History, Cosmos, Mind, and (Not Quite) Everything

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History explore the legacies of ancient history and historiography, at the levels of both theory and empirical detail. Their threefold typology of histories into ‘original’, ‘reflective’, and ‘philosophical’ constitutes a concise argument that history has and must, in the course of its development, become theoretical, and that therefore history and philosophy have essentially converged in the modern era—not least in Hegel’s own deeply historical style of thinking. With their vision of a Spirit that develops through four essential stages of the ‘Oriental’, Greek, Roman and ‘Germanic’ worlds, these lectures reveal that, for Hegel, the middle (Greek and Roman) stages are pivotal to the story of progressive human freedom and self-knowledge. The Mediterranean as the ‘middle sea’ (Mittelmeer) is a central historical fact and metaphor for Hegel (long before Braudel), and it was as peoples of the Mediterranean that his Greeks and Romans proved so historically significant—the Greeks with their humanistic art, anthropomorphic religion, philosophical depth, and ‘invention’ of history as a genre; the Romans with their law, inclusive citizenship, universal histories, inclusive empire and pantheon, and ultimately Christianity. This narrative is, in many respects, simply Hegel’s systematization of a long-held consensus. It also looks forward to the even grander narratives of global and ‘big history’, which temporalize the notion of ‘evolution’ and extend it from (human) ‘Spirit’ to all of nature. If so, this serves as a reminder that many facets of Hegel’s antiquity have been revived in new, unexpected forms.