The ideas of Hegel (German idealist philosopher, 1770-1831) are not in themselves integrative, but they include antecedents to a number a ideas central within CST. Hegelian thought is one of the philosophical traditions people are most like to bring up in trying to clarify their understanding of CST.
Hegel’s writing is notoriously convoluted and obscure, so much so that he inspires as much controversy about the meaning of his work as he does about the correctness of his ideas. I tease out three themes where comparisons are pertinent.
The first pertains to Hegel’s famous triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. (In fact Hegel never used these terms and they are often applied simplistically. But they are adequate for this discussion.) Hegel saw the basic mechanisms of truth and growth to be dialectical—a sequence in which an initial proposition proves inadequate, is replaced by its opposite, and then is followed by a third statement preserving what is best in each. This sequence is in keeping with the core dynamic of formative process in CST and shares the important implication that apparent opposites may in fact be mutually dependent.
Next, in contrast to most thinking of his time, Hegel’s ideas about culture were systemic. Culture was not just an collection of individuals, but was a kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or Geist. In the best of his thinking, individual and the cultural whole existed in co-causal dialectical relationship. When he falls off one side of the road it is toward making an idealized, almost mystical collective the defining truth.
Finally, Hegel’s view of philosophy is evolutionary in a sense that the ideas of most philosophers before him were not. He describes the thinking of earlier philosophers not simply as an interesting store of fallacies, but as representing necessary stages in a developing thought process. He saw history to be about human development, about coming to greater self-education and self-awareness.
There are two absolute and critical differences between Hegel’s thinking and that of CST. The first is that fact that Hegel’s ideas precede any significant bridging between the personal and cultural psyches. Both God and the state remain idealized absolutes in Hegelian philosophy. The situation is analogous to comparing the ideas of CST with the Hegel-like “creative dialectic” of yin and yang in Taoist thought. Rich similarities exist with each at the personal level. But CST would argue that in both Hegelian and Taoist thought, the ultimate creative polarities remain to be addressed.
The second critical difference pertains to how Hegel’s work represented a philosophically “idealist” worldview. In contrast with CST he saw development as having an idealized endpoint. Philosophically, this took the form of a realization of Absolute Spirit —by which he meant a completion of the human enterprise of self-knowledge in the collective human experience of an infinite God. Governmentally, this took the form of a constitutional monarchy (somewhat more advanced than the Prussian absolute monarchy in which he lived, but not much—he idealized 19th century Prussian culture).) In the polarity of mind and matter, Hegel tends to lean toward mind when it comes to questions of final causation.
It is this foundation in philosophical idealism that gets Hegel’s work rightly criticized for being “historicism.” Philosophical idealism lacks the integrative vantage of culturally mature perspective. Inherently it views the future in terms of some second coming-like culmination. In Hegel’s case this was the culminating image of an idealized Prussian state.
A final difference is obvious and not a philosophical difference. CST presents a more detailed depiction of the dialectical/creative process (Patterning in Space and Time).