G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge, 2011.
Leo Strauss on Hegel. Paul Franco, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
NOTE: This is the second of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, essays informed by the transcript of Leo Strauss’s 1965 course at the University of Chicago.
Unlike Africa, “we see states in it,” in Asia. Asian nations have produced histories as distinguished from poems. “History is prosaic, and myths”—the stuff of poetry—” contain no history.” Paying attention to the world beyond one’s imaginings, the world outside one’s own mind, will, and heart, requires the mind to abstract itself from itself. This intellectual act becomes much more likely once “a capacity for expressing laws is acquired”; law, too, is prosaic and requires those subjected to it to take heed of a thing beyond themselves. True, a reader may glean surmises and suppositions about “prehistory” from the poems handed down from those times, but “these do not amount to facts.”
In the “Oriental world” Hegel sees the beginning of history, the first “overpowering of arbitrary will,” the first appearance of the ethical, which he distinguished from the moral in his Introduction. “Ethical determinations are expressed as laws, but in such a manner that the subjective will is governed by these laws as by an external force, that nothing inward, disposition, conscience, formal freedom is present, and that in this respect laws are exercised only in an external manner and exist only as compulsory law.” What Hegel does not find in the Oriental world he does find in the West: “compulsory obligations” imposed ‘from outside’ oneself but supplemented, and obedience to them animated, by “the disposition of the subjects and in their empathy.” Asians haven’t (as we now say) ‘internalized’ the law. “Although the content of ethics is ordained entirely properly, the inward is yet made external. There is no want of a will to command it”—that’s what the emperor does—but there is want “of a will to perform it because commanded from within.” “In the law men have the view not of their own will but of an entirely alien one..” In Hegel’s terminology, “spirit has not yet attained inwardness” and therefore “it wears the appearance only of natural spirituality”—something of a contradiction in terms. As Strauss puts it, for Hegel “forgetting of himself in looking at the sun, that is the first stage. The unawareness of self, and only seeing the objective, the absolute, or whatever you call it, that is Asia. No awareness, no self-knowledge strictly speaking, no self-consciousness.”
The regime or “constitution” of Asian nations is theocracy, with the caveat that “what we call God has not yet in the East been realized in consciousness, for our idea of God involves the elevation to the suprasensorial.” With a very few exceptions, most of the Asian gods are nature-gods. “History commences with China and the Mongols—the realm of theocratic despotism.” Chinese despotism “admit the development of secular state life”; Mongolian despotism ruled over “a spiritual, religious kingdom.” The Chinese despot was a patriarch, “chief of the inward law,” the one who imposes the laws in his own mind upon all the others. “All that we call subjectivity is concentrated in the supreme head of the state.” Further, these laws are “partly legal, partly moral,” resulting in his subjects’ taking his inwardness ‘outwardly.’ Without the distinction between the moral and the ethical, “the sphere of inwardness… does not attain to maturity here, since moral laws are treated as civil laws while the legal, for its part, receives the appearance of the moral.” The Mongols in this respect represented the opposite extreme, having developed a spiritual empire headed by the Lama, “who is honored as God.” Among them, “no secular state life can be developed.”
The Indian realm evinced the “second phase” of history’s unfolding, the antithesis to China. There was (and is, as of the early nineteenth century) no one state in India, as in China, no “civil machinery” or bureaucracy. India is “broken up” in two ways: it consists of many sovereign kingdoms; and society features castes. “The different castes are indeed fixed; but in view of the religious doctrine that established them, they wear the aspect of natural distinctions”—that is, of immobility. “Individuals are thereby rendered still further without self,” without inwardness, without spirituality. The Indian regimes differ from the Chinese, as well, being theocratic aristocracies, ruled by the few, not the one. Indians oscillate between the concept of a “purely abstract and simple God and… the general sensorial powers of nature.” This results in “a restless rambling from one extreme to the other, a wild inconsistent delirium, which must appear as madness to a regulated, intelligent consciousness.”
The Persian empire stood as the third phase or form, contrasting with “the inert unity of China” and the “wild and turbulent unrest of India.” In terms of the West, the analogue with India was Greece (with its warring factions within the city-states and the wars among them); the analogue with Persia was Rome, with its multicultural imperial stability. The regime of the Persian empire was a theocratic monarchy, not a despotism, as the regime consisted of a king who ruled by law and shared ruling power with his subjects. Unlike all but one of the Chinese, Persian imperial subjects had ‘agency.’ However, the religion of Zoroastrianism remained at the level of nature; “the notion which the spirit has of itself at this stage is an entirely natural one—light.” The ethical had been achieved, as all individuals within the empire lived under the same law, but since the law was natural, exhibiting “the mild power of generality,” it lacked the thesis-antithesis dynamism of the fully developed spirit. It was therefore quite tolerant; its polyglot mosaic of peoples enjoyed “a free growth for unrestrained expansion and ramification”: Cyrus happily sent the Jews back to Jerusalem, where they would govern themselves under their own God and His laws. It was in this, and not in its natural religion, that the empire “exhibits the antithesis in a lively active form, and is not shut up within itself, abstract and calm, as are China and India.” The Persian empire was thus the one that “makes a real transition in world history.”
Egypt also mediated a transition to Greece, to the Western form of life, but in a different way. The antithesis or confrontation among opposites seen in external form, in the many nations comprising the empire ruled by the Persian monarchs found an inward form in Egypt. Egypt invented the Sphinx, and the Sphinx posed riddles. Only a Greek would solve the riddle, however. For the Egyptians, the contradictions of the spirit—symbolized by a being with a human head and a lion’s body—remained at the level of contradiction.
The spiritual condition of these kingdoms played out in “their various fates”—in their historical results, so to speak. China stands still, “the only durable kingdom in the world.” Chaotic India endures in its chaos but “is in its very nature destined to be intermixed, conquered, and subjugated,” since it can produce no viable state to defend it. The Persian empire has dissolved, and much of Egypt “is present under the ground, in its mute dead, today transported to all quarters of the globe”—mummies in museum cases—”and in their majestic habitations”—great tombs on the desert sand.
(a) China
In a true Hegelian “synthesis,” elements of both the “thesis” and its “antithesis” remain. A synthesis isn’t a blob of undifferentiated elements. It has articulation, structure. China combines the will of the despot, acting according to the customs of China, with the unquestioning obedience of the people. China has “substance”; it is “ethical.” In that way, it resembles a modern state—centralized and bureaucratic. However, because the people obey without consent (because they lack a sense of their own will, their own “subjectivity”) China “yet lacks the antithesis between objective being and subjective purposeful movement”; it lacks dialectic. It is the will, located in the subject, that causes movement as it interacts with the objective world; it is self-consciousness that ‘pushes back’ against the objective. Without such individuality in any but the emperor, in China “any mutability is excluded,” as “the unity of substantiality and subjective freedom so entirely excludes the distinction and antithesis of the two elements, that by this very fact, substance cannot arrive at reflection on itself—at subjectivity.” “The fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the historical.” Chinese traditions trace back to 3000 BC; genuine histories appear in the 2300s. But history in the fullest sense, history as the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, has not occurred there. China has histories, but no real history. It moves, but only in cycles. It never goes anywhere. There is no progress.
