There is always something new to be found in America's past that also brings greater clarity to our present, and to the future we choose to make as a nation.
— Eric Rhoads
I volunteer time and money to support a local "friends" group devoted to Cooch's Bridge Historic Site.
It's a labor of love.
A lifelong history buff, as a kid I never "got" why everyone wasn't equally enthralled by the past.
But I couldn't explain to anyone why—other than its romantic aspects—I found history so enchanting.
I had no explanation.
So I was delighted to discover in college that the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had formed a theory of history that, for cogency, has never been topped.
Hegel thought that history is like nature: it evolves.
Just as nature evolves toward more complex and harmonious systems, he argued, so does history. But where nature represents the material, history represents the spiritual.
History is the evolution of spirit (Geist).
Of course, that's a big leap from the record of events you'd find in a history textbook, or even the record found at an archeological dig.
But Hegel distinguished three ways of understanding the past:
- Original history, which comprises eyewitness accounts of the past and historians' interpretation of those accounts. Hegel called this the "portrait of time."
- Reflective history, which comprises grand narratives of the past. Hegel distinguished four kinds of reflective history: universal, pragmatic, critical, and specialized. Universal history examines whole nations and peoples. Pragmatic history examines the past through the lens of an ideology, such as Christianity. Critical history examines the past with the aim of providing an alternative explanation of it (The 1619 Project is a contemporary example). Specialized history examines singular topics, such as furniture, art, munitions, or mass migrations.
- Philosophical history, which comprises the history of ideas. Here, events embody thought and are spiritual epiphanies. In other words, Hegel insisted, history is Geist manifesting itself. History is not a matter of dates and places, but of ceaselessly unfolding "logic."
Philosophical history reveals to us that history—despite the recurrences of greed, cruelty and sadism—is incremental progress. Looking back as philosophers, we see that the bad is always overcome by the good; that reason always prevails; and that freedom, the "soul truth of Geist," ultimately triumphs.
History, Hegel said, is Geist "in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially."
And that which Geist is potentially is personal freedom.
Above: Cooch's Bridge. Photo by Ann Ramsey.
