Everything I need to know about Hegel..........

"'The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.'  This was the view of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). But what does it mean?  Actually, that question, 'What does it mean?' is one that readers of Hegel's work ask themselves a lot.  His writing is fiendishly difficult, partly because, like Kant's, it is mostly expressed in abstract language and often uses terms that he has himself invented.  No one, perhaps not even Hegel, has understood all of it.  The statement about the owl is one of the easier parts to decipher.  This is his way of telling us that wisdom and understanding in the course of human history will only come fully at a late stage, when we're looking back on what has already happened, like someone looking back on the events of a day as night falls."
-Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

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