Hyppolite’s Reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 08 January 2025 is the 118th anniversary of the birth of Jean Hyppolite (08 January 1907–26 October 1968), who was born in Jonzac, Poitou-Charentes, on this date in 1907.
Hyppolite was a French Hegelian scholar who wrote an introduction to Hegel’s philosophy of history. An obvious comparison to Hyppolite is Alexandre Kojève, whom I’ve mentioned in several episodes, whom Hyppolite mentions many times, and who, like Hyppolite, both adapted Hegel to the style of mid-twentieth century French philosophy and used Hegel as a platform to express his views. Using commentary on another philosopher as a vehicle for one’s own views has a long history in Western thought. During late antiquity, this went so far as authors writing books that they thought should have been written, but which were not in fact written by the famous author, thus writing these “missing” books and attributing them to the famous author, often by then long dead.
During the Middle Ages, this took the tradition of a commentary tradition, where later philosophers would write detailed commentaries on earlier philosophers. These commentaries were ostensibly expository, but they often were expressly written for the author to express his views in a way that was relatively safe since he would be commenting on a canonical text like the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In the early modern period this way of doing philosophy went out of style, but it returned in the twentieth century with the professionalization of philosophy as an academic discipline almost exclusively practiced by professors in universities. Philosophers like Kojève and Hyppolite made a career of expositions of Hegel.
The book for which Kojeve is remembered is his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, based on a lecture course he presented many times. The book for which Hyppolite is remembered is his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In the opening section titled “Spirit is History” of part I, chapter 2, Hyppolite wrote:
“Before studying the structure of the Phenomenology, it is impossible to avoid asking whether the Phenomenology is a history of humanity, or whether, at least, it claims to be a philosophy of that history.”
Here Hyppolite is talking about Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, not Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, but he’s explicitly asking if the Phenomenology of Spirit is a history or a philosophy of history. This is interesting, because Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is not presented as a history or a philosophy of history, so we might wonder why it’s being construed in this light. My guess is that Hyppolite was asking whether the Phenomenology of Spirit can be taken as a kind of abstract history of humanity. In my episode on Hegel I discussed the idea of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an abstract history of humanity, and in that episode I compared it to the twentieth century case of taking Heidigger’s account of Dasein in Being and Time as an abstract history or perhaps an abstract biography (this was suggested by William Barrett). A work that does not present itself as being historical may be historical in this abstract way, representing a kind of ideal history, an historical archetype, which we may find reiterated in actual history.
Although Hyppolite’s primarily concern is Hegel, his remarks on history in Genesis and Structure are introduced as a gloss on Schelling, one of Hegel’s rivals, and show how Schelling’s conception of history differed from Hegel, but also how he paved the way for Hegel:
“Schelling posed the question of a ‘transcendental possibility of history,’ a question that would lead him to a philosophy of history which would be for practical philosophy what nature is for theoretical philosophy.”
Note that “a transcendental possibility of history” is Kantian language. It’s an interesting twist on Kant that Kant himself didn’t formulate, though I could say that this development is implicit in Kant. Kant formulated a transcendental logic, the purpose of which is not to make logical derivations, but to understand the necessary preconditions for logic. More generally, Kant formulated what we now call transcendental arguments, that presume to demonstrate the conditions of the possibility of anything. Presumably the same could be done for history: if we demonstrated the transcendental possibility of history, we would be showing the conditions of the possibility of history. And while Schelling here seems to pose the right question, ultimately he can’t deliver. Hyppolite writes: “…though Schelling indicates the possibility of a philosophy of history, he fails to fulfill this possibility.”
Throughout this passage Hyppolite gives us a complex and sophisticated explanation of some home truths about history. One of these he delivers plainly enough: “History thus bears on the species and not on the individual.” I’ve several times invoked Pirenne to represent this view, but it’s a common enough view in history, but Hyppolite follows this plain statement with this:
“…the only history is a history of humanity. Now this history of humanity is possible only on the condition that in it necessity is reconciled with liberty, the objective with the subjective, and the unconscious with the conscious. In other words, ‘freedom must be guaranteed by an order that is as manifest and unchanging as that of nature.’ History must have a meaning. Freedom must necessarily be realized in it, and the individually arbitrary must play only an episodic and fragmentary role.”
This, then, combines the idea of history not being about individuals with the idea that history is always history of human actions. But in this brief passage Hyppolite goes well beyond what we need to say, and certainly well beyond what I would want to say in this content. He piles presupposition on top of presupposition, telling us that history must reconcile necessity with liberty, it must be meaningful, it must realize freedom, and so on. One could maintain that history is always and only the history of human actions without making these additional claims, which in and of themselves would each require considerable exposition and defense. But it’s the core home truth of history only being about human action that particularly interests me.
