Hegel on the Journey of Spirit to Self-Understanding
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Tuesday 27 August 2024 is the 254th anniversary of the birth of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770–14 November 1831), who was born in Stuttgart on this date in 1770.
It’s possible that Hegel has been the most influential philosopher of history in the western tradition. Hegel’s philosophy of history comes after the conjuncture of German philosophies of history I mentioned in my episode on Herder, and which included Herder, Kant, Lessing, and Schiller, but there is a sense in which Hegel is the culmination of these philosophies of history. Hegel transcended Enlightenment philosophies of history, building on them and going beyond them, and in so going created something new.
Because of his influence, one could reasonably hold that everything that can be said about Hegel has been said about Hegel, so that the commentary on Hegel fulfills the principle the plenitude. Hegel’s influence upon Marx alone has altered the course of history that Hegel sought to understand. Schiller has been quoted in regard to Kant’s influence, “How many beggars one rich man can feed! When kings start building, carters find their work.” The same could be said of Hegel. Many philosophers have made a career from commenting on Hegel, as, for example, Alexandre Kojève, whose reputation rests on his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Jean Hyppolite, in his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and in his Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, helped to make Hegel central to twentieth century French philosophy. The names of those who have made a career as the commentators and expositors of Hegel could be continued almost indefinitely.
Today Hegel primarily features as the bête noir and stalking horse of philosophers of all stripes who want to distance themselves from him, so that their philosophical project is not mistaken for Hegel’s philosophical project. But what was Hegel’s philosophical project? The unity of philosophers attacking Hegel disappears when it comes to identifying exactly what Hegel was up to and why they are attacking him. Was Hegel an apologist for the Prussian state? Bertrand Russell seemed to think so. He wrote:
“…both Fichte and Hegel were philosophic mouthpieces of Prussia, and did much to prepare the way for the later identification of German patriotism with admiration for Prussia.”
Bertrand Russell also said that, in Hegel, freedom was the freedom to obey the police:
“Hegel, who owed much to Rousseau, adopted his misuse of the word ‘freedom,’ and defined it as the right to obey the police, or something not very different.”
If this were true, Hegel would be truly pathetic and beneath our notice. That it isn’t true says more about Bertrand Russell than it does about Hegel. We’ve met with this attitude before. In my episode on Isaiah Berlin I quoted Berlin saying of the conceptions of freedom held respectively by Kant and Fichte:
“These are the two notions of liberty which were spread over Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century; to ask which of them is true, and which of them is false, is a shallow and unanswerable question. They represent two views of life of an irreconcilable kind, the liberal and authoritarian, open and closed, and the fact that the word ‘freedom’ has been a genuinely central symbol in both is at once remarkable and sinister.”
So Russell and Berlin were on the same page in using a straw man, in this case, their willful misunderstanding of what has been meant by freedom, to attack the conception of freedom in German idealism after Kant. Some of Russell’s worst pages are what he wrote on the German idealist philosophers, but as bad as Russell’s treatment of Hegel is, his chapter on Nietzsche is much worse.
Was Hegel a proto-totalitarian? That seems to be the message of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper, like Russell and Berlin, was so eager to prove himself an opponent of totalitarianism, that he compromised his scholarship and in so doing weakened the case that he wanted to bring against Hegel. Popper doesn’t even qualify his characterization of Hegel as proto-totalitarian, but actually called him the Father of Totalitarianism. While Popper’s first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies focuses on Plato, he didn’t let Aristotle off the hook either. The second volume begins with a sketch of Aristotle’s role as an enemy of the open society, and of Plato and Aristotle’s influence on Hegel, Popper wrote:
“The main purpose of what has been said about both of them is to show the role they have played in the rise of historicism and in the fight against the open society, and to show their influence on problems of our own time — on the rise of the oracular philosophy of Hegel, the father of modern historicism and totalitarianism.”
That’s pretty strong stuff. Popper knows how to dish it out, and Popper’s book has shaped the way that many Anglo-American philosophers have seen Hegel, but of this book Walter Kaufmann wrote:
“…it contains more misconceptions about Hegel than have previously been gathered in so small a space. Secondly, if one agrees with Popper that ‘intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish,’ one should protest against his method; for although his hatred of totalitarianism is the inspiration and central motif of his work, his method is unfortunately similar to that of totalitarian ‘scholars’ — and it appears to be spreading.”
Another class of criticisms of a Hegel was the charge that he simply was out of touch. Was Hegel a hopeless metaphysician who was so lost in his abstractions that he couldn’t possibly say anything relevant about the actual world? If this metaphysical charge is made, it conflicts with the charges of him being an apologist for Prussianism or proto-totalitarianism, since it wouldn’t make much sense to say that Hegel both had his head lost in the clouds and that he was concerned to justify the ways of the state to man.