Hegel briefly discusses the “ancient and canonical books” of China, “from which their history, constitution, and religion can be gathered.” These include a history of their “ancient kings” and their laws; a book containing the basic characters of the Chinese language, “also considered the groundwork of Chinese meditation”: a book of poems; a record of “customs and ceremonial observances pertaining to the imperial dignity and that of state functionaries”; and a chronicle of the kingdom Lu, “where Confucius appeared.” Chinese historians occupied “the highest office,” and so fit Hegel’s category of “original” historians, although even in their historical task they amalgamate instead of synthesizing, treating “the mythical and prehistorical” as “perfectly historical.”
Europeans “have always marveled at [China] as a country which, self-originated, appeared to have no connection with the outside world”—with changes but no real dialectic either internally or externally. Europeans have been “astonished” at its huge population and “thoroughly organized state administration,” the architect of which is said to be Fu Xi (ca. 2900 BC), traditionally considered “the original civilizer of China.” Fu Xi “taught that reason came from heaven,” along with marriage, engineering, and the techniques for domesticating animals and raising silkworms. This again suggests amalgamation of all things great and small. This civilizational tradition did in fact find an antithesis of sorts, seen first in the emperor Qin Shi Huang, builder of the Great Wall of China and “especially remarkable” for his “attacks on the old literature,” burning the books embodying it. (Confucian literati saved the “strictly canonical” ones, fleeing to mountain hideouts with them.) This emperor may be said to have acted on the precepts of the anti-Confucian doctrine later scholars would call ‘Legalism,’ something of a misnomer since Legalists justify hard-nosed realism against Confucian li, which means sensibility combined with custom. But again, there was no real dialectic, and therefore no comprehensive synthesis of the two stances, given the lack of “subjectivity” in all Chinese except the emperor. A Chinese emperor might be a Confucian or a Legalist; combining the two doctrines never occurred to any of them. Chinese culture lacked the capacity for such fluidity of mind and heart.
“The spirit of the ever-unchanging constitution” of China inheres first of all in the family. Since “in China, the general will”—embodied in the tradition as expressed in the canonical books—”immediately commands what the individual is to do, and the latter complies and obeys with like absence of reflection and self,” those who do step out of line are punished physically. More, such punishment does not affect the malefactor’s “inwardness”; having no convictions of his own, he merely submits to the superior force with neither awe nor resentment. Family piety consists of the opinion that individuals belong jointly to their family and the state, both of them patriarchal. “The duties of the family are absolutely binding, and established and regulated by law,” and they include ancestor worship. The Chinese reverse the Western understanding of the family, and even of the patriarchal families that existed for centuries in the West. In China, the merits of the son are ascribed to his father; logically enough, one’s ancestors “obtain honor through their posterity” and not, as in the West, the other way around. The statesmanlike heroism of a Chinese Winston Churchill would have done honor to the Duke of Marlborough. For this reason the Chinese want children who “give them the due honors of burial, pay respects to their memory after death, and decorate their grave.” Every home has “a hall of ancestors where all the members annually assemble” to pay their obsequies.
The father-emperor “claims the deepest reverence.” The entire administrative system, from the emperor to the lowest official, never governs ‘impersonally’ or ‘scientifically,’ as do modern bureaucracies seen in the West. The emperor is obliged personally to govern and must himself be acquainted with, and direct, the laws and business of the empire, although assisted by the tribunals.” He is subject to criticism (but not of course command) by the imperial censor, who also exercises “strict surveillance over everything that concerns the government.” Although the emperor does exert his will, that will has “little room for the exercise of his mere choice,” ruled as it is by the maxims learned in the Confucian classics (or, in grimmer times, by those of the Legalists). “Princes are therefore educated on the strictest plan,” with annual examinations overseen by the emperor himself. “China has therefore succeeded in getting the greatest and best governors, to whom the expression ‘Solomonian wisdom’ might be applied.” (“In Europe there can be no Solomons.”) There are, in China, and there must be: “the prosperity, the security of all depend on the one impulse of the first link in the entire chain of this hierarchy.” In this way China truly maintains the rule of the one, having no aristocracy but “only the princes of the imperial house” and other subordinates whose actions are monitored by the emperor. Beyond the administrators, “all are equal, and only those have a share in the administration of affairs who have ability for it.” Hegel notes that this rather appeals to Western scholars, who typically enjoy less exalted positions in their societies.
Strictly speaking, China has no real constitution at all; that “would imply that individuals and corporations have independent rights.” Centralized administration isn’t political in the Aristotelian (or the Hegelian) sense of ruling and being ruled. There is no reciprocity. “Since equality prevails in China, but not freedom, despotism is necessarily the mode of government.” No “special interests” receive “consideration on their own account.” Within the administrative hierarchy the learned, the “mandarins,” occupy the higher rank over the military, as “the civilian estate takes precedence.” (Under Legalist rule, the opposite occurs.) Pervaded by li, mandarins “are said to have a talent for piety of the most refined order” in addition to their mastery of Confucian canon. Mandarins are also subject to the censors. “The whole of the administration is thus covered by a network of officials” who arrange everything “with the greatest minuteness.”
“From all this it is clear that the emperor is the center, around which everything turns, and to which everything returns; consequently the well-being of the country and people depends on him,” and “the whole hierarchy of the administration works more or less according to a settled routine,” “uniform and regular, like the course of nature”—that is, cyclical. Only “the emperor is required to be the moving, ever wakeful, spontaneously active soul,” though never capricious, well-schooled as has been in the canon. “There is no other legal power or institution extant”; “it is not their own conscience their own honor, which keeps the officials to account, but an external command and the severe sanctions by which it is supported.” This means that even Confucian emperors must be tough. The current (for Hegel) Manchu Dynasty came to power thanks to an “amiable and honorable” but overly mild emperor; under Mr. Nice Guy’s slackness, “disturbances naturally”—note “naturally,” not as expressions of freely willed opposition—and “the rebels called the Manchus into the country” as allies. The Manchus stayed, after the emperor, his mandarin attendant, the empress and her attendants all committed suicide, lamenting the injustice of the emperor’s (un-subjective but rebellious) subjects.
The Chinese legal system takes all the ruled as children of the patriarch. “All legal relations are definitely settled by rules; free sentiment—the moral standpoint generally—is thereby thoroughly obliterated.” Even within family relations, conditions of slavery prevail, as the father may sell himself and his children, having purchased his wife (the only “free woman” in the household, honored for her advice to her children if not obeyed) and the subordinate concubines. The corporal punishments meted out in the legal system cause no shame because “the Chinese do not recognize a subjectivity in honor.” With no subjectivity, no one except the emperor can be blamed. [1] “The deterring principle is only the fear of punishment, not the inwardness of justice.” It follows that Chinese courts recognizes no distinction between intention and accident. An unintended crime brings down the same punishment as one committed with “malice aforethought.” Add this to the powerful family bond, and you see that the offender’s “near kinsmen are tortured to death,” as well. Cases of suicide receive the mirror-image treatment; in that case, the suicide’s enemies are arrested and tortured and, if anyone confesses, his kinsmen are executed along with him. Therefore, if you want revenge on an offender, kill or injure yourself to ruin your adversary.