Later in the same section Hyppolite quotes Hegel as saying: “…organic nature has no history…” And then Hyppolite elaborates:
“The spirit is history for Hegel — this is a fundamental thesis identical to the thesis that the absolute is subject… For in organic nature universality is only an interior without actual development in the world. There are indeed living individuals, but life comes to express itself in them only as an abstract universal, only as the negation of all particular determinations. In other words, the meaning of organic life is death, the annihilation of everything that claims a separate subsistence.”
Again, this strikes me as being over-the-top, and as claiming much more than needs to be claimed, but this is often how the French do philosophy in spite of their legendary Gallic clarity. It’s also curiously at odds with Collingwood, who maintained a distinction between the inside and the outside of history. Collingwood maintained the thesis that history is only human action, as Hyppolite attributes to Hegel, but he does so making precisely the opposite claim about interiority and exteriority. Collingwood said that the events of natural history, which isn’t history in the strict sense, have only an outside, whereas human history has an inside, and that inside is the subjectivity of historical actors, their thoughts and feelings that we can, Collingwood claimed, re-live, and in re-living we are capable of understanding history from the inside. The passage I quoted from Hyppolite he maintains that organic nature is only interior, with not expression in history. I don’t know how to interpret this.
I think we can see clearly enough the metaphysical lesson that’s being conveyed here, which is that history bears on the species and not the individual, and this is because the individual dies but the species lives on. Fair enough. But while I can understand Collingwood’s spatial metaphor applied to history, Hyppolite’s reversed spatial metaphor leaves me grasping at straws. In the quoted passage Hyppolite invokes abstract universals, and perhaps this is intended to contrast with Hegelian concrete universals, and so the claim here is that only humanity eventually produces concrete universals, and nature without humanity can produce only abstract universals. I’ve always thought that the idea of the concrete universal is one of the weakest Hegelian ideas. I don’t find it convincing, and I don’t even find it interesting, but I’m sure there are any number of Hegelians who are enthusiasts of the concrete universal, whatever that may be. Enough of that for now.
Returning to the Kantianism of Schelling, Kant also held that history bears on the species and not on the individual — a view that we’ve seen Hyppolite attributed to Hegel and which I have attributed to Pirenne. The second proposition of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective” states:
“In the human being (as the only rational creature on earth), those natural predispositions aimed at the use of its reason are to be developed in full only in the species, but not in the individual.”
Kant’s essay fills in the additional steps required to connect this observation to a larger historical context. Kant unfortunately didn’t write a volume on the philosophy of history, though he left a trail of ideas from which an entire philosophy of history could be constructed. We get a hint of Hyppolite’s view of Hegel’s view of Kant in his book on Hegel’s philosophy of history:
“Today we consider the divinities and the pagan mysteries as unworthy of any belief. Their absurdity seems obvious, and yet the best men of antiquity adhered to what seems to us a fabric of silliness. But Hegel justly remarks that we do not find in the ancients requirements ‘which are those of our present-day practical reason.” The idea of an evolution of practical reason that would be so strange to a Kant, the idea of its dependence upon history, is therefore manifested clearly here.” (p. 16)
It is the idea of development that is missing in Kant and that is central to Hegel. One might observe that Kant’s Enlightenment contemporary Adam Smith wrote about the wealth of nations without explicitly thematizing the development of wealth. What the romantics supplied and what the Enlightenment rationalists were missing was time, development, history, and evolution, and the idea of evolution would not fully flower until after Darwin in the 19th century. We find Hyppolite’s exposition of this development at the very end of this book:
“In each moment of history, the spirit must penetrate the richness of its substance, where it is entirely present under a certain aspect, just as the Leibnizian monad reflected the absolute from its point of view. Every figure of world spirit is born from the preceding one and bears it within itself; it is the negation of that figure, but a creative negation which possesses this virtue because it is always the whole that negates itself as having clothed itself in a certain determinate form, having existed there in a particular way.”
And,
“The sequence of these spirits which succeed each other in time is history. Seen from the viewpoint of their conceptual organization it is the science of phenomenal knowledge… The unity of these two aspects, which Hegel distinguishes from ‘phenomenology’ properly speaking, yields a philosophy of history, conceived history, and this history, far from being a digression, something separate from absolute spirit, an itinerary in God which would not concern God himself…”
Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit obviously focuses on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Hyppolite’s Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History doesn’t focus on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of history. Hyppolite rather takes up a couple of early works by Hegel, posthumously published in 1907, and the important of which were initially brought to philosophical attention by Wilhelm Dilthey. These writings are The Positivity of the Christian Religion and The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, which is also called The Spirit of Christianity and Its Destiny. The English translator, T. M. Knox, used “fate” while the translator of Hyppolite’s French text used “destiny,” and I’m mentioning this because “destiny” a key term in Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel.