All of these things are connected to philosophy of history, but aren’t necessarily the same as Hegel’s philosophy of history. We can make a distinction between Hegel’s philosophical project in toto, and Hegel’s philosophical project in his philosophy of history. Hegel’s overall philosophical project is intimidatingly encyclopedic. Hegel was above all a systematic thinker, and even when he is expressing himself in colorful metaphors that express his personality, it was all in service to the overall architectonic of his philosophical system. I won’t attempt to talk about Hegel’s philosophical system, but Hegel’s philosophy of history on its own is probably biting off more than I can effectively chew. Be that as it may, Hegel’s philosophy of history is easier to understand than his logic or the architectonic of his encyclopedic system.
If we’re going to criticize Hegel, we’d do better than Popper or Russell or countless others if we were to criticize Hegel for his similarity to Carlyle’s great man theory of history, since Hegel’s interest in Napoleon as a world-historical figure, as we shall see, is an interest in Napoleon as a great man of history. But in Hegel and Carlyle the emphasis is different. For Carlyle, the emphasis falls on the individuality of the man. For Hegel, the emphasis falls upon the universality of the role assumed by the man. The emphasis is different because the causality is different, and the causality is different because both their metaphysics and their methodology differ. Carlyle’s methodology is an idiographic methodology that culminates in the most particular of all particulars, an individual man. Wilhelm Windelband, who first formulated the concept of the idiographic, said that Carlyle:
“…worked himself free from the philosophy of enlightenment by the assistance of the German idealism, and laboured unweariedly for the recognition of the archetypal and creative personalities of history — for the comprehension and veneration of ‘heroes’.” (A History of Philosophy: with especial Reference to the Formation and Development of its Problems and Conceptions, p. 654)
I think there is a subtle but important difference between the archetypal and the idiographic, with the archetypal being closer to the nomothetic than the idiographic, but a more thorough examination of the categories of the idiographic and the nomothetic in relation to the archetypal will have to wait for another opportunity. Hegel’s methodology is nomothetic, and it culminates in the most universal of all universals, the universal man, i.e., the man who has assumed a universal role and so can no longer claim himself as a mere individual, but who now belongs to history and to posterity. For Carlyle, it was real flesh and blood men who were making history, and, as great men, they greatly shaped history. For Hegel, spirit works through men, and, if a man is great, and so greatly shapes history, it was because he was the right man in the right place who became an expression of the spirit of the age. Sidney Hook expresses this nicely in his book The Hero in History:
“Men gratify their errant wishes, carry out their urgent duties, pit their intelligence and courage against the obstacles of nature and society — but all the time they are building something different from what they intend. In the dim fight of his understanding, each one weaves a strand in the web of destiny which is the Meaning or Reason of history. The great man is the one who is aware that the Reason of things speaks through his words and deeds. He has historical and divine justification in overriding other individuals, even entire peoples, who remain on the level of everyday understanding.”
The hero for Hegel isn’t the point of the story, the hero is merely the contemporaneous expression of where we are at in history. Philosophy makes it possible for us to express where we are at in history in relationship to the development of spirit. Hegel himself wrote in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, “…philosophy is its age comprehended in thought.” So if Hegel’s philosophy is Hegel’s age comprehended in thought, what was Hegel’s age? Since Hegel was born late in the eighteenth century and came to maturity in the early nineteenth century, he lived in an eventful age, and there are many historical developments that we might understand as that which is comprehended in Hegel’s thought.
He was a young child when James Watt invented the steam engine, when America declared its independence from Britain, and when Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther, kicking off the Sturm und Drang movement in literature. He was a little older child when Kant was publishing his three critiques, when Mozart wrote Don Giovanni and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and when Lessing wrote his The Education of Mankind. If Hegel was aware of any of this as it happened, it would only have been the awareness of a child. Perhaps as importantly, at the time, the world moved much more slowly and news of events often followed years after the fact. But Hegel was a young man in his prime when the French Revolution popped off in 1789.
