Hegel and Process

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

“A special branch of process thought opened up in late 18th and early 19th century German Idealism, when Johann G. Fichte, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, and Georg W. F. Hegel responded to Immanuel Kant’s system of a transcendental idealism. All three of these thinkers alerted to the processual nature of the ‘transcendental subject,’ and aimed to overcome Kant’s incongruous postulate of unknowable ‘things in themselves’ by focusing on the process by which the world of knowable appearances, including reflective reasoning, is generated—this process, or so the argument goes, is the most promising candidate for reality in itself. Hegel provided the most comprehensive and detailed elaboration of this basic idea. He postulated that reality is the self-unfolding of dynamic structures or templates (“Begriffe”); among these templates external contrasts arise, which trigger self-modifications of the templates into more differentiated versions; these in turn create further external contrasts. The result is an increasingly interrelated web of dynamic dependencies, and the ‘movement of reflection’ that drives the interrelated differentiations of the templates in the end reaches a dynamic fixed point. According to Hegel’s dynamic structuralism, self-unfolding reality differentiates itself into mental, natural, socio-cultural, and institutional processes, and, in fact, over time develops any possible differentiation, so that in the end reality occurs as the totality of all possible forms of mutual conditioning. Hegel argued that this overall ‘movement’ of gradual self-determination by internal and external differentiation drives all actual and possible developments according to its inner necessity—reality is ‘reason’ articulating itself as and within the world. Hegel called this movement ‘dialectics’ and his philosophical system was an attempt to work out the ‘logic’ underlying the total dialectical development of reality”