Leo Strauss: On Hegel. Paul Franco, editor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Most readers of Strauss begin with Natural Right and History. There Strauss contrasts classical or ‘ancient’ political philosophy with ‘modern’ political philosophy. As Paul Franco remarks in his cogent introduction to On Hegel, “For Strauss the fear of violent death in Hobbes plays the same foundational role with respect to modern moral and political philosophy that radical doubt plays with respect to modern metaphysics.” Both radical doubt and fear of violent death derive “from distrust of nature”—to say nothing of God—rather than “grateful acceptance of it,” resulting in the characteristically modern philosophic attempt, instantiated in the technologies developed by modern scientists, “to actively control nature” instead of contemplating it.
In Natural Right and History Strauss remarks another contrast, one within the framework of this modern enterprise. Although the moderns would control nature, they nonetheless continue to appeal to nature, specifically human nature, as the source of moral and political right. In doing so, they also ‘lower’ the moral standard that human nature sets, inasmuch as they do not think very highly of human nature. Accordingly, thy replace the greatness of soul Aristotle upholds as the crown of ethical striving with the principles of self-preservation and acquisition. But these are still natural criteria for human conduct, down-to-earth though they are.
The tension between the attempt to conquer nature while upholding one part of nature, human nature, as the moral standard, heightens with Rousseau, in whom Strauss discerns a conception of human nature as being so malleable as hardly able to establish a usable standard at all. And so, Strauss argues, philosophers began to look elsewhere for a source of moral guidance. In the final section of Natural Right and History, Strauss finds in Edmund Burke’s celebrated denunciation of the French revolutionaries and their appeal to the natural “rights of man” a first attempt to derive right from “history”—meaning, the long course of human events which constitute the living tradition of a given people, or indeed of a given civilization. Strauss calls this new philosophic doctrine “historicism.”
Strauss’s selection of Burke as his specimen historicist may well puzzle his readers. Burke sometimes continues to profess natural-right principles and is in any event first and foremost a statesman rather than a philosopher. Just as puzzling, Strauss scarcely mentions G. W. F. Hegel, a philosopher par excellence, who elaborates an explicitly “historicist” doctrine in full and indeed systematic detail. [1]
Moreover, as Franco observes, there is a firm link between Hegel and Hobbes. “Hegel agrees with Hobbes on [the] foundational point” of modern political philosophy, locating “the origin of self-consciousness in the slave’s fear of violent death in his life-and-death struggle with the master”—the “struggle for recognition.” Hegel ‘historicizes’ the Hobbesian principle by putting it in the course of events, not in human beings as such. Under Hegel’s formulation, human nature can be as malleable as Rousseau said it was, without the consequent undermining of morality. Further, the modern project of controlling nature remains; indeed, the now-historical quest for human freedom from natural constraints makes possible not only (in Franco’s words) “the actualization of the best regime”—as Hobbes and Locke wanted to do—but (now going beyond Franco) makes his quest ‘nobler’ in its purpose than the low-but-realizable commercial monarchies and republics earlier moderns supposed possible. For Hegel, the modern state becomes not only useful but thoroughly rational to a degree even modern proponents of ‘Enlightenment’ though impossible.
Yet Strauss largely neglects Hegel in his published writings, with the exception of his exchange with the Hegelianizing Marxist and apologist for Stalin, Alexander Kojève, née Kojevnikov. That is, in the books and articles he published in his lifetime Strauss never addressed Hegel’s thought directly or in any detail. Between his accounts of Rousseau and Burke in Natural Right and History and his several engagements with Nietzsche, that grand historicist critic of Hegelian historicism, he leaves a hiatus, indeed a gulf. One wants to ask, ‘But Mr. Strauss, what about the master-historicist himself?’
We now have Strauss’s considered remarks on Hegel in the form of a well-annotated transcript of a graduate seminar on The Philosophy of History he conducted at the University of Chicago in 1965. Many of his classes were tape recorded by his students; typewritten transcripts of somewhat uneven quality have circulated for years as a sort of Straussian samizdat. In this seminar Strauss offered an interpretation of Hegel’s historicism remarkable not only for its acuity but for its equanimity. Far from a historicist himself, Strauss never descends to the level of polemical ‘critique’ so typical of latter-day adepts of ‘post-modernism.’ Indeed, he does not hesitate to correct students eager to judge Hegel too harshly and hastily.
