{"id":903143,"date":"2026-09-17T15:52:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?page_id=903143"},"modified":"2026-09-17T16:34:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:34:20","slug":"what-is-rational-is-actual","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/what-is-rational-is-actual\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201eWhat is rational is actual\u201c \u2013 does Hegel thereby justify everything that exists?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The sentence stands in the Preface<\/a> and runs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.<\/p>\nPreface to the Philosophy of Right<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is usually read like this: whatever exists is thereby in the right. That would be an invitation to put up with anything \u2013 and it would be incompatible with Hegel\u2019s own book, which over long stretches is about what is wrong with what exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mistake lies in one word<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Actual<\/em> does not mean, in Hegel, what is at hand. It is a technical term, and it stands opposed to the merely possible and contingent, not to the imagined. What is actual is what corresponds to its concept<\/a>. Everything else does exist, but is, as the note to \u00a7 1<\/a> puts it, \u201etransient existence<\/em>, external contingency, opinion, inessential appearance, untruth, illusion\u201c.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hegel did not adjust this afterwards; he explained it expressly in the Encyclopaedia<\/em> of 1830, because the misunderstandings had come to his ears:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In common life people happen to call every notion, error, evil, and whatever belongs on that side, as well as every however stunted and transient existence, an actuality. But even to ordinary feeling a contingent existence will not deserve the emphatic name of something actual; the contingent is an existence that has no greater value than something possible, which may just as well not be as it is.<\/p>\nEncyclopaedia \u00a7 6, note<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is worth noting where this clarification is missing: in the student anthology from which Karl Popper drew his knowledge of Hegel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the sentence then says<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It cuts both ways. On the one side:<\/strong> a despotic government exists, but it is not actual \u2013 it does not correspond to its concept and for that reason perishes. The sentence is no licence for what exists but a standard applied to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other:<\/strong> whoever holds the present to be simply null and knows better has his better world, as Hegel writes in the same Preface, \u201eonly in his opining \u2013 a soft element in which anything whatever can be imagined\u201c. That is the more uncomfortable half, and it is directed against the critics, not against the conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The price<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One may hold it against Hegel that a word which in everyday use means \u201eat hand\u201c means something else in him, without his saying so in the sentence itself. The reproach is justified. Hegel supplied what he meant only once \u2013 and only after nine years; otherwise he took it to be the reader\u2019s business to take the concept from the system. With that he earned himself the most lasting reputation of his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources.<\/strong> Walter Kaufmann, \u201eThe Hegel Myth and Its Method\u201c, 1959 \u00b7 Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends<\/em>, 1996, there \u201eThe Myth of the Rational and the Actual\u201c. \u2013 See also in the glossary: Actuality and Rationality<\/a>, The Concept<\/a>, The Owl of Minerva<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n