Blurts & Spasms

In answer to Quora question: "What did Hegel mean by "Rational"?"

IMO to understand what Hegel included in "rationality," you would have to decide a few things about how to interpret Hegel. For example:

1) Is Hegel's understanding of God or Spirit rational (in his own view, or as we would define "rational" today) as it pertains to his own metaphysics? Does it reflect non-rational presuppositions?

2) What does Hegel mean by "intellectual intuition" and what are his views regarding it (in contrast to or harmony with Kant and Fichte)? Similarly, what are Hegel's views about Kant's "intuitive intellect?"

3) Is Hegel's dialectic supersession analytical or immanent? Does it exist in itself, of itself, or as a projection of subjective thought?

4) How does Hegel relate individual, subjective consciousness to a) universal, pure consciousness, and b) ultimate spiritual reality (absolute knowledge)?

5) What does Hegel mean by "essence" or "real substance" or "ground" (and how does he routinely arrive here or contextualize these things), and what does he mean by "Wesen?"

Now there is certainly an easier way to answer to your question, and that would be to quote a passage where Hegel discusses the "rational," but by doing so we truncate a fuller appreciation:

"The development of the Idea is the proper activity of its rationality, and thinking, as something subjective, merely looks on at it without for its part adding to it any ingredient of its own. To consider a thing rationally means not to bring reason to bear on the object from the outside and so to tamper with it, but to find that the object is rational on its own account; here it is mind it its freedom, the culmination of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality and engenders itself as an existing world." (from the introduction to The Philosophy of Right.)

Since there is still debate about many of these issues - including the terms Hegel uses in the quote above - it is really for you to decide.

My 2 cents.