> I think natural selection is an expression of Hegel's "the
> actual is
> >rational and the rational is actual" idea, too.
>
>
> BLab:What do you mean by that?
>
> CB: The surviving species are actual; and the extinct species
> are not
> actual, i.e. don't exist anymore.
>
> The surviving species _are_ actual because their relatively superior
> fitness
> to the extinct species is rational relative to the given environment.
> Rational in the sense that whatever fit traits they have adapt them
> well to
> the given environment. Adaptive traits are rational relative to the
> environment that they adapt well to.
>
> You can see tautology impinges from a couple of angles. Hegel's
> aphorism is
> a sort of tautology. Then "what is rational is adaptive and what is
> adaptive is rational" is a tautology of a sort.
Hegel's claim is made in the context of elaborating ideas inconsistent with Darwin's. These involve the conception of human being as a being "implicitly" capable of a "will proper" and a "universal will", an "in itself" that becomes "for itself" - explicit - through an internally related set of historical stages. These concepts are elaborated in the preface and introduction to the Philosophy of Right where the claim is found.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm
Here are some illustrative passages:
"The will, which is will only according to the conception, is free implicitly, but is at the same time not free. To be truly free, it must have a truly fixed content; then it is explicitly free, has freedom for its object, and is freedom. What is at first merely in conception, i.e., implicit, is only direct and natural. We are familiar with this in pictorial thought also. The child is implicitly a man, at first has reason implicitly, and is at first the possibility of reason and freedom. He is thus free merely according to the conception. That which is only implicit does not yet exist in actuality. A man, who is implicitly rational, must create himself by working through and out of himself and by reconstructing himself within himself, before he can become also explicitly rational."
"Impulse, appetite, inclination are possessed by the animal also, but it has not will; it must obey impulse, if there is no external obstacle. Man, however, is the completely undetermined, and stands above impulse, and may fix and set it up as his. Impulse is in nature, but it depends on my will whether I establish it in the I. Nor can the will be unconditionally called to this action by the fact that the impulse lies in nature."
"In caprice it is involved that the content is not formed by the nature of my will, but by contingency. I am dependent upon this content. This is the contradiction contained in caprice. Ordinary man believes that he is free, when he is allowed to act capriciously, but precisely in caprice is it inherent that he is not free. When I will the rational, I do not act as a particular individual but according to the conception of ethical life in general. In an ethical act I establish not myself but the thing. A man, who acts perversely, exhibits particularity. The rational is the highway on which every one travels, and no one is specially marked. When a great artist finishes a work we say: 'It must be so.' The particularity of the artist has wholly disappeared and the work shows no mannerism. Phidias has no mannerism; the statue itself lives and moves. But the poorer is the artist, the more easily we discern himself, his particularity all caprice. If we adhere to the consideration that in caprice a man can will what he pleases, we have certainly freedom of a kind; but again, if we hold to the view that the content is given, then man must be determined by it, and in this light is no longer free."
"Man as spirit is a free being, who need not give way to impulse. Hence in his direct and unformed condition, man is in a situation in which he ought not to be, and he must free himself."
"The efficient or motive principle, which is not merely the analysis but the production of the several elements of the universal, I call dialectic. Dialectic is not that process in which an object or proposition, presented, to feeling or the direct consciousness, is analysed, entangled, taken hither and thither, until at last its contrary is derived. Such a merely negative method appears frequently in Plato. It may fix the opposite of any notion, or reveal the contradiction contained in it, as did the ancient scepticism, or it may in a feeble way consider an approximation to truth, or modern half-and-half attainment of it, as its goal. But the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result. Only by such a course is there development and inherent progress. Hence this dialectic is not the external agency of subjective thinking, but the private soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically. Thought regards this development of the idea and of the peculiar activity of the reason of the idea as only subjective, but is on its side unable to make any addition. To consider anything rationally is not to bring reason to it from the outside, and work it up in this way, but to count it as itself reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom, the summit of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and produces itself as the existing world. The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness."
It is in this dialectical sense that capitalism as conceived by Marx is "rational", a necessary "phase" out of whose "negative content" is produced "a positive content and result" required for the final actualization of "reason" in "the true realm of freedom".
Ted