Category: Paragraph

341

C. World History The element in which the universal spirit has its determinate being — which in art is intuition and image, in religion feeling and representation, and in philosophy pure, free thought — is, in world history, spiritual actuality in its whole compass of inwardness and externality. World history is a court of judgement,…
342

World history, furthermore, is not the mere court of judgement of power — that is, the abstract and non-rational necessity of a blind fate — but, because spirit is in and for itself reason, and reason’s being-for-itself in spirit is knowledge, world history is the development, necessary solely out of the concept of its freedom,…
343

The history of spirit is its deed, for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself — here, precisely as spirit — the object of its own consciousness, to comprehend itself by expounding itself to itself. This comprehension is its being and its principle, and the completion of an act…
344

The states, nations, and individuals engaged in this business of the world spirit arise each with its own particular determinate principle, which has its interpretation and actuality in their constitution and in the whole breadth of their condition; of this principle they are conscious and in whose interest they are absorbed, while at the same…
345

Justice and virtue, wrongdoing, violence and vice, talents and their deeds, the small and the great passions, guilt and innocence, the splendor of individual and national life, independence, the good and ill fortune of states and of individuals, have their determinate meaning and worth within the sphere of conscious actuality, and there find their judgment…
346

Because history is the shaping of spirit in the form of happening — of immediate natural actuality — the stages of development are present as immediate natural principles; and these, being natural, subsist as a plurality external to one another, and thus further in such a way that to one nation falls one of these…
347

The nation to which such a moment falls as its natural principle is entrusted with the execution of that principle in the course of the world spirit’s self-developing self-consciousness. In world history, this nation is, for this epoch — and it can (§ 346) make an epoch in it only once — the dominant one.…
348

At the head of all actions, and thus also of world-historical actions, stand individuals as the subjectivities that give actuality to the substantial (§ 279 Anm.). As these living embodiments of the substantial deed of the world spirit, and thus immediately identical with it, that deed remains hidden from them themselves and is not their…
349

A nation is not yet, as such, a state, and the transition of a family, horde, tribe, multitude, and so forth, into the condition of a state constitutes the formal realization of the Idea within it as such. Without this form, the nation — as the ethical substance which it is in itself — lacks…
350

To emerge in legal determinations and in objective institutions, proceeding from marriage and agriculture (see § 203 Anm.), is the absolute right of the Idea — whether the form of this its actualization appears as divine legislation and beneficence, or as violence and wrong; this right is the right of heroes to found states.
351

It is from this same determination that civilized nations regard and treat other nations which lag behind them in the substantial moments of the state — pastoral peoples regarding hunting peoples, agricultural peoples regarding both of these, and so on — as barbarians, with the consciousness of an unequal right, and regard their independence as…
352

The concrete Ideas, the spirits of nations, have their truth and destination in the concrete Idea as absolute universality — the world spirit, around whose throne they stand as the accomplishers of its actualization and as witnesses and ornaments of its splendor. Since, as spirit, it is nothing but the movement of its activity to…
353

In the first, as immediate revelation, spirit has as its principle the shape of substantial spirit as identity, in which individuality remains submerged in its essence and, for itself, without right. The second principle is the knowledge of this substantial spirit, such that it is the positive content and fulfillment, and being-for-self is its living…
354

According to these four principles, the world-historical realms are four in number: 1. the Oriental realm, 2. the Greek realm, 3. the Roman realm, 4. the Germanic realm.
355

1. The Oriental Realm This first realm is the substantial world-view, proceeding from the patriarchal natural whole and undivided within itself, in which secular government is theocracy, the ruler is also high priest or god, and constitution and legislation are at the same time religion, just as religious and moral commandments — or rather customs…
356

2. The Greek Realm This realm has that substantial unity of the finite and the infinite, but only as a mysterious foundation, thrust back into dull remembrance, into caves, and into images of tradition — a foundation which, born forth out of a self-differentiating spirit into individual spirituality and into the daylight of knowing, is…
357

3. The Roman Realm In this realm, the differentiation is consummated into an infinite laceration of ethical life, into the extremes of personal private self-consciousness, on the one hand, and abstract universality, on the other. The opposition, proceeding from the substantial outlook of an aristocracy set against the principle of free personality in democratic form,…
359

The inwardness of the principle — as the reconciliation and resolution of all opposition, still abstract and existing only in feeling, as faith, love, and hope — unfolds its content, raising it to actuality and to self-conscious rationality, into a temporal realm proceeding from the heart, from fidelity and the fellowship of free men; a…
360

Since, in the hard struggle of these realms — which here stand in a difference that has attained its absolute opposition, and which are at the same time rooted in one unity and Idea — the spiritual degrades the existence of its heaven to an earthly here-and-now and to common worldliness, both in actuality and…