Waller Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Chapter 1: “Escape to Lake Bienne: How Rousseau Turned the World Upside Down” and Chapter 2: “Redeeming Modernity: The Erotic Ascent of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
Rousseau inspired Robespierre, Hegel the American Progressives, Marx Lenin. Heidegger was a Nazi. But did political ambitieux understand the political philosophers they were reading? While aiming at freedom, have these later forms of modern philosophy succeeded in modernizing tyranny?
Edmund Burke thought so. Looking at the men who seized control of the French Revolution, he famously lamented, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.” But sophisters, economists, and calculators are not philosophers, however much some of them might borrow from philosophers or mimic them. The “barbarous philosophy” animating the French revolutionaries, a “mechanic” (that is, mechanistic) “philosophy,” is no real philosophy at all. Burke hopes that the coming Nineteenth Century will see a return to civilized life, a life in which men no longer “make war against either religion or philosophy, for the abuse which the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Patron, who in all things favors and protects the race of man.”
This notwithstanding, do some of the genuine philosophers bear some responsibility for modern tyrants who have not only boosted themselves into positions of rulership by means of terror but who have used terror as a method of ruling? Waller R. Newell argues that they do, while at the same time vindicating philosophy from the charges sometimes heard from conservatives who suppose they are following in Burke’s footsteps by denouncing philosophy as such as too ‘abstract,’ too much a matter of highfalutin’ theory to make anything but a mess of politics.
The philosophers he considers share a critical opinion of modern liberalism, which locates rights in individual human persons. Government (as the Declaration of Independence says) should aim at protecting those unalienable rights, accorded to us by the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. In its more ‘secular’ forms, liberalism claims that “government is not about teaching people how to be virtuous—that is a matter of individual choice.” George Washington and John Adams would not agree, although both would agree with such liberal philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu that moral education is highly fallible, and that political institutions must be designed with a view toward inhibiting our more dubious exuberances.
But, sharpening the distinction between the modern liberalism which emphasizes liberty as an indispensable economic, social, and political utility and the ancient liberalism which understands liberty as cultivating the virtues required for sound political engagement, for deliberating and acting in common with fellow citizens, Newell observes that a liberty which “gives us a sense of belonging to and participating in a community,” a liberty which “shape[s] us to be public beings first and private individuals only second, if at all,” has played out differently in the modern state than it did in the ancient polis. The illiberal philosophers among the moderns valorize the aim of political life ‘the ancients’ strove for, a political life that took its purpose to be “not merely utility but nobility.” The search for ancient models for modern politics preoccupied European political philosophers from Rousseau to Heidegger. But does, can, such an attempt to graft ancient liberalism to modern liberalism work in the large and centralized modern state? More fundamentally, do the philosophic principles of modern liberty differ so much from the philosophic (or pre-philosophic) principles or assumptions of liberty as understood by ‘the ancients’ that they incline modern states to tyranny?
Perhaps they do. “And yet—strangest paradox—precisely this longing to make politics noble again, beautiful again, and more entirely just than before, culminated in projects for revolutionary violence and extremism that surpassed anything in previous human experience for the scale and depravity of their cruelty and slaughter.” In light of Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, one must ask, “How could the desire to ennoble modern life lead to the political catastrophes of totalitarianism and utopian genocide?”
Newell sets out to show the philosophers in question effected “a massive metaphysical shift in the meaning of existence, the transition from nature to history,” from natural law to historical law and sometimes to the denial of any metaphysically grounded law at all. Tyranny has been a regime seen throughout human life, but ‘ancient’ tyrants claimed no philosophic excuses for their rule, preferring to appropriate religion for that purpose. The modern tyrants and typically atheistic tyrants availed themselves of the new philosophic ‘metaphysic’ to justify mass destruction for the sake of social justice.
To find a new metaphysics that supported a politics of nobility, these philosophers faced “one apparently insurmountable obstacle”: “the physics of Bacon and Newton appeared to have shattered forever the classical belief that the cosmos was primarily characterized by rest over motion, but unity over multiplicity, and by permanence over becoming,” a belief that ruined the ‘ancient’ philosophers’ link between human happiness and the cosmic order, between human nature and nature as a whole. “The ancients’ prescription for happiness, in other words, was not merely anthropological.” Even the ancient atomists, who most nearly resemble the moderns, linked moral right to the way natural is, never suggesting that nature could or should be ‘conquered’ by man, much less that man is a ‘historical’ being.
The new philosophers did not deny “the triumph of modern natural science” over “those ancient cosmologies.” They understood that modern science removes the idea of an eternal, orderly cosmos as “a unifying third term between subject and object, self and other, and citizen and community.” As a result, modern natural science “launch[es] an irresolvable debate as to whether the mind imposes all structure on purposeless matter or whether the mind is passively determined by those same empirical processes.”
The new philosophers of history—call them historicists—propose “a new third term, a new source of unity—the time-bound realm of historical change itself.” The first fully historicist philosopher, Hegel, claims “that it is precisely in this realm of flux and contingency, supposed by the ancients to be the enemy of all virtue, that human virtue, including civic virtue, along with the sources of political community and artistic and intellectual merit, are to be found.” If Democritus and Lucretius are the ‘ancient’ philosophers closest if not identical to the modern liberals, Heraclitus is the one closest if not identical to the historicists. The new philosophers conceive of liberty as the freedom to embrace change in the hope of synthesizing (itself a term of Hegelian thought) “the ancient Greek polis with the individual liberty of the modern age.” This is the new “Philosophy of Freedom.” Accordingly, each of the historicist philosophers Newell discusses proposes a “reinterpretation of the ancient Greeks” in an attempt to bring their nobility into the modern world of Machiavelli’s centralized state.