An extraordinary caliber of students he did attract. We hear from “Mr. Shulsky”—Abram Shulsky, author of a study on Aristotle’s Politics and co-author of a standard text on the techniques of espionage; “Mr. Glenn”—Gary D. Glenn, long a mainstay of the political science department at Northern Illinois University; “Mr. Bruell”—Christopher Bruell, author of noteworthy treatments of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle; and “Miss Heldt”—the redoubtable Catherine H. Zuckert, whose scholarship has ranged from Plato to Machiavelli to American novelists. On Hegel makes it easy to see why Strauss drew them to his classes. To l’esprit de géométrie and l’esprit de finesse he added l’esprit de politesse —a formal, old-world charm blended with witty use of American advertising slogans and news events in side-comments that obviously took his students by surprise, not expecting him to know about such things.
Strauss begins by asking: Why study Hegel “in our capacity as political scientists”? Because Hegel influenced Marx, whose latter-day disciples ruled a substantial portion of the world population at the time; because Hegel redirected intellectuals’ attention from the state to “culture” (and especially religion) “as the comprehensive theme of reflections of human society”; because The Philosophy of History consists of a series of lectures to university students, making its arguments “much more easy to follow” than those encountered in Hegel’s formal writings; and, above all, because “Hegel was the first to make the understanding of the history of political philosophy an essential ingredient of political philosophy itself.”
Strauss then introduces Hegel historically, without conceding anything to historicism as a philosophic doctrine. (“I am not a Hegelian, and I do not believe that one can say that history is rational.”) For example, he explains that “the simple formula of Hegel’s philosophy of history” is “order comes out of disorder without being intended.” In this he is obviously indebted to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” But Hegel “enlarged this” to encompass “the whole of history”; the moral sentiments Smith attributes to nature, and indeed nature itself, are reconceived by Hegel as part of a blind yet orderly movement, unfolding via rationally discernible laws, towards a fully “rational order,” one entirely conscious of itself as an order.
But how is it possible for the historically-determined philosopher to know that the ‘end of history’ has occurred? “Hegel was the first to face this difficulty: If the philosophy is the son of his time, how can he have found the eternal truth?” And Hegel’s general answer is: He can, if he lives in the moment “in which time as it were coincides with eternity,” if he lives in what Strauss calls the “absolute epoch” or “absolute moment” when the owl of Minerva not only takes flight but lands, the moment in which the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, has become wisdom itself. In this moment, the philosopher (it happens to have been Hegel, but that is of no importance) can solve the fundamental problem of Plato’s “dialectics of the ideas.” Platonic dialectic poses the problem of how the ideas, beings of a different order of being from the things we see around us, somehow generate those things? Hegelian dialectic, understood for the first time at the end of history, because of the end of history, reveals how this happens—why “the whole realm of ideas necessarily externalizes into nature on the one hand and mind on the other hand”—by the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit (which Hegel also calls “God), its dialectical work now completed. Hegel’s new theory of logic posits a dialectic that doesn’t merely catch opinionated folk in self-contradiction but rather works through contradictions, through the clash of contradictory opinions and actions (such as wars and factions) toward ever-grander syntheses of opposites, culminating in the final synthesis, the end of history. [2] With Hegel’s new logic, reason doesn’t simply discern contradiction; “reason thinks through contradiction.” In this, Strauss says, “Hegel surely is the most radical rationalist that ever wrote,” the one who understood reason as “something which is not merely a faculty of man” but instead subsumed all of being under the rubric of a reason not ‘above’ empirical reality, as in Plato, but as immanent in it, and immanent in the course of events in the empirical world. “God” isn’t transcendent but immanent. “There is nothing outside of reason, nothing which is not rational.”
