The Necessity of Illusion: on Hegel’s cunning of reason

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India.

Abstract

In Hegel’s Philosophy of History, one encounters the idea of the “cunning of reason” [List der Vernunft], which describes the unintended (universal) consequences of (particular) individual actions. However, the Philosophy of History is one of the most (if not the most) maligned of Hegel’s works, attacked by non-specialists and anti-Hegelians who use it to easily stereotype and dismiss Hegel, for instance, as a teleological anti-individualist, while most serious Hegel interpreters avoid this work at all costs. To redress the lack of serious attention to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, this paper aims to offer the strongest possible reading of Hegel’s weakest “text,” reading it alongside his strongest, the Science of Logic, thereby bringing together two seemingly contradictory instances of the cunning of reason in Hegel’s corpus. In the Logic, the cunning of reason shows how the universal emerges through the means which individuals use toward their particular ends. However, in the Philosophy of History, the cunning of reason describes how the universal acts through individuals, as it were, behind their backs and, problematically, Hegel goes on to claim that the universal (spirit [Geist]) ultimately sacrifices individuals on the “slaughter bench” of history to advance its own purpose(s). This paper’s two-part thesis is: (1) the cunning of reason in the Philosophy of History is an internal illusion of the structure of cunning of reason in the Logic, and (2) this illusion is absolutely necessary. In particular, this paper builds upon the Hegel interpretations of Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 20, Issue 54 - Serial Number 54
Articles
Issue 54, Spring 2026
February 2026
Pages 305-320

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