Newell numbers among the readers who see that Rousseau’s works compose a coherent whole, approaching “three major themes”—the critique of modernity, the state of nature, and the recovery of the state of nature under conditions of modernity—through several genres, including essay, treatise, novel, and memoir. He looks to the Reveries of a Solitary Walker‘s Fifth Promenade for “the fundamental experience uniting” those themes.
Rousseau understands “the modern view” of human nature as individualistic in the sense that man does not complete himself through political engagement; he is “complete in his nature prior to and apart from his formation by civil society.” But he detests modern society. It is bourgeois, that is, commercial and selfish. To be both commercial and selfish is to wish for self-sufficiency without the capacity to achieve it, owing to your dependency upon business relations. To be commercial and selfish also ruins a full civic life by blocking full devotion to the common good, the laws, and the way of life of your political community—which is no longer a true community at all. This makes bourgeois modern man ‘inauthentic,’ hypocritical, masking his greed and chicanery beneath a mask of “politeness and civility.”
Just as bad, the much-vaunted progress seen in modern times destroys natural and civic equality by “reward[ing] mental talent and mak[ing] all other human qualities seem worthless by comparison.” ‘Meritocracy’ is only aristocracy under a new set of rules for advancement. The liberty offered by modern liberalism yields only the unjust rule of the few over the many, who enjoy neither the freedom of natural men nor the liberty of true citizens.
To counter these disgusting consequences of modern life, and of the political philosophy that encouraged them, Rousseau recasts Socrates, that exemplar of the philosophic life. Plato’s Socrates turned from the nature-philosophy of Thales, Heraclitus, and Democritus without abandoning their quest for understanding the cosmos. His political philosophy approaches nature not so much through direct observation of the heavens and earth but through dialogue with other people, the rational sifting of opinions about the gods and men. Rousseau “transform[s] him into an ‘honest man’ in his plainspokenness, populism and simple common sense,” on the way toward replacing the Socratic and even ‘pre-Socratic’ philosopher with “the poetic artist and visionary”—the sort of person philosophers up to and including John Locke inclined to deprecate.
Rousseau is no dreamer, at least not in all respects. He denies that modern men can recover their natural condition as happy, self-sufficient individuals. In this, he “accepts the fundamental premise of modern political philosophy” and of “the modern science of matter.” Newton has refuted Aristotle’s physics, Hobbes and Locke have refuted Aristotle’s ethics and politics. The cosmos provides no sound model for either the human soul or the political community because the cosmos has no purpose, no telos. At the same time, Hobbes and Locke are mistaken about man in the state of nature. Against their contention that the state of nature sets one man against another in either a war of all against all or a competition for scarce resources, Rousseau claims that “by nature man does not have any desires he cannot satisfy on his own”; for example, any individual can readily gather some foods and hunt for others without encroaching upon the life of another. Natural man is effortlessly happy and innately good. The state of nature is “sweet.”
Rousseau thus contends that it isn’t the purpose of nature that one must consider, there being none, but its origin; it isn’t political life that fulfills human nature but the life of self-sufficient individuality. Civilizational progress is human regress, and human virtues are difficult to achieve only because we now have vices that we need to strain to overcome. These vices have proven so strong that men have turned to religion to save themselves from themselves. The civilizational cure is as bad as the civilizational disease, since religiosity leads to misery—intractable spiritual and physical war. Whereas “for the ancients,” and evidently Christians, “freedom is at the service of virtue,” for Rousseau “virtue is at the service of freedom.” With this contention, Rousseau comes close to “opening a Pandora’s box that arguably makes it impossible to legitimize any form of political authority,” although he does make the attempt to do so.
Human nature, happy and good, differs from the nature of animals. Animals are mere machines. Men are free—free “to obey or to resist nature’s commands.” This departs radically from the doctrines advanced by Plato and Aristotle, for whom “the highest development of the soul would constitute the fulfillment of (and subordination to) nature.” On the contrary Rousseau argues: civilization, especially modern civilization, has seen “the misuse of free will,” which now serves “increasingly bloated passions” fed by vanity, amour propre. You want to be ‘the envy of your neighbors,’ as the advertisements entice you to be. Worse, civilization doesn’t only lose the state of nature, it loses it “irrevocably.” Rousseau is no back-to-nature flower child.
How, then, did civilization begin? Men entered communities only as a result of natural catastrophe, events that “forced people to bind together for personal safety.” These original communities—once again, Rousseau orients himself by origin, not by purpose—were the best ones. Every elaboration of civil society has drawn men farther away from the happiness of their natural condition of freedom. The ‘Lockean liberals’ who found liberty on property mistake their enslaver for their liberator.
Despite our current enslavement in civilization, the chains with which human beings are restrained after having been born free, “a green shoot of our original connection with nature dwells within us even now, however weakened.” So, there is hope for man, still. But how did our connection with nature become so weak?
