moral self-esteem.38
37 We cannot in Kant’s view control everything about our reason. For instance, we cannot control
the fact that we have reason; nature or a “wise Creator” is responsible for that. Nor is it up us to gener-
ate reason’s essential properties, properties that distinguish it from our other faculties such as
sensation.
38 As Fackenheim puts it, Kant wants to argue that nature aims to produce something that is “an
end in itself ”, namely the human being as a “moral” being. See his “Kant’s Concept of History,” in The
God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. J. Burbridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1996), 43.
1.2.3 On how Human Reason is Awakened into Action
Especially in his discussion of the Fourth Thesis, Kant has more to say about the
means by which our reason is awakened into action, about the forces that propel
us from a condition of barbarity to one of culture. The basic engine of forward
movement is the particular kind of conflict or “antagonism [Antagonism]” that he
identifies as “unsocial sociability [ungesellige Geselligkeit]” (8:20). Although we
human animals generally desire each other’s company, we also harbor unsocial
tendencies. We compete with each other to satisfy our physical needs; when those
needs are met, we compete for something else, such as social regard or status.
Precisely because we are special animals possessing ‘higher’ faculties, we are
driven by “vainglory, lust for power, and avarice” to “achieve a rank among [our]
fellows” (8:21).39
As unpleasant as this opposition or conflict may be, Kant is convinced that,
overall and in the long run, it produces positive results. Were we not in part
unsocial natures, he writes, “all [our] talents would remain forever hidden
[verborgen]” (8:21). Not just natural scarcity but also social conflict—even
war—plays a crucial role in awakening our various powers, including our power
of reason. In encouraging the development of our tastes and talents, conflict
stimulates our need to devise and implement practical rules. If we are to live in
peace, we have to “conquer” our “vainglory”, our “lust for power”, and “avarice”.
In developing our practically rational capacities and in institutionalizing practical
principles, we secure the transition from “barbarism to culture”; we transform
society into what Kant refers to as a “moral whole [moralisches Ganze]” (8:21).
Ultimately, we make possible a whole governed by means of a “perfectly just
constitution” (8:22)—governed, that is, by universally agreed upon principles
regulating the external expression of freedom.40
A central thesis of the “Idea” essay, then, is that unsocial sociability is in the
long run the “cause of lawful order among men” (8:20). Nature knows what is best
for us and therefore “wills discord” (8:21). She does so in the service of her
39 Kant traces our sociability back to our animality which is responsible for our natural tendency to
seek the company of others. The unsociable form of our sociability derives, however, from our predis-
position to humanity. As such, it originates in our rational predisposition as free natures to set ends.
Unsociable sociability develops along with our reason which strives to secure us a sense of self-worth
and ultimately superiority. Allen Wood explores these points in detail in his “Kant’s Fourth
Proposition: the Unsocial Sociability of Human Nature”, in Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide, eds A. Rorty and J. Schmidt (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 115–116. See also, in the same volume, J. B. Schneewind’s paper, “Good out of evil: Kant
and the idea of unsocial sociability”, 107–109.
40 Kant remarks on the ultimately productive consequences of war in the Seventh Thesis of “Idea”.
In “Conjectural Beginning”, he pays homage to Rousseau for recognizing that although war is a great
source of evil, it is a necessary condition of culture. Reflecting on human culture in its “present state”,
Kant writes that war is an “indispensable means [unentbehrliches Mittel] to the still further develop-
ment of human culture” (8:121). He makes similar remarks four years later in §83 of the Critique of
Judgment. War is “one more incentive for us to develop . . . all the talents which serve culture” (5:433).
“highest purpose [höchste Absicht]”, which is to ensure the “development of all the
capacities that can be achieved by the human species” and thereby achieve a “uni-
versal civil society” (8:22).41
1.2.4 The “Most Difficult and Last” Problem to be

