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To understand Hegel, you have to read The Phenomenology of Mind. The writers of this article obviously did not. Hegel was a true philosopher, and was trying to understand how the human mind worked and how humans interacted socially. He had no agenda beyond the acquisition of knowledge and trying to describe how humans thought and interacted with each other. Some of his disciples (Neitzsche, Freud, and Marx) had an agenda. He did not, except human understanding.

I studied 19th Century German philosophers and have a degree in Philosophy. Hegel was brilliant in advancing philosophy around the human mind.

At the societal level, he believed, that there was a social consciousness (which he called Absolute Spirit) that was kind of an aggregation of individual consciousnesses in a given society, and the way it solved problems was the same as the way individual consciousnesses did, using the dialectic method. That is where Freud got the notion of the id, ego, and superego.

This guy, although an idealist, posed many questions and provided answers that have still not been addressed in any other way (my favorite was the notion of how we became aware of our own existence in a societal setting).

I remember our professor (who was brilliant) spent an entire week on two sentences of the Phenomenology of Mind to allow us to understand where this guy was coming from. And noone to this day has provided better theories on many of these issues. He was almost Einstein brilliant in his approaches to understanding and modeling human consciousness and behaviour at the societal level, but because of his idealism, was unable to convert it into anything that could change the world, except to describe it.

In his defense, noone has thus far been able to change basic human nature through understanding for any significant period of time. And that was never his intention anyway.

In Phenomenology, he analyzed art and culture throughout history to describe mans evolution of his own consciousness based on how he perceived his place in nature and how the dialectic process advanced man's understanding of the world around him, as well as how man interacted socially. His analysis of the Sphinx (half man, half animal), was just one of many fascinating insights he had in the evolution of human consciousness.

Sorry, this psychobabble drips of pure liberalism; perfection through debate and compromise.

The way I see it the more we compromise our founding document, the less perfect our nation becomes.

We are evolving into a tyranny, not out of one.

Americans are becoming less educated, not more.