To answer that question, Rousseau turns to origins, to history or the narrative of human events. “Civilized man is almost a completely different being than natural man, separated by an enormous chasm that only an account of historical evolution can explain.” Human nature in the state of nature was highly malleable, plastic, a being whose “faculties” consist of “pure formless potential.” This made man freer than the animal-machines around him, but it also made him vulnerable to malign transformation, the “loss of our natural happiness” initially spurred by natural cataclysm.
Having stated the underlying dilemma of civilized and especially modern civilized life, along with its origin in some disastrous event or series of events in his essays or “discourses,” Rousseau offers a genuine liberation or set of liberations. He elaborates a path to political liberation in a treatise, The Social Contract. The legal character of political life suggests the form of a treatise, a systematic treatment of the subject. He presents the path to social liberation in a novel, the Emile, the genre which best conveys the intimacy of teacher and student, husband and wife. He presents the path to individual liberation, a path too steep for any but a few, in memoirs—the Confessions but especially the Reveries.
The regime elaborated in The Social Contract “minimizes social inequality,” the bane of civilization, “by making everyone equally subject to laws of which they approve, set in a relatively austere economy that discourages extremes of wealth and luxury.” And it secures freedom insofar as men in civil society can recover it by “prevent[ing] one’s dependence on any an arbitrary power through our total dependence on the public power.” Political equality and freedom replace our lost natural equality and freedom.
This does not necessarily entail a democratic regime. A monarchy or an aristocracy could also “recognize the equality of all citizens in principle and with respect to their rights.” This demotes regimes from the political centrality they assumed in classical political science. For Aristotle, “each regime type embodies a different substantive conception of virtue and justice,” whereas “for Rousseau, equality is the only principle of legitimacy, and all regime types are merely different modalities for institutionalizing it.” This is in keeping with the classics’ emphasis on cultivating moral and intellectual virtue “through their participation in public affairs.” Rousseau cares more for equality and freedom, both of which are natural to man.
The Rousseauian social contract brings men closer to the natural freedom he has lost by substituting the General Will for the long-restricted free will of bourgeois man. “According to the General Will, we choose only those laws which not only we but everyone else in society would be willing to obey,” thus preventing laws that would “take advantage of me or me to take advantage of others,” thereby guaranteeing “the protection of our individual interests by limiting everyone’s pursuit of their individual interests.” A civil society founded upon the General Will seems to Newell “more social democratic than proto-Jacobin or communist,” as it protects both freedom from oppression and to practice active citizenship. Aristotle understood such citizenship as a relationship modeled on the relationship of husband and wife, who rule and are ruled in turn. Too individualistic to permit asocial human beings to find liberty in mutual dependence, Rousseau instead defines moral life in terms not only of freedom but of a sentiment experienced by the individual: compassion. Compassion enables men to establish and form civic bonds that are as free as bonds can be, because they come from the heart, not from the protection of an external supposed good, property. Compassion is a virtue civic institutions and customs can and should foster.
“Civic freedom is a simulacrum of our freedom in the state of nature but whereas our natural freedom was spontaneous and unselfconscious, our civic freedom is willed and self-conscious—a second, specifically moral, freedom gained by membership in the social contract.” To achieve civic freedom, which imitates natural freedom but most assuredly does not grow naturally out of it, one needs severe measures. Enter the Legislator.
The Legislator, the founder of civil society, drags otherwise asocial and apolitical beings into the social-contract order. He can only do so despotically, exercising unlimited power, given the radical character of the transformation he sets out to effect. He is changing malleable human nature, but it takes force to do so, given the lumpish resistance of the materials with which he works; human nature is malleable, perhaps almost infinitely, but not easily so. After founding this new republic, this new public order, he must (Moses-like) never enter “the regime he has created.” By his actions he has made himself (and perhaps shown himself) to be too unequal for that. “Future leaders will exercise only those powers voluntarily designated to them by the people,” in accordance with the laws of that regime.
Once a civil society has been founded, the General Will can malfunction if clever men delude the people, rechanneling their free will toward unfree passions. Fortunately, “the individual’s natural liberty can never be completely absorbed by the social contract.” Collectively, men retain the right to revolution; as individuals, they retain the right to withdraw. In some cases, the philosophic life, now reconceived as a life of reverie, of savoring the sweetness of existence, will be the course of such withdrawal, although for most it will simply mean self-exile, removal to another society more congenial to freedom, if one can find such a place.
The General Will puts a premium on civic unity. Factions compromise it, including the majority factionalism of democracy. As James Madison would later argue, “if factions cannot be avoided, better to have many than few, so as to diffuse their ability” to coalesce into despotism, perhaps democratic despotism or majority tyranny. Newell observes that in this Rousseau again departs from Aristotle, whose best practicable regime, the mixed regime of shared rule of the few rich and the many poor, with a substantial middle class mediating between them, “would merely be rule by a faction.”
In sharp contrast with Madison, however, Rousseau in principle rejects representative government, as commended by Locke, Montesquieu, and even (in his own monarchic way) Hobbes. Full civic freedom requires “direct participation in political life,” thereby “exercis[ing] our moral and civil freedom to assent to how we are ruled.” This necessitates a return for much smaller, polis-like political communities or ‘republics,’ where citizens may readily “affirm or revoke the powers exercised by the state to promote the general will.” The large, centralized modern states, which need the one, the few, and/or the many to conduct policies by representatives of the people must go. They are too big to permit the meaningful exercise of civic liberty. He understands that in modernity such civil societies are now rare. He therefore concedes to the modern state its size, with the caveat that its ruling institutions must be structured so as to enable citizens confirm or dissolve the authority of their representatives at regular intervals.