I’ve commented in other episodes that the French Revolution had a far greater impact on European intellectuals, and therefore on European philosophy, than the American Revolution. Walter Kaufmann credited this to proximity, writing that, “…America was very far away, but France was not far away at all.” It wasn’t only intellectuals who responded to the French Revolutions. Poets also felt the spirit of the age. William Wordsworth wrote in his poem The Prelude:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Hegel was young when the French Revolution began. He was, in fact, 19 years old — old enough to have some idea of what was going on, but not yet old enough to know how youthful enthusiasms are almost inevitably disappointed. Hegel knew some of the bliss that Wordsworth had recorded. In fact, Hegel and Wordsworth may have known a quite similar bliss, as Wordsworth was born in the same year at Hegel, 1770, and was also 19 when the French Revolution began. Wordsworth started writing the Prelude in 1798, when the memories were probably still fresh enough to be recalled, but it wasn’t published until 1850, shortly after Wordsworth’s death the same year.
Wordsworth in The Prelude, and Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, were remembering their youthful bliss at being contemporary witnesses of the French Revolution, through the lens of what came later — Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and the Napoleonic Wars. Hegel famously saw Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, and latter wrote in a letter to a friend,
“I saw the Emperor — this world-soul — riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . . . this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.”
The figure of Napoleon that Hegel glimpsed on reconnaissance near Jena, a man impossible not to admire, stuck with Hegel, and Napoleon reappeared, after his exile to St. Helena and after his death, in an abstract and purified form in Hegel’s philosophy. This gives us a simple and straight-forward way to understand Hegel’s philosophical project in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and this has been expressed concisely by David P. Jordan:
“Hegel’s philosophy of history, the most influential and profound of the age, was inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon.”
I would go further than this, and say that Hegel’s philosophy of history was not only inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon, but that it mirrors Napoleon in the abstract. Jordon continued:
“He became the first contemporary of the extraordinary events of the age to put them into a vast philosophical context whose impact, both in Hegel’s version and in its Marxist elaboration, is still alive.”
I previously quoted some of this passage in my episode on Napoleon, in particular, what follows in which Jordon described how Hegel depicted Napoleon:
“His is also the most searching appraisal ever made of Napoleon’s historical significance and his complex relationship to the French Revolution. Hegel’s Napoleon, stripped of anecdote, physical details, and personal description is the embodiment of the French Revolution, its unwitting agent, and by inference its savior.” (David P. Jordan, Napoleon and the Revolution, 2012, pp. 112–113)
If we understand that Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History is really a book about the French Revolution and Napoleon, as Jordan argued, this not only greatly clarifies what Hegel was getting at, it also shows us how wide of the mark most of Hegel’s critics have been. So far from being a celebration of the Prussian state, Hegel’s observation that it was impossible not to admire Napoleon suggests that his work was a celebration of Napoleon’s empire. Certainly it’s not a political celebration of Napoleon, but it is something of a philosophical celebration of a decisive moment in this history of spirit as it develops in human history. Hegel’s portrait of Napoleon is, as David Jordon wrote, Napoleon, stripped of anecdote, physical details, and personal description, and as such Napoleon is the embodiment of the French Revolution.
I said I wouldn’t discuss Hegel’s larger philosophical system, but, in this context, Hegel’s first book, Phenomenology of Spirit or Phenomenology of Mind, as you prefer to translate “Geist” as “spirit” or “mind,” is relevant. If Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History give us an abstract presentation of Napoleon in his role of the contemporaneous agent of the world-spirit, the Phenomenology of Spirit ups the ante and takes this to a higher level of abstraction. The Phenomenology of Spirit is an entirely abstract history of the development of spirit. We can get a sense of this, of the possibility of an abstract history, from another example of the genus.
Hegel wasn’t the only one to provide a supremely abstract history. Heidegger, on some interpretations, did something similar. William Barrett in his The Illusion of Technique talks about how he taught Heidegger to college students, and he did so by presenting Being and Time as though it was a novel and Dasein were the protagonist:
“Being and Time had a dramatic story and a hero, Dasein, who went through some very powerful and moving experiences… Dasein’s story is this: He is thrown into the world, and loses himself in its various external trivia; but through the encounter with death, in the light of his own extreme possibility that death discloses to him, he may rise to the level of an authentic existence. He may even become aware of the unique and authentic sense in which his existence is historical, and so play a free and authentic part in the historical mission of his time.”
Barrett tells us that his break with Heidegger came when he woke up one morning and said to himself, “Dasein has no soul.” We, being the beneficiaries of 21st century meme culture, can state Barrett’s realization like this: Barrett realized that Dasein is an NPC. If Dasein has any internal monologue, it’s the same as the internal monologue of every other NPC. All of the petty existential crises of Dasein’s miserable life are supposed by Dasein to be absolutely unique and individual. Of course, every NPC believes this, because this belief is built into their operating system no less than the existential crises themselves. The existential crises wouldn’t be crises at all if Dasein had realized that this is an old story that has played out countless times, that is to say, if Dasein had experienced the shock of recognition of seeing itself in the world, and the world in itself.
