You can see the notion being presented in this passage, or at least the sentiment to create institutions that are wholly owned or answerable to the people being governed by it.

In other words, public institutions, according to Hegel, are that objective attempt at viewing one's self or nations, and in the end, the very institutions (rightly so) should be directly answerable to the people who are governed by it, or rather the people govern it. We know how Marx thought about how this issue should be solved, in the form of communism...

But, this raises the issue Plato started in the Republic. How do you make sure you aren't governed by the less competent of a nation? Or what qualifications justify putting people (the same people who aren't infallible) in positions of power?

This creates a problem of demarcation between what is subjective (the mind or an individual) and having said individual in that objective form of governance in the form of public institutions. It would seem that only when philosophers become kings or kings philosophers.

That is a very interesting way of thinking about Hegel, however the passage is allied with early-Hegelian idealism where he suggests that ultimate reality is only attainable through a type of metaphysical theology; our thought processes historically evolve with the teleological aim of consciousness – a return to itself or the freedom of the Mind – achievable through the conception of God or observing ultimate reality through the lens of God. That is to say that the realisation of our ideal self is only possible when our mind or thoughts become conscious of the perfection of God and so perhaps more aligned with Platonic Forms.

In parallel with what you are attempting to convey, our subjectivity may inevitably be trapped or confined by the determined external network that allow us to use our mind independent of consciousness [thus automaton], but the Mind is a tool that is available to us despite being ignorant that we have signed the social contract. As we unthinkingly participate in all social peculiarities as though it were a part of us, consciousness of this external reality and an awareness of our separateness to this uniform network is that moment we access reality. The conception of God mediates this consciousness as God is that immeasurable perfection. From a Marxian perspective, Hegel’ idealism may be considered dogmatic and whilst I think his conception of being is actually far from the latter, religion to Marx is an illusion that traps people into the very same confined determinism that Hegel is attempting to escape. It envelops the mind with a faux consciousness, where self-reflection is a fantasy or illusion because of the dogmatic social order that feeds a false sense of self. He believed that people are capable of discovering Being or that spirit of consciousness by removing themselves from the claws of dogmatic faith and thus this consciousness is an awareness of the dialectic viz., historical materialism or to see the material world and those within it to have formed an ideological conception of reality over time.

You question the philosopher King, but perhaps a more interesting angle would be to question whether we actually need one and if so, why?

As it is understood, Hegel still is an unpopular philosopher in Anglo-Saxon World. :)

That's a beautiful passage. I love Hegel, and that's Hegel really getting down in it, spitting it out. That's THE Hegelian vision for me. It all adds up to a consciousness of freedom. But the errors and struggle were necessary. The truth is a palace built from lies.

Where I can't follow Hegel is his insistence on the concept, the concept, the concept. "...in feeling, I find myself confined and not free." I call bullshit. In great and high feeling I find everything I'm looking for. A conceptual freedom is literally worthless without its accompanying feeling. It is from this state of feeling that one can view the slaughter-bench of history as a necessary dissonance in the music as well as the condition of possibility for a rich conceptual self-consciousness that supports and reinforces the high sweet feeling.

In short, Hegel is basically 'right.' I agree with his basic historical vision. But he doesn't give feeling its due. To be fair, I think he experienced his philosophy with religious feeling. But some the details are so tediously worked out that a different passion seemed to dominate in those moments, a sort of chess-playing passion.

I am free when I have a consciousness of this my feeling. — Hegel

Is it not better to say that naming the feeling can increase the feeling or focus the feeling? If there is a urge toward freedom, it may be that this urge only determines its object as freedom after misinterpreting its object as the dominance of others, for instance.

To seek a law-giving object-god for instance might be an earlier expression of this urge. But this leads to dissonance in the feeling. The seeking, thinking mind is more god than the static god it tries to worship. Any substance that is not the substance-seeking subject himself is flat. But the substance-seeking subject in this substance seeking becomes less idiosyncratic, less pettily and yet more grandly egoistic. There are some massively 'Satanic' passages in Hegel. All that is alien and threatening is assimilated and overcome. A massive possession is promised. A triumphal homecoming. Suffering is justified as the price that potential god must pay to become god proper, god in the flesh self-knowing.

I've personally been move 'religiously' by Hegel-like interpretations of reality. Yet in other moods it's all just fine talk. Maybe even the finest of talk, but still just talk. Because the feeling has to be there. The ideas without the feeling are dead, even if they help kindle the feeling.

In great and high feeling I find everything I'm looking for. A conceptual freedom is literally worthless without its accompanying feeling. — ff0

"In sense-perception, for instance, and in feeling, I find myself confined and am not free," from above, Hegel.

I submit that you may be short-changing yourself in your ability to read Hegel (and more power to you for persisting in your reading!). I read his "feeling" as being subject-to, in the sense of being controlled by. I read your "feeling" as being the more healthy, natural, and necessary concomitant of living a full and realized life. Kant argued along similar lines in that freedom as license was not freedom, but freedom to do your duty was exactly freedom.

Good points. Hegel is amazingly clear in some texts and annoying obscure in others. My current view, however, is that he did have a grudge against 'mystical' or feeling-based approaches to the 'absolute.'
Of course it's asking for trouble to bring him up, because he wrote so much and with such varying levels of accessibility.

