Philosophy of Right (1821)
G.W.F Hegel
[translated by T. M. Knox]
Preface
. . . . .
This book, then, containing as it does the science of the state, is to be nothing other
than the endeavor to apprehend and portray the state as something inherently rational. As
a work of philosophy, it must be poles apart from an attempt to construct a state as it
ought to be. The instruction which it may contain cannot consist in teaching the state what
it ought to be; it can only show how the state, the ethical universe, is to be understood. . . .
To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason.
Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time
apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its
contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over
Rhodes. If his theory really goes beyond the world as it is and builds an ideal one as it
ought to be, that world exists indeed, but only in his opinions, an unsubstantial
element where anything you please may, in fancy, be built..
. . . . What lies between reason as self-conscious mind and reason as an actual world
before our eyes ... is the fetter of some abstraction or other which has not been liberated
[an so transformed] into the concept. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the
present, and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to
the actual, the reconciliation which philosophy affords to those in whom there has once
arisen an inner voice bidding them to comprehend, not only to dwell in what is
substantive while still retaining subjective freedom, but also to possess subjective freedom
while standing not in anything particular and accidental but in what exists absolutely.
It is this too which constitutes the more concrete meaning of what was described above
rather abstractly as the unity of form and content; for form in its most concrete signification
is reason as speculative knowing, and content is reason as the substantial essence of
actuality, whether ethical or natural. The known identity of these two in the philosophical
Idea. . . . . .
One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy
in any case always come on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it
appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has
been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is
that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and
that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself
into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray,** then has
a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only
understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
. . . . .

** per the translator's notes, this refers to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephistopheles says:
My worthy friend, gray are all theories
And green alone life's golden tree.
Philosophy paints the grayness of theory against the background of an aging world.