Rousseau’s General Will anticipates Kant’s Categorical Imperative. It is not the same as it. The Categorical Imperative “applies to mankind as such”; it is an exclusively moral principle, as Kant gives political life over to the institutional constraint of power-hungry deviltry. The generality of the General Will exists only in particular civil societies, in nations living on territories. This leaves room for each people to develop its own set of moeurs. “Rousseau believes in patriotism and does not regard its heart as dead even in today’s bourgeois.” This means that the General Will extends only to citizens; those outside the social contract might readily be oppressed, a “quandary [that] will continue to haunt the Philosophy of Freedom.”
The family is another pathway to freedom, and in the Emile Rousseau delineates that pathway. Although he is widely considered at a source of Romanticism, as indeed he is, Rousseau has Emile’s tutor give the boy a decidedly down-to-earth education. Ever since Christian-aristocratic chivalry worked to ennoble erotic love, love has taken on a certain ‘idealism.’ This is an illusion, Rousseau teaches, given that the beloved is a real woman, never the paragon her lover supposes her to be. But the sentiment itself is real enough, and the tutor puts it to good use as a means of preventing Emile from becoming a bourgeois individualist. Love so conceived gets the lover outside of himself, induces him to put his amour-propre to one side.
The marriage and family which result from love also dilute selfishness. The courtly love of the chivalric European aristocracy seldom led to marriage, but Emile and his beloved Sophie remain sufficiently sensible to become husband and wife. That is, some of the elevation of courtly love can be melded into bourgeois civil society, even and especially in those regimes which cannot recover polis-like civic virtue. “Modern bourgeois man must have a self-interested stake in the orderly society, and the family, which includes our own property and wealth, is the healthiest such stake because it gives him a personal motive for behaving justly.”
Rousseau’s third way of life for modern man is not so much the life of the philosopher but of “the solitary dreamer.” Like Paul the Apostle, Rousseau suspects the philosophic way of life to be vain, although unlike Paul, he also regards it as unnatural. [1] If there can be a good philosophic way of life at all, it must “point the way to a natural happiness which is not philosophy itself, and which all people were capable of experiencing in the state of nature prior to any hierarchical moral and intellectual ascent.” Rousseau’s philosopher, or replacement for the philosopher, turns out to be “a kind of dreamer or poet, an authentic individualist who uses his intellectual powers to free himself from the intellect, in order to commune with his natural sentiments” by “replicating natural man’s original solitariness,” by leaving civil society. Consistent with Rousseau’s critique of rationalism, his neo-philosopher does not contemplate nature but experiences it esthetically, “summoning up and releasing into himself nature’s underlying potency and sublimating those energies through their expression as art.” The Romantics would affirm this “elevation of the artist over the rational thinker as the true voice of being.” In Platonic terms, Rousseau’s Solitary Walker doesn’t ascend from the Cave of conventional opinion toward the Ideas but ‘back’ or ‘down’ to nature’s origins, the crux of creativity, “the stable current of ceaseless becoming”—a “recessional movement from selfhood back into the moment where self and becoming intersect and the self dissolves.” Platonic elevation, Rousseau charges, does not really elevate the soul. It inflates it. The only way to escape egoism is to return to the origins. Thus, “for Rousseau happiness comes from natural disorder, thinking is an impediment to this happiness.”
The soul must fill itself with the sentiment of its own existence and no others. Other sentiments lead the soul to want the objects of its desires. Only the sentiment of the soul’s own existence satisfies itself without such longing and the dependencies it generates. Rousseau compares such a soul to God, although much more the god of the Epicureans than the God of the Bible, being neither political nor rational nor moral.
Newell identifies “the meaning of nature as origination” as “the underlying unity among Rousseau’s works,” a unity that explains “their extraordinary diversity and at times considerable tension with one another,” even as the rational eros of the quest for truth unifies the equally diverse Platonic dialogues. Whereas Plato’s dialogues all “lead us toward the One, the Idea of the Good, that brings our soul into conformity with the eternal reasonableness of the cosmos,” Rousseau, who endorses the modern philosophic denial of a rational cosmic order, aims not at a higher good but rides with the natural flux. He beckons us to think not ‘vertically’ but ‘horizontally.’ In this sense he is a democrat or egalitarian. None of the three ways of life—the life of civic engagement, of familial contentment, or solitary reverie—can be said to outrank the other. “No objective ranking according to reason [is] possible.”
Newell demurs. In Rousseau, “nature is too far away to invoke us in a binding manner.” “It remains mystifying to me that Rousseau insists that man at his most natural is solitary.” As a result, he “bequeathed to his German successors Kant and Schiller a series of only partially resolved tensions between nature and convention to which they responded by extracting one dimension or another of his thought, assigning it priority, and thereby attempting to make it the basis for the others.” This response found its political echo in the factions among the French revolutionaries—the worst of them, Robespierre, going so far as to attempt the extermination of the bourgeois classes, along with the clergy and the aristocrats for good measure. “The Jacobins believed that they were returning the rest of France to the pristine condition of the Golden Age of the state of nature, incoherently blended with a collectivist republic, with no inequality of condition, a community of the virtuous and pure in which the individual would be totally submerged”—back to the supposed natural origins, with a vengeance. Newall rightly calls this a policy of “utopian genocide,” the “attempt to construct heaven on earth with the guillotine.”
