Critically evaluate Hegel's teleological account of history - Essay Example

Engels criticized such formulation of the question. He was sure the highest generalizing idea, approached by the natural sciences of that period, was the idea of expediency of established order in nature, flat Wolf’s teleology, according to which, cats were created in order to devour the mice, mice – to be devoured by cats, and everything in nature was created to prove the wisdom of the Lord (Carlton, 1975). There is no argument that it was a great merit of that period philosophy, that despite the limitations of its current scientific knowledge, it was not thrown off, and it, starting with Spinoza and ending with the great French materialists, persistently tried to explain the world, providing a detailed justification of the science of the future.

In the German classical philosophy, the problem of teleology, as well as a number of other important philosophical questions, was put in a new way, and there was some new movement of thought towards the dialectics on the relatively high level. This movement goes back to Kant. He was the first who raised a new issue of teleology. However, these Kantian formulations of the question are not directly related to that turn, made by ??Hegel in the sphere of teleology (Bristow, 2007). Concrete analysis of the dialectics of human toil takes Hegel’s antinomian opposition between causality and teleology, showing what specific place is occupied by conscious human purposefulness in general causation, not destroying, and not stepping over it, without appealing to any transcendental principle, that was very typical for prior thinkers - without losing work-specific definitions of goal-setting.

Hegelian discovery in teleology is quite simple: every working man instinctively knows that he, when having the means and the subject of labor, can not do anything that is beyond the objective laws of these subjects and their combinations, and that the process of labor, therefore, can never go beyond the causal relations of things. And every human discovery can nest in the disclosure of objective causal relations and in involving them into the workflow. And as it was rightly noted by Marx and Hegel, the specific nature of goal setting is in the notion of goal exists until the process of labor set in motion, and the process of labor exists to achieve this goal through increasingly deep causal links to objective reality (Frederick Beiser, 2007).

The very fact that goal-setting itself is causal, this also drew so much attention of Spinoza, is correct and goes without saying, but , as Spinoza thought, it does not mean that the specific nature of the teleological connection is disregarded. On the contrary, this knowledge gives us the opportunity to reveal the dialectical unity of the principle of causality and goal of labor more clearly. And this knowledge was not lost on Hegel. In accordance with his philosophy, various needs of people were the engine of progress and, thus, an impetus for civilization development in the course of history (Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825).

Hegel was the ideologue of a particular revolutionary period - the period of revolutionary constitution of a large modern nation. Hegel portrayed this process as progressive rightly. In the historical dialectic of this process, which repeatedly played out in the form of major wars, Hegel saw the state of nature, in which the spirit makes its way to the top stage