‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’, says Hegel, meaning that (all too often) wisdom comes after the event. Quote is from the preface to the Philosophy of Right. The Marxist Franz Jakubowski uses this to distinguish between the ultimately reflective Hegel, and Marx, for whom consciousness is an active subject, not just a passive mirror, in his book Ideology and Superstructure.