G.W.F Hegel restores a substantial degree of sobriety to the conversation while at the same time radicalizing modern metaphysics and, in the end, unintentionally preparing a way to radicalize modern politics even beyond the acts of the Jacobins. He takes Rousseau’s notion of the malleability of human nature, accepts David Hume’s claim that one cannot derive any ‘ought’ from the unteleological conception of nature as purposeless matter in motion, and transfers teleology to ‘History,’ the course of events, the “arduous ascent by way of civilization toward wisdom.” The erotic satisfaction of the philosopher who, from time to time, achieves “contemplative union with the immortal truth” now becomes “mankind’s progression a single time to the final outcome, the actualization of wisdom at the end of history.” Civilization becomes not the bane of existence, as in Rousseau, but the necessary process whereby everyone, not only philosophers, achieve lasting satisfaction. Far from weighing us down, civilization enables mankind to accumulate “within the all-embracing ambit of Spirit (Geist) a trove of latent in-dwelling experiences from which individuals and nations can draw in the present for guidance and inspiration.”
This happens because the world consists of instantiations of the “Absolute Spirit,” instantiations that occur because the Absolute Spirit unfolds itself through time, beginning with something like what today’s physicists call ‘The Big Bang’ and moving towards a telos, a consummation. Further, not only does the Absolute Spirit unfold itself in accordance with recognizable laws but the human mind, which is as much a part of the Absolute Spirit as everything else, operates the same way. What Hegel calls the “absolute science” of the Spirit consists of both “the actual, lived history of the world from the earliest origins to the present day and a cognitive map of the mind’s patterns.” “Spirit is simultaneously the structure of reason, the history of the world, and the psychological profile of ever living individual as he or she lays claim to the organic Bildung of moral energies evolved over the centuries.”
Between Rousseau and Hegel, Kant and Schiller attempted to address Rousseau’s antimony between nature and reason—an antimony that sharpens once one admits the modern claim that nature is purposeless, reason merely a utilitarian tool of the passions. In terms of morality, Kant turns to his Categorical Imperative. Kant agrees with the earlier ‘moderns’ in thinking that “because the cosmos as a whole is bereft of purpose, nobility and moderation, it is pointless for human beings to claim they are attempting to internalize these qualities in their own soul.” Taking up Rousseau’s emphasis on the will, on intentionality, Kant endows his Categorical Imperative with universality and selflessness: Act so that the maxim or principle of your action can be universalized. This disposes of the moral quest for happiness, which Kant deems both selfish and teleological, therefore unsupported in nature or by practical reason. As remarked previously, the universality of the Categorical Imperative distinguishes it from Rousseau’s General Will, which is general only within the confines of particular peoples living on distinct territories. Further, “for Kant there is no prospect for the wholesale of even partial recovery of the natural equilibrium of our desires, only a perpetual struggle by the will to master the inclinations.” Even more ambitiously, in the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, Kant writes, “Act as though the maxim of your action were by your will to become a universal law of nature.” This, Newell suggests, may amount to “a project for the open-ended transformation of reality hiding between the lines of what is usually taken to be Kant’s attempt to maintain an equipoise between the real of nature and the realm of freedom.” Kant is certain that “if we follow the Categorical Imperative, we do not try to become sovereigns of others and masters of nature, but masters of our own natures and sovereigns of ourselves.”
But at what price? Schiller finds Kant’s morality according to the Categorical Imperative “both unbearable and unnecessary.” Why would anyone don such a moral hair shirt? Human beings will seek satisfaction; it can do so, morally, “through aesthetic fulfillment.” In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller proposes “an education in culture as a way of healing the alienation caused by modern rationalism.” In his radical austerity, Kant’s doctrine “runs the risk of producing a prude who regards a passion for Raphael and a passion for gin as defects equally deserving of curtailment.” On the contrary, Schilling insists, “a beautiful life can entail a morally well-ordered one,” one that restores “the erotic dimension of virtue explored in Plato’s Symposium on modern subjectivist grounds.” Instead of arousing “erotic longing toward the immortal nobility of civic virtue and, at the highest level, the imperishable Idea of the Good,” Schiller locates his “aesthetic culture” and “aesthetic education” in “man’s self-conscious transformation of nature to create an organic unity between his subjective will and the sensuous embodiment of his ideal in the work of art.” Rejecting the Platonic claim that “the world is a rationally ordered and benevolent whole,” the Romanticism Schiller propounds requires struggle, struggle that often veers toward “self-doubt, moodiness, and anxiety”—what the English call Byronism. This notwithstanding, “For Schiller the aesthetic is the crucial middle realm of experience between the sometimes degrading downward pull of natural necessity”—the realm of utilitarian calculation—and “the sometimes too austere dictates of moral freedom.” Modern rationality must not be permitted to “destroy the aesthetic experience,” as it does in either the self-interested calculations of Bentham or the selfless but also colorless practical reason of Kant. To reduce nature to appetitive (and competitive) self-interest because nature is nothing more than matter in motion and the best one can do is to shoulder all impediments to that self-interest to one side, devil take the hindmost; to identify the rational calculation needed for success in that endeavor as the empiricism and “analytical rationality” of modern science: this to squeeze the joy out of life, as the young John Stuart Mill discovered when he tried to follow his father’s utilitarian precepts, finding in that way of life not happiness but misery. Why would one not prefer, morally, “the sublime sentiments aroused by the beautification of nature through art”?
