Hegel and Europe: preliminary considerations

I hope to contribute to a mutual clarification of both the terms "Europe" and "Hegel" by examining their interconnection with each other. I am convinced that the deepest motive of Hegel’s philosophy lies in reconstructing European identity. This is sure to sound odd since there is no Hegelian statement to this effect and even his explicit statements on Europe are few. My thesis can only be defended indirectly. No one will contest that Hegel’s philosophy is above all a philosophy of human freedom. In opposition, say, to Kant and Fichte (or to Hegel’s image of them), Hegel insists that freedom has to be conceived concretely, that is, not as a universal principle transcending historical and empirical conditions, but as self-shaping subjectivity (the „Idea“), which is actualised only when it is living in an adequate embodiment. Actual freedom always has an empirical form, it is always concrete together with this empirical form (concrete, from Latin „cum-cresco“, „to grow together“). Freedom is always a concretion of reason and external existence.