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Editorial

The Biggest Picture

by Grant Bartley

Happy 250th birthday to one of history’s great Romantic artists! People don’t usually think of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as a Romantic Hero, but he’s the philosophical equivalent of Beethoven – born the same year – and his philosophical preoccupations were just as Romantic and Heroic as Beethoven’s musical ones.

Hegel’s philosophy is ‘Romantic’ because it’s about penetrating into the deepest nature of Nature and seeking a revelation of ultimate truth through the natural world – which is precisely what the Romantic cultural movement was all about. And it’s heroic because the question Hegel asked himself was, “What’s the fundamental nature of everything?” You can’t get more intellectually ambitious than that.

This issue we’re focusing on Hegel’s favourite topic, the meaning of human history – surely a topic of fundamental profundity. Hegel’s theory of history is an example of what historians call ‘universal history’ – human history understood as a totality.

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