In the Freedom, the Individual, and the State chapter of Introduction to the Philosophy of History,

Hegel articulates the individuals relation to world history. Specifically, insofar as the individual
appears at first to be loced within his own private sphere, where passions dominate and personal
characteristics e!press themselves, seemingly isolated from the universal or ob"ective realm, it must
be shown to what e!tent this individuality moves outside itself and contributes to history.
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$y
doing so, Hegel will have %partially& achieved his pro"ect of unifying what 'ant left in a state of
diremption and finitude( cognition and its stygian core, or unconscious beyond, of the in)itself.
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+he first moment in understanding the relation between the individual and history is to view passion
or will as being in the service of reason. +he individual, then, acts out of interest, in that the content
he currently possesses is of a logical nature which he cannot transcend. +his ineluctable rationality,
however, does not re,uire the full awareness of the individual for it to be effective and totali-ing.
.hereas, for Hegel, the passions are acted upon in full awareness or consciousness, the
conse,uences of this process are not all grasped in an instant by the same individual. +hey must
arise dialectically in time, and only after a great length of time can they be seen as a speculative
result or figment of rational coherence. In other words, reason is a cunning master who uses the
individuals passions to bring determinate conse,uences into being. +hese conse,uences are then
much later recounted by speculative philosophy, thereby evincing the necessity of everything that
once appeared as irrational, personal, contingent, and atrocious/the necessity arrived at through
sublation, through the %not always& meticulous cleaning of historys slaughter bench. 0ccording to
Hegel, the only way we can grasp our autonomy and thereby be free is to pass through this cold
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It is important to always eep in mind that Hegel never e!cludes individual e!perience from his system, for insofar as
the latter is a dialectical construction, this or that e!perience will always find its moment in the overarching narrative.
0nd if Hegel does not go into detail concerning every possible personality, he at least privileges sub"ective space by
viewing it as the necessary entryway or passage into, first, ob"ective truth and, subse,uently, speculative truth. 1iven
this necessary passage, there are at least two types of individual within world history( he who leads the way %toward a
speculative result via the active 2creation of universals& and he who follows %by recogni-ing and identifying the
universals which precede him, thereby culturally preserving them&.
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+his is a philosophical formulation of what Hegel views as the sicness of our times, as the 2enlightened tendency
to divide and con,uer, to in fact seculari-e traditional content, without conceiving of a method which would give bac
to the modern individual a sense of connection3 the latter sense viewed by Hegel as reason in4as history from out the
substance that we are. +his is a circular, social form of autonomy.
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actuality of historical e!perience, for there is no other passage through which reason wors its
magic.
In part one of Beyond Good and Evil, 5iet-sche appears to be speaing directly against this
Hegelian depiction of will or at least the latters result. $oth Hegel and 5iet-sche hold that the will
is not the absolute locus or e!haustive meaning of worldly action.
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For Hegel, the will served
reason and was often blind to the truth that could come only at a later stage3 it was, in effect, a tool
of reason and an essential moment of the %social& actuali-ation of world spirit. 7eason is that
something other which Hegel introduces 2behind willing to incorporate individual action into
universal history. .illing, then, does not suffice for action, as 5iet-sche will say, yet in Hegel it is
later grasped in the clear consciousness of speculative thought, delayed from the immediacy of will
yet sufficient all the same. +his is a result that 5iet-sche does not abide, for it instantiates a sense
of moral responsibility
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that obscures the real relations of force operative in thought and sensibility,
relations that precede nominations such as good and evil. In 5iet-sches discourse, the will is
not the passage to a philosophical system that resolves the problem of autonomy, but rather the
recurrence of a mode of reasoning that preserves the atomistic need of traditional metaphysics.
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0nd even though Hegel does not conceive of the will as atomistic, he does incorporate it within his
modern pro"ect of absolute truth and this, for 5iet-sche, is indicative of an inability to recogni-e in
what has been written so far a symptom of what has so far been ept silent.
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5iet-sches will to power replaces Hegelian reason or spirit, yet the concept of autonomy that results from this is
radically different from Hegels insofar as it is future oriented, woring its critical passage through and beyond repose
and recollection, the all)too)human signs of the desire for truth as possession and pro!imity. 0s 5iet-sche maes clear
in another te!t, he does not busy himself with the refutation of earlier ideas, but only with the launching of insightful
arrows beyond his inherited %and idealist& intellectual tradition3 hence the difficulty in deriving 5iet-sche from Hegel.
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Hegel( +his is the seal of the absolutely high vocation of man, that he or she nows what is good and what is evil, and
that it is for him or her to will either the good or the evil. %Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 6;&
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5iet-sche( <the most diverse philosophers eep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies.
%BGE, from Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. *#;&
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BGE, p. **#.
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