I haven't read Hegel before, but I find the abstraction of something like "reason" as separate agent in itself, and then thinking about how its agency manifests a fun way of thinking.
It is, I think, begging the question, with regards to "reasons" autonomy, but it is a mind bending perspective.
According to Hegel, universal history is the realization of the Idea of Reason in a succession of National Spirits. These are manifested in the deeds of heroes, or world-historical individuals, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon. However, the Idea of Reason does not work itself out in history in a manner which would seem reasonable on the surface. It is not actualized in this or that of its stages as a consequence of men consciously adopting it as their ideal and striving to translate it into reality through their mode of life and conduct. It is not, as it were, through the imitation of Reason that Reason is realized in history. How, then, does this take place?
Hegel's answer to this question is contained in his doctrine of the Cunning of Reason. Briefly, he holds that history fulfills its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner. It does so by calling into play the irrational element in human nature, the passions. So Hegel writes: “Two elements, therefore, enter into our investigation: first, the Idea, secondly, the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast tapestry of world history.” By “passion” he means those all-consuming emotions of the individual person which are self-regarding in nature. In discussing the question, he writes: “I mean here nothing more than human activity resulting from private interest, from special or, if you will, self-seeking designs—with this qualification: that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to the attainment of one aim and that other interests or possible aims, indeed everything else, is sacrificed to this aim.”
Everything hegelian works like a word mixer which applies a nonsensical operation to an argument to produce more and more words up to the point of a semantical smoothie. It’s a result of a particular pseudointellectual hegemony and a precursor of the mental filth that plagued the last century.
Bullshit by the origin. This man juggles words and meanings at Du Soleil level, so finding roots in his claims is impossible, due to the described above. He’s basically GPT-3 of his time with the temperature parameter cranked up, an intellectual tarpit for the uninitiated.
It is, I think, begging the question, with regards to "reasons" autonomy, but it is a mind bending perspective.