Somewhat surprisingly, emperors didn’t get around to asserting ownership of the Chinese land until 213 B.C., when the aforementioned Legalist emperor Quin Shi Huang so asserted, backing his edict with force. Although those who dwelt on the land thereby became serfs, many of them didn’t much notice, inasmuch as “all are alike degraded” in effectual slavery, with or without serfdom. “As no honor exists, and no one has an individual right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates, and this easily passes into that of utter depravity.” This results in much fraud, often carefully contrived. “Their frauds are most astutely and craftily performed, so that Europeans have to be painfully cautious in dealing with them.” (Plus ça change….) Piety doesn’t necessarily bridle such scheming: “Their consciousness of moral abandonment shows itself also in the fact that the religion of Fo is so widely diffused, a religion which regards nothingness as the highest and absolute, as God, and which sets up contempt for the individual as the highest perfection” and “all claims of the subjective heart are absent.” Chinese morality centers on human patriarchy, not spirituality—”a merely human reference.” The emperor is not only the supreme head of state but also of religion. Indeed, this state-religion so lacks inwardness or spirituality that it “cannot be what we call religion” at all.
“With this deficiency of genuine subjectivity is connected… the cultivation of Chinese science.” The sciences are esteemed and supported by the state. “On the other hand there is wanting to them that free ground of inwardness, and that properly scientific interest, which make them a theoretical occupation.” As a result, “what may be called scientific” in China “is of a merely empirical nature, and is made absolutely subservient to that which is useful for the state, and for its, and individual’s needs.” And because the Chinese written language consists of thousands of signs or ideograms, effectively directing minds away from the generalizing thought that generates theory. A Chinese might invent many uses for gravity, but he will never formulate the Law of Gravity.
As with science, so with history, law, and morality. History “comprehends the bare and definite facts, without any opinion or reasoning upon them”; legal knowledge consists of memorizing “fixed laws,” with nothing like jurisprudence behind them; and morality imposes “only definite duties, without raising the question of a subjective foundation for them.” As noted, Chinese philosophy does appeal to the Tao, which Hegel identifies with reason—”that essence lying at the basis of the whole, which effectuates everything.” “Yet this has no connection with the educational pursuits which more nearly concern the state,” as Taoism, unlike Confucianism, isolates itself from civil life. Indeed, a Taoist believes that “he who is acquainted with reason possesses an instrument of universal power, which may be regarded as all-powerful, and which communicates a supernatural might” which overcomes death itself. If so, why would one need to become a bureaucrat? The politically relevant sciences are not theoretical, but serve only as “branches of knowledge for practical ends.” This is why “the Chinese are far behind in mathematics, physics, and astronomy, notwithstanding their former reputation in regard to them.” They know about the use of the magnet and practice the art of printing, but never improve on them because their culture lacks the capacity to abstract from the particular to the general, the concrete to the ideal, and then turn back to apply theory to practice in new ways. The Chinese exhibit “a remarkable skill in imitation” but invent little. And they are “too proud to learn anything from Europeans,” whom they regard as barbarians. And rightly so, by their standards—but the standards can stand only if they maintain their isolation, now an impossible strategy to enforce given the European superiority in technology that its theorizing approach to science has given it.
Hegel summarizes: “This is the character of the Chinese people in its various aspects. Its distinguishing feature is, that everything which belongs to spirit—free ethicalness, morality, heart, inward religion, science, and art properly so called—is alien to it.” The one person entitled to exert personality, the emperor, often exhibits “paternal kindness and tenderness to the people,” but the people themselves “believe that they are born only to pull the car of imperial power,” evincing “lack of respect” for themselves and for “humanity in general.” They are indeed equal, as a commoner can rise into the bureaucracy on his merit, yet “this very equality testifies to no triumphant assertion of the worth of the inner man. In China, self-esteem is “servile.”
(b) India
India stands as the antithesis of China. Chinese culture is “ethical,” but without the inwardness of morality. “It is in the interest of spirit that the externally set determination”—in China’s case, this would be the “the regulating law and the moral oversight of the emperor”—”should become inward, that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence.” This “process” unifies subjectivity and objectivity, mind and being. China remains unhistorical because this synthesis never happens; everyone remains at the level of the objective, and even the emperor acts by the rules, with a minimum of independent judgment.
By contrast, India “has received the most complete development inwardly.” Whereas “the Chinese state… presents only the most prosaic understanding, India is the region of fantasy and feeling,” a sort of idealism but, crucially, “only as a conceptless idealism of imagination,” and idealism without ideas or real-world limits. Indian idealism “does indeed take its beginning and material from existence, but changes everything into the merely imagined.” It is as if God were a dreamer, not pure thought thinking itself but “the dreaming of the unlimited spirit itself.”
There is a beauty in this “fairy region,” India, this “enchanted world.” Hegel compares it to the beauty of woman after she has given birth, “an almost unearthly beauty… when freedom from the burden of pregnancy and the pains of travail is added to the joy of soul that welcomes the gift of a beloved infant.” India, too, shows this “beauty of enervation in which all that is rough, rigid, and contradictory is dissolved, and we have only the soul in a state of emotion.” It is charming to see. But “this flower-life” is “the death of the free spirit.” “If we examine it in the light of human dignity and freedom the more attractive the first sight of it had been, so much the more unworthy shall we ultimately find it in every respect.”
Why? Consider “the character of dreaming spirit.” “In a dream the individual ceases to be conscious of self as concrete individual, exclusive over against objects. When awake, I exist for myself, and the other is something external, firm over against myself, as I myself am for it.” Awake, I seek to understand the other. In a dream I merely drift in an ethereal wonderland, whether of horror or delight. Without the conscious opposition of self and other, inner and outer, no dialectic can begin. The Absolute Spirit freezes. “The Indian view of things is entirely a general pantheism, an a pantheism of imagination, not of thought,” unlike Hegel’s rationalist and dialectical ‘pantheism,” according to which all consists of the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, its historical progress toward the end or telos of its history. In India, however, “sensorial matter and content are taken up and carried raw into the sphere of the general and immeasurable,” never “liberated by the free power of spirit into a beautiful form, and idealized in the spirit, so that the sensorial might be a merely subservient and compliant expression of the spiritual.” Consequently there can be no reasoning, no sense of the contradictions of dialectic, and thus nothing to be synthesized into a higher form. “The divine is thereby made bizarre, confused, and ridiculous.”
This non-rational pantheism takes the things before it as “its lords and gods. Everything, therefore—sun, moon, stars the Ganges, the Indus, beasts, flowers—everything is a god to it.” In such a fantasy-land, anything is possible. Meanwhile, the divine, “regarded as essentially mutable and unsettled, is also by the base form which it assumes, defiled and made absurd.” (If “the parrot, the cow, the ape, etc., are likewise incarnations of God,” and yet are “therefore not elevated above their nature,” where does that leave Christian Incarnation?) Without reason in its most basic form, understanding, with the mind only seeing reality as something “without finite cohering existence of cause and effect,” and moreover, with man lacking “the steadfastness of free being for itself, of personality and freedom,” there can be no philosophy and so no Hegelian sage—the secularized Christ-sage who incarnates the Absolute Spirit at the end of history.
This begins to explain why Hegel has turned from politics to culture as the central explanatory concept of ‘social science.’ India has no politics, only culture. Hegel could not explain India (as he conceives it) if he stayed within the realm of the political (as he conceives it).
With its beauty, India has been “the sought-after land,” toward which “all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels.” Dreamy Indians “have achieved no foreign conquests, but have been on every occasion vanquished themselves,” succumbing to wave after wave of immigration.
