The Universe is a Giant Brain!

According to G.W.F. Hegel, the universe and all its contents is a sort of mind: Absolute Truth in the process of self-knowledge. Yes, this is kind of spacey. Whether we call it a brain or a mind is a little murky, because for Hegel, the distinction between mental substance and physical substance gets blurred when we realize that all those physical objects out there are projections of the universal mind - projections which that mind in turn examines, hence the concept of self-knowledge. Inasmuch as we humans, who of course are also projections of that cosmic consciousness, exist in time, that self-knowledge is perceived by us as a process, self-discovery. And so the history of the world is a record of the universal mind examining itself, and in turn revealing itself, ever more clearly. There is something optimistic about Hegel’s view of history:

Philosophical history not only apprehends the principle of a nation from its institutions and destinies and develops the events from that principle, but considers especially the universal World-Spirit, how, in an inner context, through the history of nations in their separate appearances and their destinies, it has passed through the various stages of its formation. It exhibits the Universal Spirit in its accidents so that shape or externality is not developed conformably to its essence. Its higher representation is its shaping in a simple spiritual form.

(Every nation does not count in world history. Each has its point, its moment, according to its principle. Then, as it seems, it departs for good. Its turn does not come by chance.)

So each nation takes a turn being the center of world history, at a specific moment, when that culture’s character and nature plays a crucial role in the process of revealing the world-spirit to itself. Thus, nations like Persia, Greece, Egypt, and Rome had their moments of glory, in a precisely logical order, as each represented a step past the previous one and step toward the next one.