“Solved by the Human Species”
As if to assure us that his faith in moral progress is not too utopian, Kant again
turns his attention to obstacles that stand in the way of our ever in fact achieving
a universal cosmopolitan condition. Insofar as we live among others of our kind,
we are animals in need of a “master” (8:23). We need a master because we are not
perfectly rational animals. In interacting with others, we frequently ignore rea-
son’s commands and act from “selfish animal inclination [selbstsüchtige tierische
Neigung]” (8:23). We thus require a master to force us to “obey a universally valid
will, in order that everyone can be free” (8:23). From what do we get that master?
If taking credit for moral progress is to be possible for us, we must discover the
master within ourselves. Indeed, Kant asserts that the master is nothing other
than our faculty of reason, and this is precisely the problem. The problem is the
“most difficult” to be solved, he tells us, because the very capacity we must rely on
for our perfection is a capacity whose commands we routinely ignore. A “com-
plete solution [to this problem] is impossible”, he writes, for out of the “crooked
timber [krummem Holze]” of which the human species is made, “nothing per-
fectly straight can be built” (8:23).
Although Kant remarks here that a complete solution is impossible, he lays out
further conditions that must be in place if we are to secure a universal cosmopol-
itan condition. We need experience passed down through history as well as the
right conception of a possible constitution. We need, in addition, human wills
good enough to honor such a constitution. Because the peace and security of a
single nation is tied to its relation to other nations, we furthermore cannot secure
a moral whole without stable and harmonious international relations. In the
words of the Seventh Thesis, the “problem of establishing a perfect civic constitu-
tion is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states”.
Nature intended that individual nations “enter into a federation of peoples” in
order to preserve the rights of separate nations. But there is no escaping the
41 In “Conjectural Beginning”, Kant sometimes seems in complete agreement with Rousseau: “The
history of nature”, he writes, “begins with good, for it is God’s work; the history of freedom begins with
wickedness, for it is the work of man” (8:115). We thus begin in paradise but then suffer the “fall”
(8:115). But Kant goes on to argue that although the transition out of paradise must be considered a
“loss” for the individual, it results in the case of the species in “progress toward perfection”. In a remark
likely intended to challenge Rousseau, Kant warns against the “nihilism” of the wish to return to an
“original state” (8:122f.).
fundamental obstacle to achieving a universal cosmopolitan condition, namely

the imperfect nature of our reason.42
1.2.5 Justifying the Idea of Human History
Kant’s Eighth Thesis summarizes what we have just seen is the ultimate goal of
nature’s plan, which is to achieve a perfectly constituted state:
The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s
secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in
which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth
that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.
This is the place to turn our attention to the question: how does Kant think he is
able to justify this and the other theses of “Idea”? I want to suggest that his answer
to this question gives us further evidence of his sensitivity to human finitude. In
this case, the finitude under consideration is epistemological rather than moral.
That is, it concerns not our moral imperfections but rather the limits to what we
can know.
In his 1786 essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”, published two
years after “Idea”, Kant explicitly states that if a history of the progress of freedom
is to be grounded at all, it has to be empirically grounded—that is, “grounded on
reports or records [Nachrichten]” (8:109).43 Sometimes, he indeed seems optimis-
tic about the prospects of defending his claims empirically. In his discussion of
the First Thesis of “Idea”, for instance, he writes that “observation confirms
42 As Kant writes at (8:22), nature’s “highest purpose [höchste Absicht]” is to insure the “develop-
ment of all the capacities which can be achieved by the human species” and thereby achieve a “univer-
sal civil society”. (See for similar remarks, CJ §83 [432f.].) He is most concerned, of course, about the
development of our moral capacity, our capacity of practical reason. The final end of history, then, is
the achievement of what is effectively a “kingdom of ends” on earth. Nature seeks the realization of a
“perfectly constituted state”, in his view, because such a state is necessary for the achievement of the
final moral end. This point that the final end of history is for Kant a moral end (the achievement of
moral agency) is persuasively defended by Pauline Kleingeld in “Kant’s Changing Cosmopolitanism”.
In Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide, eds A. Rorty and
J. Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 172.
43 Kant remarks that, where no reports or records are available, the historian must fill in the gaps.
Insofar as she does so by relying on historical clues, her “conjectures [Mutmaßungen]” are “permissi-
ble [erlaubt]” (8:109). As exercises of imagination, however, conjectures are “no match for history”, in
Kant’s words. Nonetheless, they are legitimate if they are supported by clues “rationally derived from
experience” (8:110). It is not permissible for the historian to indulge in “mere fiction [bloßen
Erdichtung]”, that is, in conjectures that have no basis in historical evidence (8:109). Kant contends
that his own “conjectural” account of the beginning of human history is not a case of mere fiction,
because he relies on an argument from analogy. He draws on what experience has taught him about
human nature, and he projects that knowledge back to the beginning of human history, presupposing
that, in the beginning, humans were essentially “no better and no worse” than they are now (8:109).
[bestätigt]” the thesis that there is evidence of purpose in nature. In particular,

