"To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is Reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in Thought. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes." -Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 13.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was the paradigm text of the epistemological desire characterizing early modern philosophy. Kant demonstrated that knowledge (synthetic a priori knowledge in particular) is possible only if there exists a transcendental world that our Understanding must mediate for Thought. This transcendental reality and its objects must remain invisible to the Understanding. Kant writes, “Everything which can be given to our senses (external and internal) is looked onto by us as it appears to us, not as it is in itself” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics §285).
Hegel, embroiled in a philosophical world bordering on worship of a now-varying Kantian legacy, was able to escape the epistemological problematic that had enraptured and captured the philosophers of his day. Hegel historicized concepts such as truth and knowledge which were, in Kantianism, regulated by an objective theory of knowledge: i.e., an epistemology. In Hegel, knowledge is possible (is actual) because thought in its very nature dialectically moves towards realization of the Idea. Hegel, in demonstrating the conditions for knowledge, was not attempting a sort of Transcendental Deduction of Reason as Kant had done. Hegel’s historicist concept of Truth opened the door for a philosophical inquiry into the legitimacy of the very methods and contents of epistemology, of the legitimacy, that is, of the epistemological mode of inquiry. Hegel questioned the legitimacy of epistemology and sought to unsettle it, to destablizie it. As Richard Rorty notes (see cabin_fever's writeup above), Hegel sidesteps the epistemological problematic, instead favoring a rhetorical approach that emphasizes an organic development of Thought, a recapiluating History, a system that moves, unfolds.
Hegel had an idea that History itself was a rational process. If History is rational, thought Hegel, so is each successive phase of history. All of History finds rational vindication in as much as each epoch culminates in the Truth of the present that it is. For Hegel the present, the Truth, was an Enlightened European conception of the Freedom of Geist (Mind or Spirit). World History, and each of its succesive phases, is the progressive development of the Truth of Geist. Hegel wrote, “The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (The Philosophy of History, 19). In the shared convictions of each time and land there resides some aspect of truth in as much as these beliefs give way to the progressive development of the Truth of Geist, an actual being that recapitulates the Truth of the Idea.
According to Kantian epistemology, Hegel appears to present a contradiction in as much as he conceives of Truth as fluid, always subject to the flux of dialectical motion; Hegel, Kant would say, relativizes Truth. For Hegel, on the other hand, the True is what is present, what is here and now -— but the past isn't, for that reason, less true, or untrue. This is the epistemological mistake: to assume that the past is truth-less, devoid of truth: as if there could be a stage in history (a state of the Idea) that did not reflect the truth of the Idea unfolding. According to Hegel it is in the now, the present, where Geist finds itself and therefore finds the Truth. For Kant, truth had to be something time-less. The Hegelian conception of truth existing in a time is, therefore, lost on Kant and the whole epistemological tradition. Hegel conceives of Truth as developing through History rather than residing in some one eternally fixed and specific aspect of it. In a sense, it is really the epistemologists who relativize truth because they are the ones who are trying to fix it to something at all -— and it is only in being fixed to something that truth could possibly be relative, because it is this truth-maker that may swing back and forth according to philosophcial prejudice.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes: “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development” (§20). Truth is the movement of the dialectic. That is, truth is what the movement itself is. Without movement, without Becoming, there is no Thought at all. Only the movement of Thought can reveal.
Hegel speculated, as his follower Karl Marx would later do, that the Truth would not be finalized in his own age, the Absolute expression of Freedom would not be realized in nineteenth-century Europe. He wrote in an uncharacteristic prophecy which has come to fruition: “America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself” (The Philosophy of History, 87).