India contrasts politically with Chinese despotic centralism, where “individual members [of the state] could not attain to independence and subjective freedom.” To develop dialectically, “the next advance of this unity is for distinction to come to the fore, and in its particularity to become independent against the all-ruling unity.” One soul must ‘differentiate itself,’ produce distinctive parts or members “which in their particularity develop themselves into a complete system, yet in such a way that their activity reconstitutes one soul.” In politics, this means moving from what we call, in a term Hegel himself might approve, the ‘nuclear family’ through various developmental stages to the modern state. “This freedom of particularization is lacking in China.”
Particularization has occurred in India. Its “independent members” have “ramif[ied] from the unity of despotic power.” “Yet these distinctions revert into nature. Instead of stimulating the activity of a soul as their center of union, and spontaneously realizing that soul—as is the case in organic life—they petrify and become rigid, and by their stereotyped character condemn the Indian people to the most degrading spiritual serfdom” inasmuch as “the distinctions in question are the castes.” Objects in inorganic nature, like mountains, they do not move; castes feature no ‘social mobility.’
This matters because “in every rational state there are distinctions which must manifest themselves,” as individuals, having “arrive[d] at subjective freedom,” establish them. Without subjective freedom, without making the ethical or objective law “inward,” Indians classify themselves by the group into which they were born, and so born, conceive of their membership in that group as fixed, natural in Hegel’s sense. India stays in the same immobile condition as China, despite the existence of no state in the one, a centralized state in the other.
Hegel digresses briefly to answer those who claim that some persons “in modern times” argue in favor of a state should recognize no estates or professional classes at all. “But equality in civil life is something absolutely impossible; for individual distinctions of sex and age will always assert themselves, and even if an equal share in the government is accorded to all citizens, women and children are immediately passed by, and remain excluded. The distinction between poverty and riches, the influence of skill and talent, can be as little ignored—utterly refuting those abstract assertions.” But estates are one thing, castes another. You belong to a caste by birth, and you’re “bound to it for life.” “Thereby does all the concrete vitality, which we see arise, sink back into death”; the existence of social divisions promises dialectic, but the rigidity of caste precludes it. “The appearance of the realization of freedom in these distinctions is therewith completely annihilated.” “Internal subjectivity ought to be entitled to choose its occupation,” but in the East “internal subjectivity is not yet recognized as independent, as the Chinese depend upon “the laws and moral decision of the emperor, consequently on a human will” and Indians depend upon nature in the form of birth —birth into one’s caste. Further, if the divine is ‘in’ everything, if pantheism is true, then placement into one’s caste is supposed sacred, rightly irrevocable and unchangeable; “all are invested with absolute value by religion.”
To those who might object that the European Middle Ages saw feudalism, with its stable and sharp class distinctions, therefore was no better than India, Hegel replies that all Europeans in those times had “the right of person and of property” in the form of “equality before the law.” [2] Such “ethical dignity,” constitutes what “man must possess in and through himself” as an individual. Not so in India, where Hinduism teaches that caste distinctions “extend not only to the objectivity of spirit, but also to its absolute inwardness.” Putting it in plainer language, Hegel means that in India “duties and rights… are not recognized as pertaining to mankind generally, but as those of a particular caste.” We say, “Bravery is a virtue”; they say, “Bravery is the virtue of the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste.” “Everything is petrified into these distinctions”—the opposite of Hegel’s esteemed rational movement and vitality. “Over this petrification a capricious desire holds sway,” under which “ethics and human dignity are unknown; evil passions have their full swing; the spirit roams in the dream-world, and the highest state is annihilation” of self via meditation.
Meditation suggests religion, and India’s main religion reinforces the caste system. Hinduism’s highest god is Brahma, and it’s not for nothing that members of the highest caste are called Brahmins. Behind the gods and humanity is the “substantial unity” of all, Brahm. “If a Brahmin is asked what Brahm is, he answers: when I fall back within myself, and close all external senses, and say Ôm within myself, that is Brahm.” To reach it, one thus ‘annihilates’ self and all other human beings from one’s consciousness in an act of abstracting oneself from humanity. One is tempted to recall that God in the Gospels does exactly the opposite, incarnating Himself as human and commanding all men to love their neighbors. But “the morality which is involved in respect for human life is not found among the Indians.” The only way to escape a lower caste is by self-annihilation consisting not merely of meditation but of asceticism, suffering. “The perfect deadening of consciousness” establishes “a point from which the transition to physical death is no great step.” Meanwhile, members of all other castes must worship the Brahmins as gods and thoughts of political revolution seem irrelevant; if a princeling usurps the prince, “the common Indian” finds “his life… unchanged.”
If Brahm sounds a bit vague, as purported underlying realities go, you are not alone in thinking so. “It is difficult to discover what the Indians understand by Brahm,” although the English, exercising due diligence respecting their imperial possessions, “have taken a good deal of trouble to find out.” Hegel offers to translate Brahm “into our way of thinking”: “We should call Brahm the pure unity of thought in itself—God simple in Himself,” without temples or worshippers.” “This pure unity…lies at the foundation of all—the root of all definite existence. In the knowledge of this unity, all objectivity falls away; for the purely abstract is knowledge itself in its most extreme emptiness,” a “death of life during life itself” which “requir[es] the disappearance of all activity and volition, and of all knowledge too.” Counterbalancing Brahm we find the other pole of Hinduism, which consists of its “concrete content” of pantheism or universal polytheism. The deities here are “things of sense: mountains, streams, beasts, the sun, the moon, the Ganges.” “This duality—abstract unity [Brahm] and abstract sensorial particularity—exactly corresponds to the duality of worship” in Hinduism. On one side, there is meditation aiming at “the abstraction of pure cancellation, the destruction of real self-consciousness,” on the other “a wild tumult of excess,” an effort to lose self-consciousness “by immersion in the natural, with which individuality thus makes itself identical, destroying its consciousness of being distinct from nature.” “Paramours and dancing girls” prance in, permitting the devotee to immerse himself in “a voluptuous intoxication in the merely natural and leaving “a doctrine of the relation of religion to ethics… altogether out of the question,” as Hegel soberly puts it.
Whereas “to us [Europeans or more precisely Hegelians] religion is the knowledge of that essence which is actually our essence, and therefore the substance of knowledge and will,” “this cannot be found among the Indians,” who “have not the spiritual as the content of their consciousness.” As in China, morals suffer—in much the same way, if for the opposite reason. “Deceit and cunning are the fundamental characteristics of the Indian; swindling, stealing, robbing, murdering are part of his manners.” “The Indians will not tread upon ants, but they are perfectly indifferent when poor wanderers pine away with hunger.” In China, the lack of a sense of personal honor issues in this; in India, it is the lack of any objective standard of conduct.
Since the state “is a realization of spirit, such that in it the self-conscious being of spirit—the freedom of the will—is realized as law,” and inasmuch as “the Indian principle” tends toward imagination, self-abnegation or (alternatively) indiscipline and indifference to those outside of one’s caste, India lacks “the proper basis of the state.” “Freedom both as will existing for itself and as subjective freedom is absent.” China is “nothing else but a state”; India “is only a people, not a state.” China features “moral despotism”; India features “a despotism without any sort of principle, without any rule of ethics and religiosity.” “there is no sense of self with which tyranny could be compared, and which would cause revolt in the soul.” India has poetry, geometry, astronomy, algebra, philosophy, and an intricate language. But it has no history. “For history requires understanding—the power of letting an object be free for itself, and to comprehend it in its rational connection.” In the Indian soul, all is indeterminate, making it “incapable of writing history. All that happens is dissipated in their minds into confused dreams.” And without history there can be “no development into a veritable political condition.” To understand Indian history, consult the Greeks and Muslims who have written it. But as for the Indians themselves, they have culture, “a common character pervading the whole of India,” but no real politics because they conceive of no real freedom. “Their whole life and ideas are one unbroken superstition, because among them all is reverie and consequent enslavement.”
