Hegel was born into a lutheran household. He knew the turbulent times that people were living through and experienced them himself. His view of freedom doesn't require appeal to another world, be ond or outside this world. For hegel, only human animals have freedom. Even highly intelligent animals cannot adopt a point of view. They can't act from self conscious reasons. And it's those powers of reflection, or thought, that are uniquely human for hegel. Without which we would not have freedom at all.
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