Posted by Peter Van der Biest on June 05, 19103 at 11:36:43:
In Reply to: Hegel posted by Carmen on June 12, 19100 at 04:08:57:
: Hi.....i need some Help on understanding Hegel and his version of freedom.....
Hegel's version of freedom was entirely idealistic, meaning that he thought only the spirit was free in its movements, and real thinking, dialectical thought, the free but not chaotic movement of spirit in its own element. The three stages in Hegel's system are:
1. The idea of which logic is the proper science.
2. Nature: at a certain moment the selfdeployment of the idea gives rise to the material world, which Hegel describes in his Encyclopedia as a first great alienation of the original idea.
3. Spirit: at a given qualitative moment nature breeds humankind, and with humankind the spirit. The whole historical development of the spirit is described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1807), in which he describes the oddyssea of human consciousness from its most primitive starting point (the sensual certainty - let's say the consciousness of both the infant as of primitive man) to the complete selfconsciousness of mankind about its own position in the world. The process of the Phenomenology is none other then that of the spirit gradually becoming aware of itself, thus reaching complete selfknowledge and thus freedom.