None of this means that India is inferior to China. On the contrary, Strauss observes. In positing Nothingness—not a void but No-thing-ness, a pervasive spirit—India surpasses China, represents an advance in the progress of history. “To China the highest is a visible heaven. The Hindus go beyond that and peer through heaven, as it were, and discover a spiritual principle… and this is an act of liberation.” In its infinitude, Nothingness has as yet no defined character, manifesting itself as anything. Nonetheless, it is “the beginning” of a move away from merely empirical perception.
Strauss remarks that Hegel “doesn’t deny that there are very fine and great things in China and India, but he says somehow the soul is missing, the core is missing, because the awareness of the rights of man is missing.” He goes further, suggesting that Hegel may be mistaken to ascribe to either culture a real notion of nature. The Chinese term translated as “Heaven,” which Hegel considers to mean nature, may not mean that at all, especially since Chinese and Indian writers tend to ascribe rightness to following a way of life, a path, and not to natural right or natural law.
(c) Buddhism
The Buddha came to China from India, so it might be said that Buddhism consists of a synthesis of the two cultures. Hegel contrasts Buddhism with Hinduism. Buddhism diverges from Hinduism’s “inebriate dream-life,” framed by a “rigid” caste system. Buddhism offers not “self-abandoned, helpless slavery” but an “unconstrained dream life”; Buddhism “keeps itself more free, more independently fixed in itself.” A Buddhist master meditates; he does not impose, except on disciples who consent to his discipline. Hegel reaches for quasi-Kantian terms to describe it; Buddhism “may be generally regarded as the religion of being in itself.” Behind all finite things resides an infinite No-thing-ness, “the principle of all things, that proceeds from and returns to nothingness.” “The differences in the world are only modifications of this procession”; “everything is but a change of form.” The essence of No-thing-ness us “eternal repose,” “the absence of activity and volition.” “Nothingness is abstract unity with itself.” For man, “true blessedness is union with nothingness,” a condition he can achieve in this life, not in the life hereafter.
At “the point of history” in which the Buddha taught, “the form of the [absolute] spirit is yet that of immediacy,” by which Hegel means that “God is conceived in an immediate form, not objectively in the form of thought.” However, “this immediate form is the human figure”—the Buddha, not the sun or the stars. While “the abstract understanding generally objects to this idea of a God-man, alleging as a defect that the form here assigned to spirit is an immediate one, in fact man,” Hegel of course regards immanence as an advance. Undoubtedly glancing at Jesus as well as the Buddha, he admits that “the idea of a man—especially a living man—being worshiped as a God has in it something paradoxical and revolting.” To conceive of the Absolute Spirit is to conceive “something general in itself.” But this generality “must be emphasized, and it must be shown in the view of peoples that they have this generality in view.” One might add that this is especially important respecting a generality to a people to whom the teacher is foreign. Be this as it may, “it is not the singularity of the subject that is revered, but that which is general in him.” The Dalai Lama, for example, “is nothing but the figure in which spirit manifests itself, and who does not hold this spirituality as his peculiar property, but is regarded as partaking of it in order to exhibit it to others, that they may attain a view of spirituality and be led to piety and blessedness.” And no more than that: a lama has no power over nature, practices no sorcery. In Tibet Buddhism in fact displaced the local shamans
Given its radical inwardness and its consequent eschewal of any but the simplest and most lenient ruling institutions, Buddhism has exerted little influence on the course of history. A lama will advise the ruler but not take political authority for himself.
(d) Persia
“With the Persian empire we enter into the connection of history for the first time. The Persians are the first historical people; Persia was the first empire to have passed away,” thus exemplifying the res gestae in contrast with “stationary” China and India, with their “natural vegetative existence.”
Persia’s religion, Zoroastrianism rejects undifferentiated No-thing-ness, positing instead a world divided between the light and darkness. “Zoroaster’s light is the first which belongs to the world of consciousness, to spirit as a relation to something distinct from itself.” The light permits human self-consciousness as free from it; it “only manifests what bodies are in themselves, a unity which governs individuals only to excite them to become powerful for themselves, to develop and assist their particularity.” Light is also egalitarian, shining on righteous and unrighteous alike. And (crucially for Hegel) “light is vitalizing,” nourishing life and not aspiring to ‘deaden’ it as the religions of the Far East tend to do. Because life has an antithesis, darkness, “this antithetical relation opens out to us the principle of activity and life,” dialectical movement. Thus “the principle of development begins with the history of Persia,” which “constitutes the beginning of world history strictly speaking; for the grand interest of spirit in history is to attain an unlimited being-in-itself or subjectivity, to attain reconciliation through absolute antithesis.”
Whereas Brahm is entirely non-objective, encouraging his devotees to self-annihilation, the light of the Zoroastrians, being objective, is a means by which the spirit “acquires an affirmative nature: man becomes free, and appears over against that which is supreme, which to him is objective,” not the all-pervading pantheist deity residing in humans and parrots alike. In Persia, the individual “distinguishes himself from the general and likewise mak[es] himself identical with the general” by spiritual exercises. “In the Chinese and Indian principle, this distinction is not made.” Instead of unifying the spiritual and the natural, Zoroastrianism advances the spirit in “the task of freeing itself from nature.”
The light also has a moral dimension; it isn’t only “the most universal physical element, but at the same time also purity of spirit—the good.” This means that man can overcome nature—which is, as his students have seen in his account of Africa, bestial. “Light, in a physical and spiritual sense, imports, therefore elevation—freedom from the merely natural.” “All are equally able to approach” this “abstract good,” and in it “all equally may be hallowed.” There are no castes. “Everyone has a share in that principle, secures to him a value for himself.” Hegel goes so far as to say the Persia’s geography supports this, as its mountains rise up sharply from the plains, unlike the gentler topographies of China and India. The land of Persia is physically ‘dualistic.’
Hegel divides his discussion of Persia into three: first, a discussion of the original Zend people; then an account of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Mede and Persian nations—the peoples comprising the empire; and finally an account of the empire and its parts considered as regimes. The regime section features discussions of Persia, the ruling element, Syria, Judea, and Egypt, followed by a brief section in which Hegel shows how Persia as it were carried the torch of history to Greece.
The Zend people descended from the fire-worshiping Parsees, and “as a whole they were destroyed by the Muslims.” The Zend language “is connected with the Sanskrit, as the language of the Persians, Medes, and Bactrians.” Zend laws and institutions “bear an evident stamp of extreme simplicity,” ordaining four classes: priests, warriors, farmers, and craftsmen. These were estates, not castes, with no restrictions on inter-class marriages. There was no Brahmin caste for whom alone full consciousness has been attained. Zoroastrian light “is not a Lama, a Brahmin, a mountain, a brute—this or that sensorial existence—but sensorial generality itself, the simple manifestation.” Light is the sensible thing that makes clear the outlines of all other sensible things. Light enables man to ‘see what he is doing,’ putting him “in a position to be able to exercise choice,” inasmuch as “he can only choose when he has emerged from that which had absorbed him.” And given the dichotomy of light and darkness, Zoroastrianism posits a stark choice, indeed: good or evil. Hegel approves of this dialectic: “As man could not appreciate good if evil were not there, and as he can be really good only when he knows evil, so the light does not exist without darkness.” Nor can it know itself without it; “spirit, in order to comprehend itself, must essentially place the general positive over against the particular negative”; in overcoming its antithesis the spirit is “twice-born.” Hegel thereby offers a comment on the Book of Genesis, and perhaps of Christian baptism, without mentioning them.
