Jean Hyppolite
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 116th anniversary of the birth of Jean Hyppolite (08 January 1907–26 October 1968), who was born on this date in 1907.
Hyppolite is primarily remembered as a teacher and an expositor of Hegel, his most famous work being Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, although he also wrote Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of 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:
“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. The categories of intelligence are made real, or realized, in nature; those of the will are e.xpressed in history. The practical ideal, the ideal of an order of cosmopolitan law, is only a far-off ideal for a particular individual, an ideal whose realization depends not only on his free will but on the free will of other rational beings as well. History thus bears on the species and not on the individual: ‘All my actions, indeed, finally lead to a result the realization of which cannot be attained by the individual alone but only by the whole species.’ Thus, 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. In order that there really be a history of humanity which is for practical philosophy what nature is for theoretical philosophy, it is necessary that unconscious actions be combined with the conscious actions of individualities.” (p. 27–28)
Kant also held that history bears on the species and not on the individual. 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, although Kant unfortunately did not write a philosophy of history, though he left a trail of ideas from which an entire philosophy of history could be constructed. Yet Hyppolite thought that Kant had been “surpassed” (p. 529). 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 seens 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 theretore 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 that the Enlightenment rationalists were missing was time, development, history, and evolution, and the idea of evolution would not fully flower until after Darwin.
But not only development; there is also the special role that destiny plays in Hegel’s philosophy of history:
“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:
“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. 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. Here is Hyppolite again:
“Hegel had reflected on the unhappiness of consciousness from the time of his first theological works. We can even say that the essential preoccupation of those early works was to describe the unhappiness of consciousness in its most diverse form in order to define the essence of that torment. At the time, Hegel was preoccupied with extraindividual entities with the spirit of a people, or with a religion — and he envisaged the Greeks as the happy people of history and the Jews as the unhappy people. He also viewed Christianity as one of the great forms of unhappy consciousness. The Jewish people is the unhappy people of history because it represents the first total reflection of consciousness away from life. Whereas the Greek people remain in the bosom of life and attain a harmonious unity of self and nature, transposing nature into thought and thought into nature, the Jewish people can only oppose itself constantly to nature and to life. Through this opposition, it discovers a subjectivity more profound than that of the Greeks and prepares the way both for Christian subjectivity and for the reconciliation between self and life, on which Hegel’s philosophy is a commentary.” (Genesis and Structure, p. 191)
Further Resources
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/004056395201300304
