Hegel’s Idea of Life and Its Importance for Understanding the Civilizational Development of Contemporary Russia

Abstract

Hegel’s idea of life turned out to be productive in terms of understanding the present and the future of such a modern civilization as Russia. Turning to this idea allows us to answer some of the questions that concern us today, including what life is in its spiritual dimension and what may be the projection of the spirit on the development of a civilization. Firstly, we need to rethink Hegel’s teaching about life and its spiritual dimension to find out what we lack in the understanding of contemporary facts of life. Nature in the idea of life not only reaches its external manifestation, but also transcends its own limits. Hegel sees life in its unity with the spirit, which frees life from objectivity and subjectivity, raising it to “absolute universality”. All living things, including man, are a continuous ascent to the spirit, going beyond the boundaries of the bosom of nature. Only in man does life reach its spiritual development and go from nature to the kingdom of the spirit. Secondly, the present and the future of Russian civilization can be considered through the prism of Hegel’s understanding of the levels and contradictions of the spiritual organization of human life by conducting a certain thought experiment. Russia is at a civilizational crossroads today. It has not been able to reach the end of the stage of the development of the objective spirit as the actual embodiment of the moral idea and complete the construction of the civilization, including creating a civil society and the rule of law. The country is still in the grip of civilizational dilemmas, both in its present and in the anticipated future. It can be assumed that Russia’s living space is deformed and lies between two pairs of opposing trends: between traditionalization and modernization in the present and between informatization and ecologization in the possible future.