ABSTRACT
German intellectual life was, for several generations, under the spell of Hegel’s philosophy and its theory of the ‘Idea’ as the manifestation of triumphant Reason. Hegel considered that the ‘history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom’. This total reliance on the power of reason led Hegel to proclaim a ‘glorious mental dawn’ for humanity as thought ought to govern reality and not the other way around. The task of philosophy is, for Hegel, ‘to comprehend its time in thought’, and the only method for understanding all natural phenomena and human events consists in identifying the dialectical process by which everything moves from thesis to antithesis before culminating in a synthesis of the two previous stages. All life processes, be they intellectual or physical, are eventually resolved in the ‘Absolute Idea’.
