Özet:

Stoicism is a school of thought that has been very influential in metaphysics and ethics in the history of philosophy. The following can be said in terms of the metaphysical views of the school: The entire universe is composed of two principles called active and passive. Matter is the passive one; the active is God immanent in the universe. But it cannot be said that there is an absolute distinction between the two principles. Because God has been conceived as an organism integrated with and contains the universe. God, as the good in himself, brought the universe into existence according to goodness and intentionality. For this reason, all the elements of the universe are divinely connected. Therefore, the stoic school argued for the existence of a divine power, a divine mind that covers the entire universe. Their ethical views also should be considered in this context. The principle of living by nature is organized according to the intention of being in harmony with God. Because of the teleological system in the universe, people also carry this intentionality. For this reason, people should see themselves as a part of the whole which they cannot be separated from and arrange their actions accordingly. At this point, the principle of living by nature means to see incidents as a manifestation of divine providence. Therefore, since they cannot resist the course of the world, people must show his/her consent and take everything with steadiness. They should reflect on what is happening in the world in a way that will be useful to him/her and derive lessons from it. The divine mind or providentia governing the universe will bring us to virtue and perfection, no matter how painful the events that happen to us, because this providence carries out an intention hidden behind these individual events. Since we cannot know the intention of this divine mind, it is up to people to learn from them. Hegel's Concept of ‘List der Vernunft’, ‘the cunning of reason’, also touches on a similar point. Specifically, this concept, which the philosopher included in the philosophy of history, correspond to the Stoic divine mind, ‘providentia’. Hegel's universal history works independently of individual interests and passions. This process follow a journey that will enable the mind/spirit to return to itself by liberating. Moreover, the thinker says that the history of the world consists of the divine mind's self-disclosure. This self-disclosure will go back to divine unity through historical phases. Individual interests and passions of historical characters for victory caused conflict on the stage of history. However, universal history and divine minds keep themselves protected and unimpaired in the background. Thus the particular and the individual are sacrificed for the universal and the general. At this point, the concept of divine providence that Hegel uses, that is, ‘die Vorsehung’, manages all events in history teleologically. The concepts of ‘providentia’ in the Stoic philosophy and ‘the cunning of reason’ of Hegel are similar in terms of the plan to move the world to a better, more beautiful, and freer in the context of divine providence. In this article, I tried to investigate Hegel's concept of ‘the cunning of reason’ in the light of the Stoic concept of ‘providentia’. In this quest, which I limited with the philosophy of history, I wanted to point out how wars, disasters and destructions that have been the subject of history can be legitimized according to Hegel's thought. As a criticism, I touched upon Hegel's disregard for the emancipation efforts of the plantation slaves in Saint Domingue during his lifetime. In the journey of universal history and the divine mind, this enterprise of emancipation could offer a justification for Hegel's philosophy of history. At the same time, with this criticism, I tried to establish a connection with Hegel's concept of divine providence and the question of how to pay the compensation of events that brought pain and destruction in history.

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