Politically, this means that political life is no longer architectonic, as Plato and Aristotle maintained. “The political life is part of a larger whole,” the life of the “collective mind, folk-mind”—a “culture” consisting of language, religion, arts, and (on the material side) natural descent, climate, and geography. “The folk-mind is the mediation between nature and mind.” No folk-mind dies but instead “becomes the matter for a higher principle embodied in another people”—a rational process in Hegel’s sense of the dialectical, namely, the clash of opposites leading to a new synthesis. In turn, “each folk-mind is a part, or facet, or stage of the mind, the world-mind” or Absolute Spirit, “and this is therefore a reconciliation between the universal and the particular.” It is also a reconciliation of good and evil, inasmuch as both are necessary elements of the world-historical dialectic. In this, Hegel satisfies himself that he has solved the theologians’ ‘problem of evil,’ while at the same time vindicating the religions, especially Christianity, as philosophically necessary steps toward full human self-consciousness or wisdom. His new dialectic also solves the philosophic problem posed by Hume, the problem of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Contra Hume, at the end of history one can indeed see how the ‘ought’ derives from the ‘is,’ because what is has worked toward what ought to be, what must be, namely, the end or purpose of history.
These matters being so, after his philosophic introduction Hegel divides his lectures on the philosophy of history into four parts, each corresponding to a culture, a folk-mind: the Oriental world; the Greek world; the Roman world; and the Germanic world, wherein the historically-unfolding Absolute Spirit or World Mind has reached its culmination in Hegel’s comprehensive rational system. Even in ‘pre-history,’ in Africa, we already see the human intention to oppose itself to external nature in the practice of sorcery and even of cannibalism, which form parts of African religion. But Asia is where history proper began. In Africa and elsewhere, the sorcerer assumes that the world around him “remains subject to arbitrariness”—manipulable at his command; he is a radical ‘subjectivist.’ The Chinese were the first to understand the world around them as ‘objective,’ as having a stubborn reality of its own. But in making this advance, Chinese civilization (and Asian civilization generally) run to the opposite extreme. They lack “an inner sense, pointing in the right direction,” instead obeying the Emperor’s commands “as a matter of course” because they are supposed to be the “Mandates of Heaven.” this paternalism and its accompanying rule by administration, leads finally to cultural-political ossification, as “there is no life, so to speak, in the state. it all depends on the man at the top.” In such civilizations as China, India, or ancient Judea there can be no “science and political liberty” because while there is an understanding that the world has an objective integrity of its own, there is no sense of rational opposition of human beings to this given order. This (Strauss emphasizes) has nothing to do with biological racialism; he quotes Carl Schmitt as saying that “the moment Hitler came to power…Hegel died” in Germany.
India is superior to China in that for the Chinese the highest thing is “a visible heaven,” whereas Hindus “go beyond and peer through heaven, as it were, and discover a spiritual principle—nothingness as the ground of everything—and this is an act of liberation.” It is not a liberation of reason, but it is a precondition of reasoning. In Persia we see another advance. The Persians “view the whole historical process as a fight” between opposites, between light and darkness, goodness and evil. “The point is that this highest, the light, does not absorb the individual things or human beings but lets them be what they are; whereas for the Hindu, nothingness leads to the negation of the particulars, Nirvana.” The Persian insight provides a foundation both for dialectic and for individuation—not yet understood rationally, but posited.
Notice that as Hegel uncovers these gradual advances in human thought in Asia, he moves geographically closer and closer toward the West. Phoenicia is the next step, where a a people goes to sea, trading as far away as the British Isles, and therefore needing a plan, needing to engage in practical if not theoretical reasoning about how to survive at sea, pursuing an active way of life, industrious and not merely agricultural or ‘vegetative.’ what is more the Phoenician god, Adonis, dies: “The death of God is the highest point of Phoenicia, and Hegel implies that there is some connection between this concept of the death of God—that the negativity belongs to the spirit itself—and what he had said about the industrial character of Phoenicia.” Neither commerce and industry nor a religion in which God dies bespeaks a way of life settled in a condition of changelessness. It prefigures Christianity and the Cross. “In the Old Testament there is indeed for the first time the primacy of the spirit,” the Persian light now the first sign of a Creator -God, a god of freedom, superior to material ‘givenness.’ In this, Hegel takes up Burke’s distinction between the beautiful—the harmonious, the natural, the created—and the sublime—the creative, but also the suffering, the sacrificial, the dialectical—and this may be the link Strauss sees between Hegel’s progressivism and Burke’s traditionalism. “For Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it,” while for “Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas.” But they did not set out to conquer nature, only to contemplate and apprehend it.
