Quora answer: Is there such a thing as a historical dialectic?

What is meant by this “catch phrase” is the historical working out of the dialectics of consciousness, which in Hegel appears as Absolute Reason. Absolute Reason is the application of the principle of sufficient reason to everything that happens in history. Everything happens for a reason, i.e. all events that occur have some sort of causal sources if you look hard enough for them. Human events that occur in history take place within the context of the understanding of history that human beings have and their place in that context. For Kant human beings project the categories and space & time. For Hegel almost all aspects of thought are contained in the “categories” and history  and the development of consciousness, reason, and absolute spirit all are driven forward by dialectical self-overcoming called Aufhebung in which positions are generated and then overcome by a higher synthesis that then has an anti-thesis, produces a variety of responses and a pattern of relations between views at the next level which then again needs to be overcome by a new synthesis. So the dialectic of absolute reason works itself out in history, because history itself is a human construct, and we are projecting it and ourselves into it as we create our futures, and recreate ourselves anew continually.