Hegel’s World Spirit
For Hegel, the purpose or goal of history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Progress is rational in so far as it corresponds to this development. This rational development is the evolution of Geist attaining consciousness of itself, since the very nature of spirit is freedom. Hegel also refers to Geist as the ‘world spirit’, the spirit of the world as it unveils itself through human consciousness, as manifested through a society’s culture, particularly its art, religion and philosophy (Hegel calls this triad the expression of the ‘absolute Spirit’). As Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), spirit is the “ethical life of a nation.” For Hegel, then, there is rational progress in history only in so far as there is progress of the self-consciousness of the spirit of the world through human culture in terms of the consciousness of freedom.
It is crucial however that Hegel does not mean by ‘freedom’ merely the unrestricted ability to do whatever we like: in the Philosophy of Right (1820) Hegel calls that type of freedom ‘negative freedom’ and says it’s an intellectually immature way to understand freedom. What Hegel means by freedom is instead closer to Immanuel Kant’s idea, in which a free subject is someone who self-consciously makes choices in accordance with universal principles and moral laws, and who does not merely pursue personal desires. Hegel claims that if the individuals of a nation merely pursue their own gratification, this will lead to the eventual collapse of the nation