In Hegelian terms, Dasein is incapable of recognizing itself as spirit, in consequence, Dasein cannot comprehend itself as part of the larger historical process. Wisdom is to recognize ourselves as expressions of history, and to recognize history expressed within ourselves. This is not given to us as a birthright, but is won through effort and experience. Let me give an example of how our comprehension of experience enables us to see ourselves in history and to see history in ourselves. Earlier I was critical of how Bertrand Russell characterized Hegel, but Russell found an interesting passage in Hegel that he described in his book Wisdom of the West:
“The contrast is that between somebody whose notion of the Absolute is unsupported by a passage through the dialectic, and someone else who has gone through it. This is likened to the significance that a prayer has to a child and to an old man. Both recite the same words, but for the child they mean very little more than certain noises, whereas to the old man they evoke the experiences of a lifetime.”
It took me a while to find the source of this, but I eventually found it in Hegel’s lesser Logic, “The Doctrine of the Notion,” paragraph 237:
“The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same religious propositions as the child, but for whom they are pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion which these propositions include, he cannot but imagine them to be something unconnected with, and lying outside of, the whole of life and the whole of the world.”
What Hegel here says about prayer is equally applicable to a reading a poem or singing a song that one read or sang in the innocence of youth, and reading or singing it again with the sad wisdom of age, if one has been so fortunate as to gain any wisdom from one’s experiences. Whether you laugh, or you cry, or both, the shock of recognition brings you to the realization that there is something more going on than what’s inside your head alone. For Hegel, mature wisdom is understanding how the experiences of a lifetime are integral with the development of the entire course of world history. Our lives are both a reflection of our time and a reflection of a larger epic of world history, which, if only we will see it, we will understand is our life. We could say that history is a fractal structure that is self-similar across scales of magnitude. In more traditional language, we could say that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, and vice versa. But to see this, we have to step back and see it all whole.
This immediately suggests the question of how we do this, how we take a step back and see things whole. The better question might be who does this, who takes a step back and sees history whole, or even who is capable of stepping back and seeing history whole. There’s a line from Hegel relevant to this that I quote with some regularity. In one of its translations it goes like this: “The owl of Minerva takes flight only with the setting of the sun.” The owl, a symbol of wisdom, and Minerva, or Athena to the Greeks, also a symbol of wisdom, begins its own journey when the journey of the day is over. Wisdom is possible only as the day is ending. Wisdom, then, belongs to that which comes after the sunlit hours of youth; it is that which follows, that which is won from age and experience. It is the clean up crew in comparison to the event itself or even the staging of the event. But the clean up crew are the only ones who know what really went down.
Earlier I quoted Wordsworth on his youthful reflection on the French Revolution:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Perhaps it was the very heaven to be young as the French Revolution was happening. And imagine being young and in the thick of things in Paris, perhaps being present at the Oath of the Tennis Court, and then, less than a month later, joining in at the storming of the Bastille. But a few short years later, when one is marginally older but still young yet, the Reign of Terror begins. Do you participate in the Reign of Terror as enthusiastically as you participated in the storming of the Bastille? Maybe being in the thick of things isn’t that great after all. Maybe one becomes possessed by the mob and loses oneself. This is what Dasein does; this is what the NPC does. So maybe being young is very heaven, but the bliss of simply being alive isn’t too bad either.
What about those who were old when the French Revolution happened? If you have the good fortune to live long enough to hesitate both in joining the crowd to storm the Bastille, and to hesitate joining the crowds watching the guillotine at work, maybe age is the better part of discretion. Everyone experiences what it is like to be young, but only the survivors of history learn what it is like to be old. And to be old and to witness the spectacle of history being made is a remarkable thing. Maybe it isn’t the very heaven, but it offers the possibility of viewing these events in hindsight.
Every age and its dramatic events are witnessed alike by the young, the middle aged, and the old. To witness a great event like the French Revolution not from the Wordsworthian or Hegelian standpoint as a young man, but from the standpoint of age is to be given a glimpse of the future that is yet to come, yet to be. With a glimpse of the future, one vicariously extends one’s life upon Earth. Despite the tragic shortness of human life, we can transcend our time-bound lives by learning history, and thus acquiring the past, and discerning within the present the glimpses of what is to come, thus acquiring the future. The more you extend yourself in history in this way, the closer you approximate what Hegel called spirit.
R. G. Collingwood in his philosophy of history argued that history is the reenactment of the thoughts of past historical actors. In this reenactment, we become these historical actors and we relive their moment in history. Hegel is proposing a kind of reenactment on a grand scale. In understanding history we reenact the development of spirit through time.
