Thanks guys. I’m not trying to create suspense here – it’s just hard to know exactly what to say. But here’s a start.
First ‘reality’ - which includes civilisations, societies, and indeed human nature and consciousness – is subject to a process of historical change
Kant‘s view of human nature is that members of the human species always have been and always will be divided/torn between their reason and their animal passions. Following Plato (and also Aristotle in a different way) European philosopher’s before Hegel were interested in talking about the general, the essential, the unchanging. Well Hegel from his examinations of different cultures/ societies and epochs contested this view of human nature as fixed. He pointed out that in ancient Greece – at least prior to the time of Socrates – people were not conscious of the conflict between their desires and their reason in the same way that they are today and that human nature seemed more harmoniums to them (although we should not envy their naïveté – see next post).
Perhaps Heraclitus amongst the Greeks anticipated Hegel and there were three medieval thinkers who anticipated him in their own way when speculating on the three ages of history governed by each person of the Trinity in their processional turn. A sense of the past as radically different from the present had been growing in Western consciousness since the early Florentine Renaissance. But Hegel was the first person to introduce a clear sense of the historical into philosophy. He argued that our ideas are not purely abstract but rather embedded in ways of life that change.
I will give more detail about Hegel’s view of the harmony of Greek society and the drawbacks of this harmony in my next post about dialectic. In the meantime - are there any questions?