There is a “deficiency in the Persian principle.” Zoroastrianism does not give the devil his due. That is, the god of light simply conquers the god of darkness. There is no true synthesis of the two principles. The light “does not return the distinction” of light versus darkness “back into itself,” fails to integrate elements of its antithesis into a new, more comprehensive being. That would be the work of the Germans.
The morality of the Zend people is mild. “It is implied that man should be virtuous: his own will, his subjective freedom, is presupposed.” Religious practices were aligned with life, not death. “It was made especially obligatory upon the Persians to maintain the living, to plant trees, to dig wells, to fertilize deserts, in order that life, the positive, the pure, might be furthered, and the dominion of Ormuzd [the god of light] be universally extended.” We are only two generations away from Nietzsche and his Zarathustra. [3]
If Zend race was the highest spiritual element of the Persian empire, so in Assyria and Babylon we have the element of external wealth, luxury, and commerce.” In Assyrians, these riches required fortified cities. Having relinquished “the nomad life and pursuing agriculture, handicrafts and trade in a fixed abode,” they needed to protect themselves and their property from “the roving mountain peoples and the predatory Arabs.” (“Even at this day the country round Baghdad is thus infested by roving nomads.”) Babylon enjoyed life in the Fertile Crescent, and its people lived “peaceably and neighborly with each other.” For the most part, “immorality invaded Babylon only at a later period, when the people became poorer,” but for much of its existence the community practiced “provident care for all” and a sense of “common cause.”
The Medes were a mountain people—fierce, barbaric, warlike. The Persians were found “in extremely close and early connection” with them; when the Persians came to dominate, it made “no essential difference” in spirit. “The names of Persia and Media melt into one.”
This formed the nucleus of the Persian empire. Hegel considers it “an empire in the modern sense,” one “consisting of a number of states which are indeed dependent but which have retained their own individuality, their manners, and laws.” “As light illuminates everything, imparting to each object a peculiar vitality, so the Persian empire extends over a multitude of nations, and leaves to each one its particular character.” Geographically, too, the empire united “the three natural principles”: the uplands of Persia and Media; the valley plain of the Nile; and, in Syria and Phoenicia, the seacoast, where nations “encounter the perils of the sea.” “We find here neither that consolidated totality which China presents, nor that Indian life in which an anarchy of caprice is prevalent everywhere.” The empire put a stop “to that barbarism and ferocity with which the nations had been wont to carry on their destructive feuds, of which the Book of Kings and the Book of Samuel sufficiently attest.” The Israelite prophets lamented this condition; Cyrus the Great changed it, diffusing “happiness” over “the region of the Near East.” To be sure, “it was not given to the Asians to unite self-reliance, freedom, and substantial vigor of mind with culture, an interest in diverse pursuits, and an acquaintance with the conveniences of life.” Military valor among them comported “only with barbarity of manners,” leaving “the calm courage of order” unachieved. “And when their mind opens to a sympathy with various interests, it immediately passes into effeminacy, allows its energies to sink, and makes men the slaves of an enervated sensuality.” Readers of Machiavelli will recall his accusations against Christianity.
Moving to the national constituents of the empire, Hegel begins with the Persians themselves, originally “a free mountain and nomad people” who now “stood with one foot on their ancestral territory, with the other on their foreign conquests.” They could raise vast armies from the empire, but the men thus conscripted were “so unequally disciplined, so diverse in strength and bravery, it is easy to understand how the small but well-trained armies of the Greeks, animated by the same spirit, and under matchless leadership, could withstand those innumerable but disorderly hosts of the Persians.”
Their government of the empire “was by no means oppressive,” although the regional rulers, the satraps, were often arbitrary and jealous of one another, “a source of much evil.” But at least the Persian kings left to the nation of each province “the enjoyment of the country.” Famously, Cyrus let the Jews return to Jerusalem. In this, the regime of Persia acts like the light of Zoroastrianism, shining on all equally, nourishing individuality even under imperial rule. And like the Jews, the Persians “had no idols and in fact ridiculed anthropomorphic representations of the gods”; “they tolerated every religion, although there may be found expressions of wrath against idolatry.” In this, Persian life resembled that envisioned by the prophet Micah, a life wherein each man sits under his own vine and fig tree, with none to make him afraid—unless it might be the provincial satrap.
Syria had two populations. The western, landlocked people shared with the Babylonians a way of life consisting of idolatry, nature worship, luxury and pleasure integrated into their worship—in all, “a merely sense-oriented life” ruled cruelly “because nature itself is the highest, so that man has no value, or only the most trifling.” Hegel wastes little time on them. The seafaring Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast are altogether a different kind. Commercial, cosmopolitan, early the possessors of a written language, their ships ranged as far as Britain.
“This opens us to an entirely new principle. Inactivity ceases, as also mere rude valor; in their place appears the activity of industry, and that considerate courage which, while it dares the perils of the deep, rationally bethinks itself of the means of safety.” The life of commercial seafaring requires “human will and activity,” courage, intelligence, all at the service of “the interest of man,” not some vaguely imagined god or gods, nor some one man or few men. “The sailor relies on himself, amid the fluctuations of the waves, and eye and heart must always be open”; in this, the sailor is Hegelian man, conscious of the waves of history and riding them. His industry opposes “what is received from nature”; “in industry, man is an object to himself, and treats nature as something subject to him, on which he impresses the seal of his activity.” Here, in Phoenicia at this time, “we see nations freed from their fear of nature and its slavish bondage.” (“You see how little reactionary Hegel is,” Strauss quips.)
Accordingly, the Phoenicians worshiped two divine persons. Hercules (who may or may not have been the same as the familiar figure in Greek myth) “is that scion of the gods who, by his virtue and exertion, made himself a god by human spirit and valor; and who, instead of passing his life in idleness, spends it in hardship and toil” with “courage and daring” and (although Hegel doesn’t mention it) wiliness. Their other god is Adonis, who suffers, dies, and is then reborn. While in India “lamentation is suppressed in the heroism of insensibility,” as women, “uncomplaining,” throw themselves into the Ganges and men “impose upon themselves the direst tortures,” “giv[ing] themselves up to lifelessness in order to destroy consciousness in empty abstract contemplation,” with Adonis life “regains its value,” as “human pain becomes an element of worship” as the experience in which “man realizes his subjectivity,” sees himself in dialectic with nature, now rightly seen as not-human and indeed inhuman. “A universality of pain is established; for death becomes immanent in the divine, and the deity dies. Among the Persians we saw light and darkness struggling with each other, but here both principles are united in one—the absolute,” the synthesis that encompasses the warring elements without destroying either one. The return of Adonis to life is celebrated with joy. Without the suffering what would that be?
