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MOLE: A SMALL FURRY MAMMAL, virtually blind, with s&vng forefeet for burrowing though the earth. Not the first d)ing that would come to mind when seeking an analogy for the spirit of world history@ But a mole is what Hegel, the great philosopher of spirit, lights upon. For him, spirit advancing dialectically through historical time toward the freedom of full consciousness is like a mole tunneling through the earth toward open light. Like an "old mole," to be precise, for it has been burrowing toward the light for "the whole history of the world," by Hegel's calculation in the History of Philosophy, a good twenty-five hundred years: "All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day."' For the entire course of history, spirit has been going "ever on and on" in its striving to know itself, advancing slowly but surely through hard dialectical struggle toward its end.2 As it approaches the latest and final stretch of history, it picks up momentum in its eagerness to attain its goal of absolute consciousness, accelerating from "a snail's pace" to the stride of magical "seven league boots. "3 In this newly energetic mode ("new youth"), the mole embodies the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. The "old mole" is then both Welgeist and Zeitgeist, the seasoned spirit running through all world history and the more vigorous spirit driving the time of which the present is the extremist pointthe time of the modern. Hegel concludes his History of Philosophy by exhorting readers to follow the spirit of the times by grasping "the mole that is within [as it] forces its way on into the light of day."4 The mole's tunneling, then, illustrates what Hegel calls the "great day's work of [the] Spirit," the progress of world history, its strenuous drive forward toward its end of self-determining freedom.5
Hegel is not the first, of course, to have called a spirit a mole. Hamlet did so more than two centuries before Hegel. "Well said, old mole" (1.5.170),6 Hamlet says to the spirit of his father after it has slipped back underground, interred once again, the time allotted him to roam above now up. And from that subterranean region, he four times repeats Hamlet's injunction to his companions to...