Yet Asia still does not produce the rational. The rational came to light “in the free, joyful spirit of Greece,” in the Apollonian command, “man, know thyself.” In answering the riddle posed by the Asian sphinx, Oedipus “overthrew the sphinx from the rock,” liberating the Oriental spirit, “which Egypt had advanced so far as to propose the problem.” “The answer is “that the inwardness of nature is the thought that has its existence only in the human consciousness.” In the realm of historical action, the same transition occurred when the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis, marking the limit of Persian imperialism, an imperialism that could never form itself into “a harmonious whole” and which now retreated against “Greek organization,” itself an expression of the liberated human spirit.
Hegel ignored the Greek understanding of art as imitation. Greek art, preeminently Greek poetry, is in his view rather a form of religion. “That is its peculiar greatness and freedom,” seen in the triumph of the Olympian gods over the old cthonic gods, Chronos and Ouranos. The freedom implied in art is not yet the full, modern freedom, as it retains what Hegel calls “an essential relation to some stimulus supplied by Nature,” something external to the human spirit. “Nevertheless,” Strauss says, “the freedom of the mind is recognized within these limits, and therefore Greece is higher than the Orient.” Among the arts practiced by the Greeks was rhetoric, the art of debate, the art of democratic politics, the nucleus of Socratic debate or dialectic. In negating traditional opinions and practices (and getting himself killed for it) Socrates and his dialectic still come from them, in some sense express them.
The defect of the Greek world is seen in the slavery that undergirds its democratic politics. For the Greeks, freedom consists of controlling the passions; they do not see that innate freedom of the human mind “by virtue of which every man is by nature free,” responsible, “and therefore an object of respect.” There is reason in Greece, but no “right of subjectivity,” no conscience—only the virtue of the self-governing citizen. The self-governing citizen shares in ruling the tiny polis; there is no central state, no sense of “a distinction between the people and the government,” and thus no realm of privacy, of personal subjectivity, and therefore of individual rights. Socrates provides the beginning of the salutary corruption of the Greek folk-mind by causing “the awakening of subjectivity.” But a fuller freedom of spirit, of conscience, and of individual rights must await the founding of Christianity.
But first came the conqueror of Greece—its dialectical opponent, Rome. Rome would eventuate in Christianity, “the complete break with naturalness” and its replacement (or at least displacement) in the Christian soul with Spirit. Before this though could occur, there needed to be a midway point; classical Rome provided this with the concept of personality. “Personality,” Strauss remarks, “is not individuality.” “The concept of personality is a legal concept”; in Rome, all men were understood to be “legal persons,” human beings with ‘standing’ in court. “Out of the full person of formal law there will grow the fuller individuality later on.” At the same time, legal standing in court implies conventionality, artificiality. The emphasis on the Roman citizen as a legal person comports with the fact that “Rome was from the outset not natural in any way; nor did it have the originality going together with naturalness.” On the contrary, it originated in fratricidal violence, the story of Romulus and Remus—a story, Strauss emphasizes, that the Romans told about themselves. “A nation which can tell this story about its own origin thereby reveals its soul,” whether the story is factually true or not.”
Rome “constitutes a progress beyond Greece” because “there is no longer the tutelage of nature which is in Greece,” no longer “the charming union of nature and mind which is charming and therefore also deceptive and untrue.” Rome’s origins were ugly and it ended in the ugly rule of emperor-tyrants. Rome had a civil religion but according to Hegel (following Machiavelli) it was a sham. The emptiness and misery of classical Rome was called ‘sin’ by Christians. And the sin it lived by—especially its unending, unjust imperial wars—aspired to universality, to worldwide empire. In attempting to save the old republic, Cicero wasted his time.” “Looking at this thing in hindsight,” Hegel “sees what wonderful things came out of this terrible Caesarism, namely, the emergence of Christianity and the modern world.”
Hegel’s “section of Christianity…is in a way the most important part of the whole work.” Roman imperialism brought the Romans to Transalpine Gaul, Germany, and Britain—to the Europe which would become the center of Christendom and then the center of modernity. Rome also prepared for Christianity by its universality of thought as well as action, by “purif[ying] the human mind and heart from all particularity because it recognized only the individual as an abstract legal person.” Christianity would take the Jewish claim that man is sinful, “wholly alienated from God and yet to be redeemed by God,” combine it with Roman universality while rejecting Rome itself as sinful, and finally give all of these themes a “visible, sensual certainty” by worshipping Jesus, “God’s son…incarnated as man.”