observation confirms the assumption that the natural predispositions of animals
are “determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively”
(8:18). In his discussion of the Eighth Thesis, he adds that we have good historical
grounds for expecting that “enlightenment will gradually arise” for the human
species, enlightenment that is manifested in principles of government (8:28). He
supports this remark by noting that, over time, humanity has discovered the ill
effects of hindering freedom. Humanity has come to recognize that:
[i]f one hinders the citizen from pursuing his well-being in whatever ways con-
sistent with the freedom of others he chooses, one hampers the liveliness of
enterprise generally and, along with it, the powers [Kräfte] of the whole (8:28).
Finally, in “The Strife of the Faculties”, published in 1798, Kant mentions an inspi-
rational event of his time (the French Revolution) that he thinks warrants him in
predicting the “progress” of the human race “towards the better” (7:88).
Elsewhere, however, Kant concedes that the prospects for empirically justify-
ing his claims are dim. In “Idea”, he remarks that history provides only “a little
[etwas Weniges]” support for his thesis that humanity is morally progressing
(8:27). Although history instructs us that there has been “regular progress” in the
constitution of states on the European continent at least since the Greeks, the his-
tory of the human species covers a long span of time, and humanity has so far
occupied only a brief period of it. No certain conclusions can be drawn about the
whole, given that we have observed only a small part of that whole (8:27). In
“Strife”, Kant notes that even did we possess historical evidence of past progress,
this would not allow us to predict future actions with “certainty”. Past events war-
rant us in predicting future similar events only on the assumption that we will
encounter similar circumstances in the future, but we cannot know in advance
that similar circumstances will prevail. The best we can do, he says, is calculate
probabilities (7:84).44
These difficulties attending the collection of solid empirical evidence, however,
pale in comparison to what is the most insuperable obstacle to justifying Kant’s
theses regarding the progress and purpose of world history. The problem is not
just that the past is not an object of direct observation, nor is it that inductive
evidence is incapable of yielding “certainty”. There is a more fundamental
difficulty—one that derives from the nature of the objects under investigation.
For Kant, the idea that human history unfolds in accordance with nature’s plan or
44 In “Strife”, Kant identifies further problems connected with our efforts to predict the course of
history. Because human agents are not perfectly rational, we cannot predict that they will always do
what they ought to do (7:83). Because there is a “mixture of good and evil” in the predisposition of
human agents, we cannot predict “with certainty [mit Sicherheit]” the “progress” of the human species
“toward the better” (7:84).
purpose is a thesis no empirical investigation (no matter how flawless) could justify.
This is for reasons we considered earlier. The concept of nature’s plan or purpose
is an “idea” in his technical sense, that is, it is a concept for which “no object can
be given in experience” (CJ § 77 [344f.]). As he writes in “Strife”, the “problem of
progress is not to be settled directly through experience” (7:83).45
The same consideration applies to the thesis that we possess a special faculty of
reason in virtue of which we are warranted in taking credit for our good works
(8:20). Given Kant’s particular conception of this faculty, it, too, is not a proper
object of empirical inquiry. In “Idea”, he describes the function of reason as that of
“extending” the “rules and aims . . . of natural instinct” (8:18). He has more to say
about the special nature of this power in “Conjectural Beginning”, where he
remarks that our reason is “a power that can extend itself beyond the limits to
which all animals are confined” (8:111). In its practical application, reason is the
power of free choice (8:112). Thanks to the fact that we possess this faculty, we are
ultimately responsible for our actions, whether good or evil (8:20, 115). We have
this capacity, Kant writes in his 1794 essay “The End of All Things”, as creatures
who may be thought of as having a “supersensible [übersinnlicher]” nature, that is,
as creatures who are free in the sense of “not standing under conditions of time”
(8:327). In “Strife”, Kant notes that experience can never furnish evidence that we
possess such a faculty (7:85, 91). As he puts it, the idea of a “moral cause” (a cause
that is “undetermined with regard to time”) can only be “established purely a pri-
ori” (7:84, 91).46
45 According to Walsh in The Philosophy of History, it follows from the fact that the idea of nature’s
“secret plan” is not for Kant susceptible to empirical confirmation, that we should regard his philo-
sophical approach to history as “external”, 129. In Walsh’s words, Kant insists upon a “complete gulf ”
between the “activity of the historian discovering facts about the past and that of the philosopher
devising a point of view from which sense can be made of them”, 127. Walsh asserts that this “external”
approach is rejected not just by Herder but also by Hegel, 135. Walsh seems to me correct in making
this latter claim, but it is curious that he later remarks that Hegel’s philosophy of history, like Kant’s,
suffers from the defect that it is too a prioristic, 151f.
46 Kant therefore takes exception to the efforts of those such as Herder who (on his interpretation)
set out to provide a thoroughly naturalistic explanation of the origin and development of human free-
dom. In his first review of Herder’s 1784 “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit”, Kant
argues that Herder deserves criticism for tracing the emergence of freedom to the “upright form” or
posture of human beings (8:49) and for suggesting that the soul is a kind of “material force” (8:50). For
recent discussions of the Kant–Herder relationship, see in addition to the works I have already men-
tioned: John H. Zammito’s comprehensive study, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Karl Ameriks’s papers, “History, Progress and
Autonomy: Kant, Herder, and After”, in Kant and the Possibility of Progress: Essays on the History of
German Philosophy, eds S. Stoner and P. Wilford (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2020), and “Kant’s Fateful Reviews of Herder’s Ideas”, in Kant’s Elliptical Path (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), Chapter 12, 221–237; Allen Wood, “Herder and Kant on History: Their
Enlightenment Faith”, in Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew
Adams, eds S. Newlands and L. M. Jorgensen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 313–342;
Rachel Zuckert, “History, Biology, and Philosophical Anthropology in Kant and Herder”, in
Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 8, eds
F. Rush and J. Stolzenberg (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter Verlag, 2010): 38–59.
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Time and History in Hegelian Thought