Initially, Hegel too struggled “to fully reconcile the realms of Beauty and Understanding,” aesthetics and (modern) rationalism. But in the Phenomenology of the Spirit Hegel solves the problem to his own satisfaction by proclaiming a “teleological progress of history.” “We now enter the real of ‘historicism’ proper.” “Hegel, in contrast with his predecessors, recasts man as a historical being through and through,” completely “jettisoning the concept of human nature” by subsuming nature “within the organic historical life-world Hegel terms Spirit.”
The Absolute Spirit is the Holy Spirit ‘secularized’; that is, instead of standing apart as an entity qualitatively different from and superior to matter, the Absolute Spirit (which Hegel sometimes calls “God”) is immanent in all reality. This gets rid not only of the dualisms of earlier modern thought in a grand “synthesis” of all antimonies as the Absolute Spirit progresses in time toward its End, but it reconciles reason and revelation. With the consciousness of the Absolute Spirit, “no choice between reason and revelation is possible or necessary,” as they are “two ways of representing the same truth,” two instantiations of the Absolute Spirit. “As Leo Strauss put it, [Hegel] was the first modern philosopher to elevate the study of religion to a branch of philosophy.” In Hegel’s view, “to separate God from rationality reduces God to arbitrary caprice” and to separate a rational God from will is to reduce the Absolute Spirit to impotence.” Put in less metaphysical terms, “Romanticism requires scientific supplementation in order for Spirit to become fully conscious of itself,” but “science left to itself, cannot even fathom what it lacks.”
Hegel can thereby retain the “cold analytical thought premised on man’s alienation from nature and growing power to master it” while also retaining something like the philosophic eroticism of Plato. He can do this because alienation and masterly power again have a telos to long for: no longer the Ideas of Plato but the End of History. In political terms, liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights can find their realization only in the impersonal modern state. History for Hegel becomes “a double-sided quest for unity and fulfillment by means of scientific rationality,” bringing “the pursuit of Understanding (including political rights and scientific power)” into an indispensable step towards “the reign of Love.” In recognizing human dignity, the modern nation-state becomes the locus of representative institutions, the protector of personal liberties, tolerance, diverse cultural and religious communities. History is “the human pursuit of freedom beyond the contradictions placed on it by the present,” a pursuit that forms part of the process of “Spirit’s own development as it supersedes itself through the agency of man.” Hegel gives the name “Subject” to the human, latterly modern-scientific quest to know; he gives the name “Substance” to the emotions, especially love, the romance in Romanticism. “Both dimensions—Subject and Substance, Understanding and Love—are essential for a stance toward political life that is both humane and realistic,” a life that avoids “Jacobin fanaticism” (“the attempt to impose from above, by revolutionary fiat, a single global pattern for rational political and economic organization”) and “the Romantic retreat from the muck of politics into a purely apolitical realm of aesthetic bliss” or, in another path some Romantics took, “a folk nationalism of tribal belonging and instinct.” By esteeming each stage of historical development as a necessary step, however violent, in the march toward the End of History, Hegel can “moderate the modern assumption that the past has nothing to teach us about freedom and culture.” Even the Jacobin Terror teaches us something; its negation of all existing social and political institutions, its murder of existing social and political rulers, simultaneously destroyed moribund practices and hidebound persons as it presented humanity with horrors to overcome and then to avoid in a better, more humane world. The unfolding of the Absolute Spirit proceeds not smoothly but ‘dialectically’—through the often-violent clashes of opposing, even enemy, forces. Not for Hegel is the smooth path “where everyone and everything is instantaneously reunifying, where everything is at one with everything else.”
History, then, is “dialectical,” at odds with itself before it can achieve its final synthesis. This clash of opposing persons and forces expresses the energy and the direction of the Absolute Spirit as it moves toward its telos. Hegel calls “determinate negation” the retention of “a residue of what has been overcome” by any important advance in human freedom. “Progress, in other words, is always a matter of two steps forward and one step back, a kind of dialectical cha-cha” in which forward steps partially recapitulate earlier steps. Newell compares this to Burke’s notion of prescription or tradition, although in Hegel’s “science of wisdom” History proceeds by the rules of (Hegelian) logic. If it did not, History “might be viewed as a pointless cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations and beliefs.”
And again, this historical progress encompasses everyone. Philosophers will not leave the rest of humanity behind. “The entire human species makes this ascent from fleshly and sensuous experience toward the light of the truth,” as “the teleological ascent from becoming toward the eternal Good is replaced by the teleological progress of history.” In this sense, by putting a universalized human telos not above us but in front of us, Hegel democratizes moral, philosophic, and political striving. True, “if all phenomena are time-bound, then our knowledge cannot leap,” Platonically, “beyond the limits of time, change, variability, and perishability,” but it doesn’t need to seek such elevation if human beings become conscious of the movement of the Absolute Spirit itself, which moves in time, changes, varies, and causes to perish those things and persons it no longer needs. “This wisdom is not merely speculative,” as Platonic sophia is; “it is the concretely actualized outcome of the entire previous eons-long pursuit of freedom, enlightenment and happiness, embodied in the living structures of the modern state, culture, education and religion.”
