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Hegel & History

Hegel On The Future, Hegel In The Future

Slavoj Žižek says Hegel doesn’t need to be a prophet to point us to a better tomorrow.

The claim I want to defend is that Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any project of how our future should look. As he says towards the end of the Preface to his Philosophy of Right (1820), philosophy can only paint ‘grey on grey’, and “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.” That is, philosophy only retrospectively translates, into a ‘grey’ (lifeless) conceptual scheme, a form of life which has already reached its peak and has entered its decline – which is becoming ‘grey’ itself. To put it simply and brutally, this is why we should reject all those readings of Hegel which see in his thought an implicit model of a future society reconciled with itself, leaving behind the alienations of modernity. I call those readers the ‘not-yet-Hegelians’.

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