The state, the society has a fundamental role to play in this. It's only in so far as you reflect your desires and see them as meaningful that they will then seem to express your self. But that's only possible if they're given a more than just your own individual meaning - some broader social meaning. And i might think, well, ye, i mean, i am a university lecturer that satisfied my own particular desire,. So when i step back from that desire, i can give it that wider meaning. Bob is right. Sally, do you want to come in anoter few words to the decide freedom?
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