d by noting the profound impact of the French Revolution and its residue on the continent on the formulation of German idealism as a philosophical type. As Marcuse explains, that idealism as a general mode of philosophy was a reaction to the feudalism and absolutism of politics and religion of the period that had just preceded the Revolution. No less significantly, the idealism was based on the emergence of human rational capacity rather than some extraordinary authority outside human capacity (i.e., king, Church, God) to affect and effect what today might be called the quality of life. In other words, the human-centeredness of Hegel's approach--qualified by much attention to appropriate method and attitude--becomes decisive. As Marcuse puts it, Man's position in the world, the mode of his labor and enjoyment, was no longer to depend on some external authority, but on his own free rational activity. Man had passed the long period of immaturity during which he had been victimized by overwhelming natural and social forces, and had become the autonomous subject of his own development. From now on, the struggle with nature and with social organization was to be guided by his own progress in knowledge. The world was to be an order of reason . . . The core of Hegel's philosophy is a structure the concepts of which--freedom, subject, mind, notion--are derived from the idea of reason (p. 3).
Encasing reason, as Hegel makes plain in Phenomenology of Spirit, is what might be termed reason raised to a high art, which is science. Hegel seeks to show in Phenomenology of Spirit that it is within man's capacity to reach the ultimate expression of reason as a mode of philosophical speculation; when reason has been thus expressed, it will have reached meaning because it will have achieved expression by means of Science. Incidentally, the German convention of capitalizing nouns becomes an important index of Hegelian metaphysical terminology ...