These structures have two dimensions: the sphere of ethical life or Sittlichkeit and the realm of morality or Moralitat. Ethical life denotes custom within a given community; morality denotes the countervailing “will of the individual to master his own nature so as to achieve autonomy.” “These two standpoints are in tension with one another, but they also interweave as history moves toward its completion.” Without this interplay, ethical life would congeal into mindless habit while morality would rigidify into inflexible sternness. Without it, Romanticism would decline into sentimentality, science into nihilism. But “the cultural battle between science and Romanticism…will, once sublimated, usher in the reemergence of God in history in a new era of mutual forgiveness” and peace.
Newell rightly observes that Hegel’s idea of the Absolute Spirit resembles, and actually prefigures, “the most up to date modern physics,” embracing as it does “the concept of Force.” This concept “heralded an inroad against the physics of matter in motion—not particles clashing,” as proposed by the Epicureans, “but quanta or waves.” At the same time, it reaches back to the Bible, to the God who announces, “I am what/that I am,” that is, I am “completely mutable,” free of all material and formal constraints. The Absolute Spirit can posit itself as matter and form, but it has the freedom to change. The Biblical God symbolizes it, since “God cannot be conceptualized as a specific entity or static being.”
For this reason, Hegel admires the ancient polis as a necessary step in History’s progress but would never attempt to reproduce it under modern conditions, in the manner of Rousseau and his epigoni. The Greek polis was “the first concrete historical embodiment of Spirit because of its living interplay between the individual citizens and the organic community they made up, an interplay between particular and universal that mirrors Spirit’s own dynamic,” its interplay of morality and ethical life. Greek tragedy registers this tension in extremis. Sophocles’ Antigone dramatizes the way in which “the divine law must inevitably be circumscribed by the self-consciously ethical human law; the primacy of the household and clan supplanted by the primacy of citizenship.” Hegel’s interest in the communal customs of the ancient Greeks, their religion, distinguishes him from both the rationalists of the modern Enlightenment, who cared only for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
But that was then, this is now. Christianity is “the absolute religion” of modernity, Christ’s salvific immanence symbolizing the “Spirit’s dynamic.” “Christ represents man’s alienation or separation from God, but also reveals that God has alienated himself from himself,” as Jesus’ pleading prayer at Gethsemane proves. “The Good Friday of the Crucifixion”—a determinate negation if ever there was one—achieves “the Easter of resurrection and reconciliation and Christ’s return to God, and man is forever changed.” Dante was right to call his poem The Divine Comedy, inasmuch the apparent tragedy of the Crucifixion gives way to the supremely happy ending of the Resurrection of Christ and the redemption of man.
What does this metaphysical teaching mean for politics? Hegel denies that Rousseau’s state of nature could have existed, or could be proved to have existed, because “we never encounter human nature that has not already been mediated by freedom and political authority.” As for Kant, “we never encounter the will to freedom that has not already been mediated by nature.” Such formulations are too abstract—”valid analytically,” to be sure, but of no help in understanding politics in the real world. In the real world, “the final form that Spirit assumes is the modern state,” which “embodies the unity of Subject and Substance by uniting the subjective, passionate side of Spirit with its substantive completion through civic life.” As such, it never originated in a social contract. The state’s “law and morality mediate between the individual and the state, and thereby complete our freedom,” neither tyrannizing us nor allowing us to plunge into anarchy. “The state is not a mere instrument for self-preservation, but an organic whole, the living embodiment of the Concept of Spirit,” best seen in constitutional monarchy, a regime that combines the rule of law with executive force. [2]
In identifying Hegelian constitutional monarchy as a regime of liberalism, Newell scants the importance of Hegel’s championing of the administrative or bureaucratic state. This may be the result of his concentration on the Phenomenology rather than The Philosophy of Right. Newell thus sees clearly how Hegel aims at avoiding tyranny or ‘hard’ despotism. He does not see what Tocqueville sees: that the administrative state may bring about a ‘soft’ despotism, a form of rule that does not suppress human liberty but unbends the virtues that want liberty in the first place and enable citizens to step up to defend it.
Be this as it may, for Hegel the national state isn’t the only embodiment of the end of history. Each people has “a perspective on the divine operations of Spirit not only in their own country but throughout the world, which encourage them to transcend their subjectivity,” their nationalism. Works of art do, across time, what religions do, across territories, “rendering the divine in sensuous form, s that a statue can embody the spirit of an entire age, or its access to God.” And philosophy understands all of this rationally, contemplating the dialectical sweep of the Absolute Spirit theoretically. “In the coming synthesis, the nation-state will emerge as an organic mingling of political, aesthetic, religious and cultural bonds.”
