«WHAT IS REASONABLE IS REAL; AND WHAT REALLY IS REASONABLE»: HISTORY, MEANINGS AND FATE OF ONE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY

The purpose of this article is a conceptual and historical-philosophical analysis of the content, interpretations and criticism of G. Hegel’s paradoxical idea about the rationality of reality – an idea that constitutes the essence of his system of absolute objective idealism. Four main directions were identified in the interpretation of the content and understanding of the modern perspectives of this idea, presented in the works of the leading thinkers of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Historical-contextual and hermeneutic methodology, as well as system-structural and comparative-historical methods are widely used in the work. The main sources of the work were the main works of G. Hegel and the original works of his leading opponents and like-minded people. An important role in the preparation of the article was played by fundamental research on the history of philosophy by the Italian authors J. Reale and D. Antiseri, the English thinkers B. Russell and Fr. Copleston, German researcher K. Loewit and others. The article proves that this main and debatable idea of G. Hegel has deep historical and philosophical roots – the “panlogism” of Parmenides and Spinoza, the “dialectics” of Heraclitus and the determinism of Democritus, Cusansky and Spinoza. However, its main philosophical sources are the metaphysics of Aristotle and the theological ontology of scholasticism, supplemented by the rationalism of the New Age and the Enlightenment with their cult of Reason, which had a decisive influence on Hegel. At the same time, in antiquity (misologism), in early medieval apologetics (“I believe, because it is absurd”) and in the aesthetics of the romanticism of the Enlightenment, the foundations of an alternative to Hegel’s irrationalism of the 19th-20th centuries were laid. Its ontological basis is the fundamental Absurdity of being associated with the existentialist “being towards death”. In the 21st century, the confrontation between these two intentions of philosophical consciousness reaches its climax. Thus, the content and main meanings of G. Hegel’s idea about the becoming and increasing reasonableness of reality (our world) are analyzed in the work. Alternative approaches and directions are identified and considered, its historical-philosophical and theological criticism is assessed. In conclusion, conclusions were drawn about the ambiguity and debatability of the modern triumph of Reason in the light of possible negative prospects and trends in the future development of mankind.