and Spirit Sally Sedgwick

Time, History, and Political Thought John Robertson

Understanding Human Time (Oxford Studies of Time in

Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization

Science, Technology and Innovation in the History of

America's Forgotten Poet-Philosopher: The Thought of

A Short History of Islamic Thought Morrissey

Postsecular History: Political Theology and the

The Soulmate Sally Hepworth

6.3 Hegel’s “Philosophic” Method Revisited 158

Works Cited 183

Francesca Menegoni (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2018), 249–261.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im

CJ Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

“Nothing in the past is lost [to philosophy] . . .”

A conspicuous feature of Hegel’s major works is that they are developmental

capacity responsible for unchangeable a priori laws, is an achievement that is

should not be understood as obtaining between two distinct forces (necessary

Structure and Argumentative Strategy

least apparently problematic representation of the relation of the individual to the

his fatalism is consistent with a robust theory of human freedom as genuinely

Some implications of my argument

Chapter 1: History and Human Finitude: Kant versus Hegel

Hegel repeatedly warns us against conflating his treatment of practical normativity

Chapter 2: Hegel’s “Philosophic” Approach to World History

Chapter 3: Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History

It is tempting to suppose that, in describing the purposive development of history as

to defend a Leibnizian-­style theodicy. His insistence upon history’s necessity might

Chapter 4: Hegel’s Fatalism as a Theory of Freedom

In the service of further demystifying Hegel’s commitment to history’s necessity, I

Chapter 5: Freedom’s Necessary Limits

Chapter 6: Thought’s Temporality

Chapter 7: Coda: Permanence in Hegelian Thought and Spirit

23 “Alles ist ihr [Philosophie] in der Vergangenheit unverloren . . .”

1.1 Kant on World History and Finitude: Introduction

1.1.1 The Task of “Idea”

1.1.2 Kant’s Motivation

Kant’s remarks here can hardly be described as those of a starry-­eyed romantic.

1.1.3 Kant’s Method in “Idea”

1.2 Principal Theses of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History”

My objective in considering central theses of Kant’s “Idea” essay in this section is

30 The novelty of Kant’s enterprise of attempting an a priori history is emphasized by Walter

confident that what is “rational [vernünftig]” is already realized or “actual

1.2.1 A Teleological Approach to History

1.2.2 On the Function Nature Has Assigned Human Reason

1.2.3 On how Human Reason is Awakened into Action

1.2.4 The “Most Difficult and Last” Problem to be

fundamental obstacle to achieving a universal cosmopolitan condition, namely

1.2.5 Justifying the Idea of Human History

[bestätigt]” the thesis that there is evidence of purpose in nature. In particular,

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6.3 Hegel’s “Philosophic” Method Revisited 158

Works Cited 183

to defend a Leibnizian-style theodicy. His insistence upon history’s necessity might

Kant’s remarks here can hardly be described as those of a starry-eyed romantic.