[13th Paragraph]
Now comes the most famous sentence of the book:
“What is rational is actual;
and what is actual is rational.”
People have often misunderstood this sentence. Some read it this way: everything that exists is good, so one should change nothing. That is not what Hegel means.
The word “actual” has a special meaning for him. Not everything that is at hand is actual. What is actual is what matches its own core. Many things are merely there: by chance, fleeting, mere show. That is not what is meant.
So the sentence says two things. Reason is not a mere idea in the head; it asserts itself in the world. And what really lasts in the world has reason in it.
Every unprejudiced person thinks this way, says Hegel, and so does philosophy. But whoever thinks he stands above his present and knows better lives in vanity. For only the present is actual.
So the task is this: to recognize what lasts in what changes and passes. Reason shows itself in countless colorful forms. It wraps itself around its core like a colorful rind. Thinking must pass through this rind to feel the pulse inside it.
But philosophy has nothing to do with the countless details. It need not give good advice about everything. Plato advised nurses always to rock the children in their arms. Fichte wanted every passport to carry a painted portrait of its holder. That is no longer philosophy. And because it stays out of this, it remains free of the know-it-all’s petty hatred of all that exists.
In short: the sentence does not say that everything that exists is good. It says that reason becomes actual and that there is reason in the actual. Philosophy should find this reason.
Hegel’s text: Preface, paragraph 13 →