Here's a potent passage:

By this elevation of the spirit to itself the spirit wins in itself its objectivity, which hitherto it had to seek in the external and sensuous character of existence, and in this unification with itself it senses and knows itself. This spiritual elevation is the fundamental principle of romantic art. Bound up with it at once is the essential point that at this final stage of art the beauty of the classical ideal, and therefore beauty in its very own shape and its most adequate content, is no longer the ultimate thing. For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.

But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier [on pp. 435-6, 505-6], does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.
— Hegel

In my view, this image of this infinity would be something like one of those paintings of Christ with his hand raised in a sign. He knows that he is one with the absolute. So for me there is still the charged sensual image of an ideal human. Not just concept but embodied passionate concept. Yes, the inner life is central. But spiritual joy (in my view) expresses itself in terms of images and poems and philosophy. The Word remains important, but I don't know if it ever pulls away from image altogether. The labor of the concept does intensify and sustain the power of the image. It steers this power away from confusion. But the image also drives the labor of the concept to equal it in sublimity.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity. — Hegel

I adore that quote. I've had that kind of 'manic' insight. It doesn't completely go away, but whether it's there in the fullness of feeling is something that varies.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1

One of Hegel's translators, maybe Walter Kaufmann, in a preface makes the point that there was a time (now 200 years ago!) when readers of Hegel were pretty much conversant with his idioms, but not know. Indeed, not now! My experience with attempting to read him is as if I were watching a dancer, and finally noticing that his feet were no longer acquainted with the ground, without being aware of when he became airborne.

You apparently can decipher him, and that's admirable. But I suspect that outside of academia you find few to engage in discussion about him or his ideas. I harbor the suspicion that sometime someone will "distill" Hegel into radically shorter and more accessible language. As an example, I offer as a gloss of the quotation above Socrates's "Know yourself!"

On my bedside table these past several years is Kaufmann's translation of the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology. There for my edification, I find it instead a powerful soporific. Here's what I think I've got from it so far: that whenever something is said to be in categorical terms, that saying both reveals and conceals parts of the essential nature of the thing. It's true nature is the entire cycle of its being, revealed in what Hegel calls a dialectic of being, the initial, or prior, phases of which are overcome in sublation into the next phase, as the seed becomes shoot becomes a flower becomes rotting compost, and so on. - This dialectical process, happening in whichever however many ways (but not the schoolboy's thesis-antithesis-synthesis) being applied to being itself. If you want to "get into" the preface, I'll try to keep up.

You apparently can decipher him, and that's admirable. — tim wood

Only some of him! But some of these passages are glorious. His 'feel' is grand, lofty.

On my bedside table these past several years is Kaufmann's translation of the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology. — tim wood

I have this book. It's one of my favorite Hegel books. We could definitely start a conversation about this preface, to make what we can of it. I feel good about my interpretation of much of it.

I suspect that outside of academia you find few to engage in discussion about him or his ideas. — tim wood

I think I have the cure for this situation, and it applies to Heidegger and others too. In my view, it's best to just present some stirring idea in English. Out of respect one can mention that it was influenced by Hegel. But really we can just play with the idea as its stands in English. The idea is more important than its possible source, no? Along these lines, I decided to drop the word Dasein, because I don't want the burden of playing the responsible scholar. I want to talk about ideas that live for me, that square with my direct experience of life.

I harbor the suspicion that sometime someone will "distill" Hegel into radically shorter and more accessible language. — tim wood

Kojeve! His lectures are beautifully translated. That book is what really turned me on to Hegel. Of course it's as much Kojeve as it is Hegel. But that's not a bad thing.

It's true nature is the entire cycle of its being, revealed in what Hegel calls a dialectic of being, the initial, or prior, phases of which are overcome in sublation into the next phase, as the seed becomes shoot becomes a flower becomes rotting compost, and so on. - This dialectical process, happening in whichever however many ways (but not the schoolboy's thesis-antithesis-synthesis) being applied to being itself. If you want to "get into" the preface, I'll try to keep up. — tim wood

Yeah. That sounds spot on. I love the blossom-bud metaphor. Reality evolves to know itself dialectically. It becomes itself in this knowing of itself. It unfolds. It gains in richness and complexity in a sort of war with itself. Great stuff. Yes, we should get into the preface. We could quote the Baille translation via cut and paste and discuss passages.

In case no one has noticed, this passage is pretty much what Hinduism Maya is all about with a sprinkle of Ascetic Hatha Yoga.

That seems plausible. Isn't this idea in the Vedanta, too? If memory serves, there's an old idea of God playing hide-and-go-seek with himself. In any case, it's a beautiful idea. And this idea is IMV far more important than its source.

This idea of consciousness/Mind playing hide-and-seek with itself is a recurrent theme in mythology. It would be manifestation of what Jung called the collective unconscious. Whether or not Hegel intuited the idea or was somehow influenced by Eastern philosophy (the concept of thesis/antithesis/synthesis is straight out of Daoism) is unclear to me. Either cases are certainly possible.

Ah, yes, Jung. I read lots of Jung at one time. Great stuff.

What I like especially is the idea of errors accumulating to become truth. We become richer and more complex as we age. Our notions of ourselves and of reality evolve in a way that we can recall our older notions and see them from the outside. We transcend and include.

So we can see certain positions/perspectives that we once had in others, and we can anticipate where those positions/perspectives might lead them. This is not to say that I believe in just one 'sequence' of positions (actually a continuum). Life is huge.