First thought:
In Hegel's account of reason, it is thinking that holds the power to explain the world. What we see in nature, in terms of singularities perceived by the senses, our thinking, or our Reason, turns into universals. Pure thinking is when thinking turns on itself, is at home with itself, when the thinker understands himself as a free-thinking thing. This we perceive as universal, Absolute, but we also retain ourselves in a position of free thinker, thinking the universal of which we are a part. This, for Hegel, is what we know as Geist, or Spirit (with no accurate translation, though it is also related to ideas of soul and ghost). This universal is self-determining, not determined.
For Hegel, this process began in Ancient Greece and in a movement of continual progress, the Geist has developed, deepened and grown. So the spirit conceives of itself as universal, of itself as thought by thinkers, and this is the foundation of political freedom. One perceives oneself and recognises one's subjective thinking-freedom as part of the universal, thus pulling apart from nature and becoming at home with itself instead. This is the birth of philosophy, for as thinking universalises particulars, philosophy is the thinking of thinking, it universalises the universaliser, whilst remaining on the level of the subjective. Meaning is bound up in human cognition; the world is understandable insofar as it is we who undertake an understanding of it.
Hegel is concerned here with philosophical history, in attempting to access the Geist, to understand the concepts that animate certain cultural periods. World History is a dialectic, insofar as it determines itself, successively overcoming and synthesising old determinations, gradually becoming richer and more concrete. (CR) Each step in this process has its own determinate principle, encompassing every aspect of a nation's consciousness. It is integral to the philosophical conception of World History to understand why certain principles became inadequate, why they failed and how the Geist transformed itself. Reason is critical and never satisfied; the intellectual sphere is self-transforming and in societies throughout World History, there inevitably comes a point where the objective sphere, within which that culture is based, is no longer adequate. It is then, at this crucial point, when the subjective, intellectual sphere will push to the point of destruction the society it has outgrown. The product is a synthesis, where the old resides within the new, the Geist ever deeper and concrete. Thus we progress.
It is modernity, Hegel believes, that encompasses a truly new relationship of the subjective world to the objective. Taking Kant's notion of rational critique out of its idealised sphere, where it remains unintegrated into the reality of everyday life, Hegel conceives of its synthesis within a society that whose spiritual Being is at home with the objective conditions within which it exists. Modernity has the capacity to create such a society, where culture, social and political institutions, law, governance, and religion are such that the rational being, freeing himself from dogmatism, questioning and criticising, will Be At Home (Beisichsein) within them; the capacity for self-transformation will be a property of the modern society as well as its individual subjects.
Another thought:
From what I have understood of Hegel, his praise of modernity is premature. Without even delving into the notion of a constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government (perhaps only with an equally ideal Hegelian citizen would this actually seem feasible), I cannot grant him modernity's synthesis of subjective and objective spheres. Insofar as Ideas are most clearly understood right before their demise, in a kind of hubristic crystallisation, his conception of modernity is safe. A society whose Home has as its Geistian foundation the intellectual ideas of self-transformation, critique and progress, must inevitably cease to become a Home at all. Speed, the crucial quickening of The Industrialised (society, culture, mind, soul), will destroy the ability for the cultural to remain a home, and will in turn destroy the mind's conception of a such a philosophical, memory-based space. Home will disappear, and we will feel lost. I return once again to nostalgia, that abhorred word whose mention will produce knowing smirks and grimaces, the concept that we wrongly believe to refer only to a mawkish sentimentalising of the past, a feeling of the "golden ages". The word, from the Greek nostos - 'return home' algos - 'pain', means acute homesickness, and in it we will find (as we usually do with nostalgia) the past, but in this, a Hegelian past. The sea that we have crossed is Hegel's own; "when we think freely, voyaging on the open sea, with nothing under us and nothing over us, in solitude, alone by ourselves, then we are purely at home with ourselves". We have voyaged, we have felt free and new, and perhaps now we simply feel alone. When György Lukács, in his 1920 work 'Theory of the Novel', spoke of "transcendental homelessness", he was speaking directly to a Hegelian demise.
Lear too addresses this important ontological problem of cultural collapse - when an old way of life becomes impossible, when the guiding cultural principles are inadequate, how does one go on? Looking retroactively at the Crow culture, Lear recounts the way in which a culture, through collective anxiety, dream ritual and interpretation, attempts to form an active relationship with its future, to maintain some control. When, looking back, there is nothing one can do or think that makes sense anymore, how can one proceed. "The end of history" for the Crow may well hint at our own impending collapse. How will we create and maintain a relationship to the future that is imaginable to our present Geist? It seems clear that the modern way of life is rapidly becoming unsustainable, population increase untenable and socio-economic divisions ever widening.
The problem we face is made more serious by the fact that the means we have to make sense of the world is the rational system, the very problem we are looking to solve. We are unable criticise outside of the sphere that we inhabit, the critical method being its framework. We do not resort to dreams, save Freudian analysis (which itself has become an outmoded form of discovery), nor do we pay proper attention to the irrational; all things sense based, art, music, literature, nature, have become functional, they are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Meditation is "used" by corporations as well as people, to improve functioning, to deal with stress, to be more efficient. We will discuss this kind of instrumentality with Lukács next week.
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