Hegel may have surprised his students by spending so little time on Judea. He ‘puts Judaism in its place’ within his philosophic system, which radically revises the Bible. “While among the Phoenician people the spiritual was still limited by nature, in the case of the Jews we find it entirely purified; the pure product of thought, self-thought, comes to consciousness, and the spiritual develops in sharp contrast to nature and to union with it.” In Hinduism, Brahm “is not himself an object of consciousness; in Zoroastrianism, the light was an object of consciousness but of “sensorial contemplation.” With Judaism, “light is henceforth Jehovah—the purely One.” “This is the break between East and West; spirit descends into the depths of its own being, and recognizes the abstract fundamental principle as the spiritual Nature—which in the East is the primary, the foundation—is now pushed down to the condition of a mere creature; and spirit now occupies first place.” (This of course is not quite right. The Book of Genesis teaches not that God is the light but that He created it. It would be more accurate, although inconsistent with Hegel’s neo-pantheistic Absolute Spirit, to say that Jehovah replaces the status of the light in Zoroastrianism, but even that formulation doesn’t capture the holiness of the Creator-God.)
As always, Hegel then articulates an antithesis, a critique. The one God chooses one people as his own. He is “the God only of Abraham and of his seed,” and “before Him all other gods are false.” Hegel demurs. “Every form of spiritual activity, and the more so every religion, is of such a nature, that whatever be its peculiar character, an affirmative element is necessarily contained in it,” as he has painstakingly related in his discussions of China, India, and Persia. “In every religion there is a divine presence, a divine relation; and a philosopher of history has to seek out the spiritual element even in the most imperfect forms” even if, admittedly, “it does not follow that because it is a religion, it is therefore good”—a “lax conception,” indeed.
The merit of Judaism is that it reduces nature “to something merely external and ungodly,” which is “actually the truth about nature, for only later can the idea attain reconciliation in this its externality.” “The whole of nature is only His robe of glory, and is applied to his service.” Further, Jews honor God by walking in His way, obeying His law, which way leads to more abundant life—Hegel’s esteemed vitalism found its expression in Jerusalem. “Here too we have the possibility of a historical view; for the understanding has become prosaic,” not poetic-mythological, “putting the limited and circumscribed”—God’s creation or what Hegel calls nature—”in its proper place.” “Men are regarded as individuals, not as incarnations of God; sun as sun mountains as mountains, not as if possessing spirit and will.” In Judaism, human individuals do “hard service as relation to pure thought.” [4]
All this is good, but Judaism binds individuals too closely to ceremonies and the law. They cannot live freely for themselves, as the Phoenicians did. God has freedom, as the Chinese emperor did; Judaism is superior to Confucianism because it is no mere human who exercises freedom over his fellow-men, but a transcendent and providential Creator-God. But “the subject never comes to the consciousness of his independence,” never (for example) believes in the soul’s immortality, “for the subject does not exist in and for itself.” “However spiritual may be the conception of God as objective,” in Judaism, “the subjective side—the honor rendered to Him—is still very limited and unspiritual in character,” too ritualistic.
In keeping with the relative weakness of individual spirits, families are the fundamental ruling units, not individuals and not the state, which “is an institution which is not consistent with the Judaistic principle,” one “alien to the legislation of Moses.” Not only are the Jews excessively exclusive and intolerant, too prideful in “their peculiar nationality,” but they also believe in miracles, “a disturbing feature in this history as history,” inasmuch as real history doesn’t explain things by appealing to divine intervention. “Nature is de-divinized but not yet understood.” On the level of practice, a state lacking the firm, spiritual commitment of its people, dominated instead by family life, may divide on that fault line. This, Hegel observes, is exactly what happened, as the Levites and the Judah-ites divided the land. But according to Judaic principles themselves, “the one God could not be honored in different temples, and there could not be two kingdoms attached to one religion.” So weakened, Jews were “subjected to the Assyrians and the Babylonians,” released from captivity not by God but by Cyrus.
Egypt is the final Asian regime Hegel considers, the one with the closest and longest dealings with both Greece and Rome. Like the other Near Eastern regimes, Egyptians have lost their empire; it survives, but as “the ultimate Land of Ruins,” a monument to death. But Egypt served an indispensable historical function by uniting or synthesizing the many “contradictory elements” of Persia, Babylon, Syria, and Judea. Egyptians combined the Persian sense of a “universal natural existence,” Babylonian and west-Syrian sensuousness, the Phoenicians’ “incipient consciousness of the concrete spirit” seen in Adonis-worship, and the “pure and abstract thought” of Judaism.
How could this task possibly be done? Hegel point to the figure of the sphinx, “the symbol of the Egyptian spirit.” “The human head looking out from the brute body, exhibits spirit as it begins to emerge from the merely natural, to tear itself loose therefrom and already to look more freely around it,without, however, entirely freeing itself from the fetters nature had imposed.” Similarly, the landscape itself, with its half-buried ruins, figures forth the idea of natural beings rising into the air. “The whole land is divided into a kingdom of life and a kingdom of death.” Located geographically “alongside African stupidity,” Egyptian exhibit “reflective intelligence, a thoroughly rational organization characterizing all institutions, and most astonishing works of art.” They lacked, however, and adequate written language and self-consciousness; with these out of their reach, they could not write their own history, and one must consult foreigners for that. Among them, Hegel prefers Herodotus, with his naturalistic explanations of events, eschewing the miraculous.
The rational organization of Egyptian institutions may be seen in their way of life, which establishes “a condition of settled peace” by such laws as the requirement of each Egyptian to report “from what resources he obtained his livelihood.” (“If he could not refer to any, he was punished with death,” a lawful if draconian way to give men an incentive to work.) One source of such employment was the construction of a carefully designed systems of canals and dikes, moderating the fluctuations of the Nile.
As for their reflective intelligence, Hegel recalls that “Egypt was regarded as the pattern of an ethically regulated condition of things,” as depicted in the writings of Pythagoras and Plato. Hegel cautions, however, that “such ideals” take “no account of passion,” and therefore stand as “altogether opposed to the nature of spirit, which makes contemporary life into its objects and whose infinite impulse of activity is to change that life.” Strauss explicates: “Passion claims freedom, the mind claims freedom, and there is a certain connection between them according to Hegel. This freedom both of passion and of the mind is provided for in the reasonable state as Hegel understands it.” [5] Hegel tells his students that the real Egyptians saw the dilemma but ultimately could not resolve the tension between “that African imprisonment of ideas” and “the infinite impulse of the spirit to realize itself objectively.”
The dominance of the Nile and the sun presented Egyptians with a “naturally-determined world in which [to] live, a cyclical world of flooding and receding, sunrise and sunset.” The good aspect of this is that both river and sun are prodigious life-givers; the Egyptians partook of Hegelian vitalism within the very natural confinement that usually keeps men in barbarism. Accordingly, Egyptian religion “the Nile and the sun constitute the divinities, conceived under human forms; and the course of nature and the divine history is the same.” Adonis-like disappearance and rebirth find another other forms. And the god Osirus suffers, is killed and mourned by his sister, Isis; “pain is regarded as something divine, and the same honor is assigned to it here as among the Phoenicians.” The “leading ideas”—Osirus, the sun, and the Nile—constitute a “triplicity of being… united in one knot”—obviously an anticipation of the Christian Trinity, although Hegel is here too discreet to say so. This three-in-one “vitality” is unified, but still “quite abstract” in the sense that it isn’t clear what connects the three ideas. There was no sense of history among the people who could not write their own history, despite the world-historical importance of their culture.
