The Real Is Rational and the Rational Is Real

In the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1820, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote a sentence that scandalised his contemporaries and has divided readers since. What is rational is actual, he said, and what is actual is rational. In Prussia, where the king ruled by decree and censors watched the universities, critics took it as a sanctification of the existing state. Hegel's students split into a right wing that agreed and a left wing, which included the young Karl Marx, that took the sentence as a challenge to bring reality into line with reason.

The ambiguity begins with the words. Hegel used the German word wirklich, translated here as real or actual, in a technical sense. He did not mean everything that merely exists. Elsewhere he said plainly that existence is partly appearance and only partly actuality. A bad government or a corrupt practice, in his terms, exists but is not fully actual, since it fails to realise the concept of what it is supposed to be. The actual is what expresses its own essence, and the essence of the state or of a human life is reason, the capacity to be understood and justified.

The deeper idea is that the world is intelligible. For Hegel, thought and being are not alien to each other. The universe is the kind of thing that can be understood by mind, and the history of the world is the story in which mind comes to know itself and, in knowing, to make itself free. Each stage of history grasps a little more of what freedom requires. In ancient despotisms one was free, in Greece and Rome some were free, and in the modern world, Hegel believed, all are in principle free. The rational is gradually becoming real, and the real is being shown to be rational.

Elements of this vision have found support in modern science. Einstein remarked in 1936 that the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility, and the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing nature. That equations scribbled on paper should predict the path of a planet or the existence of an unseen particle suggests that reality has a rational structure to which the mind corresponds. If the real were not rational, science would be impossible. In this sense the first half of Hegel's sentence is a working assumption of every laboratory.

If the real were not rational, science would be impossible.

The second half, that the rational is real, is the more daring. It says that what reason requires is not a mere ideal but a force in the world. The abolition of slavery, the end of colonial rule and the spread of human rights can be read as the progressive realisation of ideas that had long been recognised as rational and were therefore bound to find expression. The Indian Constitution, adopted in 1950, enacted principles of equality and liberty that had been argued in philosophy for two centuries. Ideas, on this view, are not merely dreams and have a way of making the world fit them.

Law offers an example of the sentence at work. The idea that a person should not be punished without a trial was once a philosophical demand and is now a feature of nearly every legal system. A judge who applies the principle does not feel that he is enacting a dream but that he is applying what is reasonable, and a government that ignores it loses legitimacy. Constitutions that outlive their authors, such as the American one of 1787 and the Indian one of 1950, owe their survival partly to the fact that they gave institutional form to arguments that people could accept as reasonable.

The objections are strong, however. The most obvious is that many real things are appallingly irrational. Slavery was real in the United States for two and a half centuries, and the Holocaust was a fact. To say that these were rational is a moral outrage, and to say that they were not actual in Hegel's sense seems a verbal trick to avoid the force of the evidence. Karl Popper argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945 that Hegel's philosophy was a defence of authoritarian states and a precursor of totalitarianism, since it taught the individual to see the state as the embodiment of reason.

Defenders respond that Hegel's claim is more subtle. Calling something rational means that it can be explained in terms of purposes and needs, and not that it is right. A philosopher's job is to understand the world as it has become, and not to scold it from an imaginary standpoint. Hegel's famous remark that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk makes the same point, that philosophy comes after the event, to comprehend it. This is not an endorsement of every reality, but a refusal to explain the world by wishes.

Marx saw the potential in the sentence for criticism. If only the rational is truly real, then an arrangement that is irrational, such as an economy that produces want in the midst of plenty, is condemned as unstable, doomed to be overtaken by reality itself. The young Hegelians held that the sentence contained a revolution, because it meant that whatever was unreasonable had no right to last. The same logic has been used by reformers who argue that a law or custom that cannot be justified by reasons will eventually fall, and that to call it unreal is to say that its time is limited.

We are left with a sentence that can bear either reading, and this may be its fascination. It is a statement of confidence in the intelligibility of the world, which encourages both science and reform, and it is also a temptation to complacency, since a believer in progress may excuse the present by pointing to the future. Whether history in fact moves toward reason or only seems to when seen backward is the problem that no one has solved. A philosopher who finds the real rational has first to decide who is judging, and the judge, too, is real.