In an ethical state, you've got to have institutions that value individuality and a respect individuality. Hegel wants to say there's also a sort of these larger forces at work. You could say call them just world historical force forces. There might be a meaning to my actions that's not part of my intention,. A meaning that comes to be rewarded to my action years later after the action has been performed. So i think what it means really is more like a conceptioal claim that there's a conceptual closure that's possible in history.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) on history. Hegel, one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those who came before us. To explore this, he looked into the past to identify periods when freedom was moving from the one to the few to the all, arguing that once we understand the true nature of freedom we reach an endpoint in understanding. That end of history, as it's known, describes an understanding of freedom so far progressed, so profound, that it cannot be extended or deepened even if it can be lost.
With
Sally Sedgwick
Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Boston University
Robert Stern
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
And
Stephen Houlgate
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Producer: Simon Tillotson