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September 27, 2004
In the light of this kind of stuff from President Bush at the UN, we can turn to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History(1830) with its conception of the panorama of sin and suffering that history unfolds.
In this text Hegel argues that “To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect." Hegel argues that world history is rational. A thinker can uncover the ultimate design of the world by utilizing his or her own reason to explain the rational basis of history, a rational basis that is hidden by faulty and limited thinking.
He then makes the following remark in para 24, in part one entitled, 'Reason Governs the World'. He begins this a paragraph by saying that human passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are the most effective springs of action. Then this:
“When we consider this spectacle of the passions; when the consequences of their violence and the folly that accompanies not only them but even, and indeed pre-eminently, good intentions and legitimate aims, come before our eyes – the ills, the evil, the destruction of the most flourishing realms that the human spirit has created; when we behold individuals with the deepest sympathy for the indescribable misery – then we can only end up with sadness over this transitoriness and, insofar as this destruction is not only a work of nature but of the will of men, even more with moral sadness, with the indignation of the good spirit, if there be any in us, over such a spectacle. We can raise such events, without any rhetorical exaggeration, merely by putting together all the misfortune that the most glorious peoples and states as well as individual virtues or innocence have suffered, into the most horrible portrait, and thus intensify our feeling into the most profound and helpless sadness which cannot be balanced by any conciliatory result…. But even as we contemplate history as this slaughter bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, our thoughts cannot avoid the question for whom, for what final aim these monstrous sacrifices have been made.”
(Translation courtesy of The Young Hegelian.
Reason and horror go ang work together with Hegel. It's a very dialectical conception built aroudn the idea of the cunning of reason. It is much more preferrable to the conservatives black versus white (good versus evil) view of history.
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