The final step will be the “spiritual” understanding of Jesus “as opposed to the carnal understanding,” that is, a fully rationalist form of ‘Christianity’ now purged of the miracles and the doctrine of sanctity or holiness. Science will replace miracles, mastering nature; immanence will replace the separation of Spirit and human nature. “The recognition of the rights of man, the recognition of the infinite value of the individual…this is the full realization of Christianity” according to Hegel. The rational Absolute Spirit replaces the Holy Spirit.
Strauss distinguishes Hegel’s philosophy of history from political philosophy. Political philosophy “was based from the very beginning on the difference between the good and the ancestral; the agathon and the patrium,” as seen in the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. To Plato’s Socrates, inquiring after the good in the Athenian marketplace by rationally testing the opinions of his fellow citizens, “the various forms of the ancestral” to which men characteristically appeal when struggling to define the good “are divinations or fragments of the good, and even souled fragments of it.” “Hegel says: No, there is an order among these ancestrals”—indeed, “an ascending order,” as they appear over the centuries. “Not only is the end toward which they point…rational, the way towards the end is itself rational” and therefore as necessary in its progress as a logical proof. “At the end there is complete reconciliation of reason and tradition” in the fully rational administrative state.
Classical philosophy was “cosmological,” “concerned with men within the cosmos,” with natural beings within the natural order. Changes in “human thoughts and human societies” were understood “within the cosmic context,” within nature as a whole. Well before Hegel, modern philosophy had rejected this. Hobbes asserts that “we understand only what we make, i.e., if we merely discover something, it is essentially unintelligible”; Descartes agrees, as for him “the beginning is the thinking ego, not the cosmos.” For the moderns, “the thinking, understanding subject is the origin of all meaning,” and the rights of man are “subjective rights.” As early as Machiavelli, one sees disdain for the “imagined commonwealths” of the ancients, pagan and Biblical—commonwealths said to be outside and indeed above men. Modern ‘subjectivity’ is, Strauss maintains, “the necessary but not sufficient condition of the discovery of history.” Modern ‘subjects’ or ‘selves’ consult their own desires and reach out to grasp, to manipulate, to control external nature, not to guide themselves by its laws or by some idea of the good discernible in it. This project of the conquest of nature is understood to be progressive.
“All of these kinds of things came together and made it compelling for man in the eighteenth century to say that the human mind necessarily progresses and its results necessarily spread. And then by the spread of knowledge the people become enlightened and opinion is changed; and if opinion is changed, power is changed, because power will now move in a different direction than it moved before it was enlightened.” This “altered the nature not only of political philosophy but of political life very profoundly.” Hegel synthesized all of these elements into his philosophy; this synthesis was the “absolute speech” in which Christianity, itself predicting the advent of a new heaven and a new earth, “becomes completely secularized,” instantiated by human rationality. “Christianity has become fully understood, i.e., religion has been transformed into philosophy by Hegel at the University of Berlin.” Similarly, the arts that once depicted the gods—whether Athena or Christ Pantocrator—are replaced by “philosophy, including science,” and especially the scientific art, technology, and by “the rational state, revealing itself in reasonable laws,” implemented in accordance with the principles of scientific administration. This is no longer political philosophy because it is no longer political—no longer an interplay of ruling and being ruled but instead a matter of consensual obedience to rational regulation. And it is no longer philosophy, either, but the wisdom for which philosophers had long searched but never found until the dialectic of the Absolute Spirit rested in Hegel’s fully rational and comprehensive system of thought and of action, now unified.
How would Hegel reply to what now calls itself ‘postmodernism,’ the refusal of the authority of the administrative state and indeed of reason itself? Hegel as illuminated by Strauss makes this quite clear: The ‘end of history is the peak of the roof, but the owl of Minerva which takes wing from it descends to catch rodents. From the heights, history has nowhere to go but down, or perhaps around. And so it has, into a democratized Nietzscheism for the Last Man.
Notes
- For a step-by-step exposition of The Philosophy of History, see the five articles posted in the “Philosophers” section of this website.
- See Stanley Rosen: G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), discussed in “Historicity and Reason: Two Studies,” on this website in the “Philosophers” section of this website.
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