SECTION A
Essay
125 marks
The real is rational and the rational is real.
WRITE IN
90 min
1,000–1,200 words
Reading the topic
The line is from G.W.F. Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1820). It suggests that what exists has a rational basis, and that what is rational will eventually become reality. The examiner expects an essay that examines whether existing institutions are justified, and how reason drives historical change.
ThesisHegel's claim is best read not as blessing whatever exists, but as a promise that reason, through struggle, turns unjust realities into rational ones over time.
Dimensions to cover
- 1Philosophy: for Hegel, history is the unfolding of reason, where contradictions drive change towards freedom
- 2Conservative reading: it can be used to justify existing power, caste or colonial hierarchies as natural and necessary
- 3Progressive reading: ideas such as equality and rights, once rational in theory, became real through law and movements
- 4Law: courts often strike down long-standing laws because what exists fails the test of reason and constitutional morality
- 5History: totalitarian horrors show that much of what is real is deeply irrational, testing Hegel's optimism
- 6Science: the rational structure of mathematics matches physical reality, a narrower sense in which the topic holds
Counter-view
- The strongest objection is that genocide, slavery and untouchability were real but certainly not rational. The essay should answer that such realities were defeated precisely because they could not withstand reason, so the rational eventually reshapes the real
Open and close
- Open: Open with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989: a wall that had seemed permanent and justified to its builders collapsed in a night, as if reality had caught up with reason
- Close: Conclude that the real becomes rational only when people use reason to question it, so the topic is a call to critical citizenship rather than complacency
Where marks usually go
- Writing a vague essay on rational thinking without engaging Hegel's dialectical meaning
- Accepting the conservative reading uncritically, implying that every existing injustice is rational
- Overloading the essay with philosophical jargon at the cost of concrete examples
Examples that fit
- CaseArticle 17 of the Constitution abolished untouchability, showing an age-old social reality overturned because it failed the test of reason and dignity.Constitution of India, Article 17
- CaseIn Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018), the Supreme Court read down Section 377 IPC, holding that a colonial-era law could not survive constitutional reasoning.Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India (2018)
- ThinkerHannah Arendt's account of Adolf Eichmann describes the 'banality of evil', where ordinary bureaucratic rationality served irrational mass murder.Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (1963)
- ThinkerFrancis Fukuyama, drawing on Hegel, argued after the Cold War that liberal democracy might be the end point of humanity's ideological evolution, a claim later events have tested.The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama (1992)