The state has an apparently dark side, developing dialectically, through the determinate negation or “labor of the negative” seen in rule by terror. “For Hegel, only by seeing history without illusion as an outwardly violent, often dreadful process of creative destruction can we retain a realistic basis for any optimism we might entertain regarding the improvement of mankind and the world.” Hegel is thinking of the Jacobin Terror. But what would he think of the mass murders committed by the Communist and Nazi regimes of the next century? Newell considers “Hegel’s analysis of the Terror” as too likely to lend itself to those ruinous atrocities if one forgets Hegel’s insistence that the past must never be entirely obliterated, and only a fool or a tyrant would try. Such millenarian ‘politics’ relentlessly attempts “to eliminate all the mediating bonds of civil society,” all ethical life, in a phantasmagoria of moralism run wild. “A soundly educated (in Hegelian terms) citizen of today must surmount the horrors of genocide and tyranny by absorbing them intellectually and psychologically, sharpening his sense of ethical condemnation by recognizing that these variants of millenarian extremism are not dead and buried monsters from a past happily left behind, but the dark side of modernity itself, when ‘the laor of the negative,’ it imperative of destruction and re-creation, exceeds all bounds of moderation, prudence and respect for human beings.” Hegel’s takes his own historicist liberalism to be “the antidote to the dangerous fantasies of the General Will.” But is it an effective antidote to the “disturbing built-in tendency of modernity itself”? Hegel cannot avail himself of the non-metaphysical political teaching of Burke before him or of Tocqueville after him, having insisted that Being itself is teleological and immanent in the course of events, which necessarily encompasses and animates political life.
Hegel’s moderating intention was lost on Karl Marx, or rather rejected by him. He adopts Hegel’s collectivism—his insistence that progress toward knowledge is for everyone, not only the few philosophers—and his dialectical historicism but transforms the latter into dialectical materialism. No Spirit, absolute or other, need apply; no such force exists. All is matter in motion, but the motion proceeds dialectically toward a telos, communism. Or, as Newell puts it, Marx anthropomorphizes the Hegelian Spirit, making history “nothing but the conquest of and transformation of nature in the pursuit of freedom and material survival by human beings seeking power.” Hence his valorization of labor and its modern embodiment in the ‘working class’ or industrial proletariat, which he contends will overcome the bourgeoisie that enslaves them by victorious acts of the labor of the negative. After that labor has been completed, the bourgeoisie eliminated, there will be a brief era of socialism, of ownership of the means of production in the hands of proletarians, before that state and the social classes that use it as their instrument wither away and mankind achieves its full liberation. The state can wither away because human nature is malleable; under socialism, then in communism, it will no longer be what it was—compelled by capitalism to be grasping, selfish, manipulative—but the locus of an unselfish “freedom of untrammeled creativity.” Marx admired Lucretius, whose materialist-atomist ‘swerve’ showed him “a way in which spontaneity could be compatible with materialistic determinism,” especially since that swerve could now be said to move matter in predictable laws of change. Like Lucretius, Marx assumes that there may be movement without any invisible, immaterial force or ‘Spirit.’
Looking at the United States, Marx sees that political emancipation is not enough. Full emancipation requires social and economic freedom, as well. Americans are bourgeois. Their ‘ought’—unalienable rights—contradicts their ‘is’—capitalist wage slavery. This contradiction is irresolvable on “American terms.”
Newell judges Hegel to have been the far more sober historicist, having recognized that “even at the end of history…a political state with laws and police will be needed to balance the public and private goods.” But for Marx, “precisely the worst excesses of natural desire and fanatical willpower in the present guarantee the achievement of [a] beautiful collective existence for everyone.” “The irony,” Newell sees, “is that Marxism, whose original aim was the complete transcendence of the state, is transformed into a manifesto for Promethean state-building”—no liberation but a far worse tyranny than any previous monarch has imposed, or a far worse oligarchy than either feudal aristocrats or modern capitalists established.
Newell concedes that Marx correctly “warned that if the political revolution for the transition to socialism was too far in advance of…socioeconomic development, the result could only be the imposition of equality by force majeure”—seen in the Stalinist (but also the Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Pol-Potian) terror. “The result was a program of state terror to be equaled only by the Nazis.” While “Marx’s philosophy is not responsible for Stalinism in a direct causal sense,” Marx’s “explosion of the Hegelian synthesis of the unity of Subject and Substance—of freedom and community—left his philosophy intrinsically vulnerable to further radicalizations of its purely political pole, the ‘scientistic’ dimension of Marxism,” appropriated by tyrants claiming to represent the leading edge of historical project as determined by the iron laws of dialectic. And this tendency can even be discerned in Marx himself, who suggested that a backward country like Czarist Russia could and should leap ahead of the advanced capitalist countries, although its socialist revolution would need the reinforcement to be provided by the future proletarian revolutions in Western Europe. In practice, this led to more than three generations of attempts by the rulers of the Soviet Union to spark revolution in the ‘capitalist’ and therefore decidedly undemocratic ‘democracies’. The Soviet “attempt to build socialism from above through rapid collectivization and industrialization claimed an estimated thirty million lives,” and similar ambitions in China and Cambodia claimed tens of millions more.
Rousseau prepared the ground for historicism by arguing that human nature is malleable. The historicists Hegel and Marx saw that a more or less infinitely malleable human nature needed some other guiding principle if it were not to descend into nihilism. For them, ‘History’ provided that guiding principle: rationally discernible dialectical laws of progress toward a telos or ‘end of history.’ Subsequent historicists would not shrink from the nihilistic implications of malleability, having come to doubt the rational character of historical change. Newell next turns to Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Note
- More precisely, both Rousseau and Paul regard human nature as originally good but corrupted. The difference is that for Rousseau human corruption can be remediated by human effort; for Paul, only God’s self-sacrifice on the Cross can do that, since human nature has become irremediably corrupted otherwise.
- In its American form, Progressivism valorizes ‘the living Constitution,’ not the one the Founders framed to strengthen the social contract among Americans; Progressivism also tends to elevate the presidency, the executive, to a position of prominence, as seen (for example) in Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
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