Hyppolite emphasizes two ideas in particular in Hegel, and these are the ideas of positivity and destiny, each of which figure in the titles of these youthful theological works. Hyppolite’s book on Hegel’s philosophy of history isn’t long and it’s a reasonably easy read, so it’s worth it to read it for yourself. Even though it’s a commentary on Hegel, it’s very much Hyppolite’s book, and while the English translation of the prose is clear — one reviewer called it a model of Gallic clarity — it doesn’t have the conceptual clarity that I would like to see in a commentary, and that is because it’s really about giving Hyppolite’s version of Hegel, rather than being a simple exposition of Hegel. If I were to write a book on Hegel and say that the ideas of positivity and destiny were among the most important ideas in his philosophy of history, I would make a real attempt to articulate these explicitly. I’ve read Hyppolite’s exposition of positivity in Hegel several times now, and I can’t extract a single quote that explicitly states the conception of positivity Hyppolite attributes to Hegel. The exposition is clear enough, but it’s not explicit and it’s not systematic.
At times Hyppolite writes in a way that suggests positivity is a kind of formalization, in which something is made explicit, and sometimes it’s more like a stipulation, that is to say, the establishment of a convention, but positivity also takes the form of historical embodiment:
“A positive religion is therefore a historical religion. It adds to what human reason, reduced to itself alone, can give, beliefs that have appeared at a given period in time, in certain places in space, and beliefs that could not be fully assimilated by reason, that comes from other sources. We can therefore say with Hegel of positive relations that they are ‘either supernatural or antinatural’.” (p. 21)
Perhaps the positivity Hyppolite attributes to Hegel is all of these things taken together, but I find it difficult to reconcile positivity as a convention with positivity as the historically given, as these things strike me as being categorically distinct. Hyppolite uses two pairs of contrasts to set off positivity, contrasting natural religion with positive religion, but also contrasting natural right with positive right.
With the idea of destiny we’re on a bit firmer ground. Of the special role that destiny plays in Hegel’s philosophy of history Hyppolite wrote:
“With the idea of destiny (destiny of a people destiny of an individual and destiny in general), more than with the idea of positivity we are at the heart of the Hegelian vision of the world. We have been able to maintain that this is a certain conception of the tragic which is at the foundation of the Hegelian dialectic and which, before receiving its logical consecration by a theory of negativity and contradiction, inspires the first Hegelian meditations on history.”
And…
“…the concept of destiny is full of meaning, and it appears to overflow the analyses of reason. Even more than the idea of positivity, destiny is an irrational concept. Hegel borrows the idea from a tragic vision that, with Holderlin and prior to Nietzsche, he sees as the somber background of Hellenic serenity.”
The reference to “Hellenic serenity” is a tip-off to another of Hegel’s preoccupations. Several sources tell us that Greek tragedy was among Hegel’s favorite reading, for example, Merold Westphal in History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology wrote:
“Hegel began his reading of Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, as well as Plato and Aristotle, during his gymnasium years. His sister tells us that during his student years the Greek tragedies were his favorite reading, and of these, Sophocles, whom he read uninterruptedly for several years and translated as well, his favorite author, and Antigone his favorite play.”
Yet the “Hellenic serenity,” of which tragedy constitutes the somber background, may have itself have been the background while the tragic and the irrational may have been closer to the foreground. Bertrand Russell in A History of Western Philosophy notes the tradition of reading the Greeks in this way:
“Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn… celebrates a religious ceremony, but not one which could fill men’s minds with dark and gloomy terrors. I think popular beliefs were very largely not of this cheerful kind. The worship of the Olympians had less of superstitious cruelty than the other forms of Greek religion, but even the Olympian gods had demanded occasional human sacrifice until the seventh or sixth century B.C., and this practice was recorded in myth and drama.”
Hegel’s reading of the Greeks was historically situated — Hegel’s own philosophy of history would not have scrupled to acknowledge this — and Hegel’s conception of history, his conception of historical peoples, and this conception of tragedy as a contrast with Greek cheerfulness, are all informed by this historically situated reading. Hegel, who read Greek tragedy for enjoyment throughout his life, would have been keenly aware of this, and there are any number of passages from Hegel that underline his tragic view of history. I don’t have any way to prove this, but I don’t think that Hyppolite himself shared Hegel’s tragic view of history, and I believe that the different historical outlooks of Hegel and Hyppolite means that Hyppolite was reading against the grain when he was reading Hegel, and that Hegel was being read against the grain by Hyppolite.