Egyptians also worshiped animals, a practice Hegel compares favorably to the worship of sun and stars. Animals have instinct, “restlessness, excitability, and liveliness.” “We cannot make out what is in these creatures, and cannot rely on them. A black tom-cat, with its glowing eyes and its now gliding, now quick and darting movement, has been deemed the presence of a malignant being, a mysterious reserved specter: the dog, the canary, on the contrary appear friendly and sympathizing.” “The animals are truly incomprehensible,” unlike the sun and the stars, which merely revolve in regular patterns, readily mapped by man. Animals are ‘higher’ than the heavens. The problem with worshiping them is that they are natural beings. “In truth it is only in nature that we encounter the incomprehensible; for spirit is just this, to be revealed to itself; spirit understands and comprehends spirit.” Mere vitality is not enough. “Among the Egyptians this worship of beasts was carried to excess under the forms of a most stupid and non-human superstition.”
This brings Hegel back to the sphinx. The combination of man and beast is for the Egyptians an enigma, a riddle. To Egypt’s credit, the riddle is clearly stated by the creature that embodies it. “We thus see Egypt intellectually confined by a narrow, involved, close view of nature, but breaking through this; impelling it to self-contradiction, and proposing to itself the problem which that contradiction implies.” Hegel credits the Egyptians for posing the riddle, for enabling us “to behold the antithesis of nature and spirit,” but it will take ‘Greece,’ in the particular figure of Oedipus, to solve the riddle, to resolve the paradox of identity that changes, to synthesize thesis and antithesis.
Hegel ends his account of Egypt with praise. Unlike the Jews, the Egyptians regarded the soul as immortal. “The notion that spirit is immortal involves this, that the human individual inherently possesses infinite value.” True, “the soul initially was known to the Egyptians only as an atom, that is, something concrete and particular” which could move from a human body to the body of an animal, then back again. Hegel concurs with Aristotle’s judgment on metempsychosis—that it ignores the fact that bodies have structures, that the bodies of human and animal species differ radically, and that as a consequence it makes no sense to believe that souls free-float among them. Still, “with the Egyptians the soul—the spirit—is, at any rate, an affirmative being, although only abstractedly affirmative,” migratory in an implausible way. Once again Egypt raised the right questions, even if its answers did not suffice.
“What must now be done is for the particularity,” the individual, “which in itself is already ideal to posit itself as ideal”—to become conscious of itself—”and for the general, which in itself is already free, to comprehend itself. It is the free, joyful spirit of Greece that accomplishes this, and makes this its starting-point.” If the Egyptians are “vigorous boys, eager for self-comprehension, who require nothing but clear understanding of themselves in an ideal form in order to become young men,” the Greeks are those young men, following the aphorism of Apollonian Greece, “man, know thyself.” “Humanity in general is summoned to self-knowledge; in replying to the sphinx’s riddle with the correct answer to its question, Oedipus “overthrew the sphinx from the rock, liberating “that Oriental spirit” by saying in effect “the inwardness of nature is the thought that has its existence only in human consciousness.” Hegel therefore both is and is not an atheist. In calling the Absolute Spirit “God,” and in considering all religions effort at understanding God, he is a theist. In calling the Absolute Spirit “God” and in claiming that the human consciousness alone comprehends it, he is an atheist in the eyes of any particular religion that preceded his own philosophic doctrine. [6]
Such is the “inward” transition from Asia to Greece. The historical transition occurred when the Greeks defeated the Persians at Thermopylae, sending the Persian empire into decline. But in this failure, Persia showed itself part of history, part of the great birthing and passing away, as China and India are not. “The Persians could erect no empire possessing complete organization; they could not impart their principle into the conquered lands, and were unable to make them into a harmonious whole, but were obliged to be content with an aggregate of the most diverse individualities.” It was not the alleged “effeminacy” of the Persians that did them in but “the unwieldy, unorganized character of their host, as matched against Greek organization,” that brought on their ruin. This claim illustrates the difference between Machiavelli and Hegel. Machiavelli writes of virtù, a sort of virtue, albeit neither classical nor Christian. Hegel writes of rational organization, the latest, better articulation of the Absolute Spirit. Characteristically, Hegel finds a necessity in Persia’s fatal disorganization. Without it, the principle of freedom could not have manifested itself at that time. In the Greeks, freedom and order achieve a synthesis, although not yet an adequate synthesis, not yet the ‘end of history.’ China and India, in Strauss’s words, were “dead-end developments in cultures,” but “Persia itself points beyond itself” and is therefore “historical in a way in which China is not historical.”
Notes
- Strauss expands on this point. Corporeal punishment might be resented by individuals, but “what Hegel has in mind is the sense that corporeal punishment is incompatible with the dignity of man…. The mere ego—it is not I who am insulted if I am publicly spanked by some executioner, but the dignity of man.” Chinese culture doesn’t feature a sense of that dignity, inasmuch as no struggle for recognition with ‘the other’ can occur if there’s no moral sense, no sentiment of self-worth that demands recognition. (Strauss, p. 130).
- Strauss gives an example of liberty under feudalism: “A serf’s son could enter a monastery and then, in other words, he could belong to the highest estates” or professions,” whereas in India no one can become a Brahmin under any conditions.” (Strauss, p. 150).
- Strauss elaborates helpfully: “There are two principles, the good and the evil principle. In Western language we would say god and devil. But whereas according to the Christian or Jewish view the devil is the creature of God who has sinned and thus fallen, here these two forces are of equal status, not regarding goodness but regarding being. They are independent of each other.” The Persians “were aware of the difficulty” of contending, as they did, that eventually good will vanquish evil: On what basis? “There is as it were an neutral ground beyond the opposition of good and evil, something like the nothingness of the Hindus…. Out of that emerged good and evil.” (Strauss, p. 177). Still, is this “ground” truly neutral, or does it ‘skew’ the conflict, ‘load’ the dice, in favor of the good?
- Strauss demurs. Just as “there is no Old Testament expression for nature,” so “there is not Old Testament word for history…. There is one old Hebrew word which could lead to the notion of nature on the one hand, and history on the other.” Literally translated, it is “generation,” as in “these are the generations” of a given Israelite patriarch. Generation is both a ‘natural’ and a ‘historical’ event, to use contemporary terms. (Strauss, p. 187). More startlingly, Strauss notices that “from Hegel’s point of view, the Old Testament prepares the new Testament to no higher degree than Phoenicia does, in a very different way.” Such is the cunning of history, that is to say of the Absolute Spirit as it works itself out.
- Strauss goes on to say that “the reasonable state in Hegel’s understanding includes the relative freedom of what he calls bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which i the translation both of civil society and of bourgeois society. He means the economic sphere in the sense of Adam Smith.” (Strauss, pp. 190-191). “In this sense, Hegel is a liberal.” (p. 192). This clarifies Strauss’s quotation of a Nazi-sympathizing German who called the election of Adolf Hitler the death of German liberalism.
- Highlighting Hegel’s status as a philosopher, Strauss tells his students that “Hegel retains the supremacy of theory” over practice, even as he synthesizes them. “What is the object of theory? In Aristotle, the highest object of theory is the cosmos and the mind governing the cosmos.
But for Hegel, the highest object of theory is, one can say, what man has done in the whole course of history. So that practice and its products are the state. From Aristotle’s point of view it would be absurd to say that the state has a higher philosophic status as an object than the cosmos. For Hegel it is elemental that all are art. For Aristotle these are subordinate subjects; for Hegel these are the highest subjects of theory. So we can say that theory for Hegel deals with the products of practice, the product of human actions much more than with the natural. This is entirely contrary to the original Aristotelian scheme.” (Strauss, p. 194)
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