G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge: 2011.
Paul Franco, ed.: Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Note: This is the third of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures, essays informed by transcripts of classes conducted by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in 1965.
In Part II of the Lectures Hegel considers ancient Greece, telling his students that “among the Greeks we feel ourselves immediately at home, for we are on the soil of spirit,” a soil modern Germans now occupy, a soil where they have flourished. Recalling that he’d compared the Greek world to “the period of adolescence,” he clarifies his metaphor, saying what he does and does not mean by that. He doesn’t mean it “in the sense that youth bears within it a serious, anticipative destiny”; he means that “youth does not yet present the activity of work, does not yet exert itself for a definite intelligent aim, but rather exhibits a concrete freshness of the soul’s life,” a life in which the senses and the spirit blend in “youthful freshness,” “spiritual vitality.” The youth aspires, newly self-conscious and aiming at self-cultivation, the enhancement of his individuality through the institutions of state, family, law, and religion. The adult, by contrast, “devotes his life to labor for an objective aim, which he pursues consistently, even at the cost of his individuality.” Hegel artfully selects Achilles, “the Homeric youth of the Trojan War,” and brilliant, brave Alexander, with his “beautiful humanity and individuality,” as the alpha and the omega of the Greek world—Achilles “the ideal youth of poetry,” world-conquering Alexander “the ideal youth of reality,” indeed, “the freest and finest individuality that the real world has ever produced.” [1]
Hegel divides Greek history into three periods: the first, often called the Heroic Age, “that of becoming of real individuality”; the second, Hellenic Age, “that of its independence and prosperity as conquest outward”; the third, Hellenistic Age, “the period of its decline and fall, and its encounter with” Rome, its successor in “world-history.” Greece as we know it began with a synthesis of the Greeks themselves with foreign migrants and invaders. These elements were united by an education which combined “its forces to produce its real and proper vigor.” Greece flourishes in military victory and commercial prosperity. But these very advances, in “direct[ing] its energies outward,” caused it to abandon “its purposes at home”; further, the defeat of its enemies opened Greece to “internal dissension,” bringing on its decline. Greece then faced ruin and conquest by Rome. “The same process, it may be stated once for all, will meet us in the life of every world-historical people.”
Accordingly, Hegel also divides his lectures on Greece into three parts: “The Elements of the Greek Spirit”; “The Shapes of Beautiful Individuality” (itself divided into three sections); and “The Fall of the Greek Spirit.” In Greece, “the condition of being submerged in nature is abrogated, and therefore the massiveness of geographical relations has also vanished,” as it could not have done in ancient Asia, and had not yet done in modern Asia by Hegel’s lifetime. The geography of Greece conduced to this abrogation because its “soil in manifold ways spread[s] across the sea”—a peninsula with innumerable inlets and offshore islands. Without a major river and thus without a major valley plain, the “divided and manifold character” of the land “perfectly corresponds with the varied life of Greek races and the flexibility of the Greek spirit.” Greeks were never “patriarchically united by a bond of nature, but realized a union first through another medium, in law and spiritual ethics”; “the Greek people became what it was,” especially because waves of foreigners settled there. “Only through such foreignness and through such supersession did the beautiful, free Greek spirit come into existence…. It is superficial folly to imagine that a beautiful and truly free life could arise from the simple development of a race remaining in its blood relationship and friendship.” Human beings advance with dialectic, with the clash of opposites.
What adaptation to foreigners does is what Greek geography does: shake a people out of settled customs, force them into the dialectic that drives history, as Hegel understands it. “Every world-historical people apart from the Asian empires, which stand outside the connection of world history, developed in this manner,” including the Romans. “Greece and its peoples were continuously on the move.” The Americans of Hegel’s time were quite different, having emigrated but not integrated with the aborigines; the Americans of subsequent decades, the Americans of the ‘melting pot,’ exemplified his teaching.
And then there was the sea. “The nature of their land brought them to this amphibious existence,” floating on the waves, then returning to port, “neither wandering about like the nomadic peoples nor stagnating like the peoples of the watercourses,” the riverfronts. Initially, the Greeks were pirates (“as we see from Homer”), but they later settled into a life of trade-voyaging. What settled them was the founding of small fortress-cities ruled by royal houses, “the nuclei of small towns.” These gave greater security to agriculture and “protected commercial intercourse against robbery.” Greece’s ‘Heroic Age’ saw no rule of law, as rulers derived authority from superiority “in riches, possessions, weaponry, and ancestry.” “Their subjects obeyed them” out of “the need, universally felt, of being held together, and of obeying a ruler accustomed to command, without envy and ill-will towards him.” Neither caste nor serfdom, neither patriarchy nor constitutional government prevailed. Authority derived from being “individually heroic, resting on personal merit”; such authority “does not continue long” but, it might be added, it formed the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey, substantial gifts to all subsequent generations of men.
The government of the royal council paralleled that of the Olympian Pantheon. There was mutual respect between the king and his courtiers, “but each one of them has his own will.” The Greeks united against their common enemy during the Trojan War, but only temporarily. Individuality was too strong for that. As for relations between the rulers and the people, there existed “no actual ethical bond connecting them.” As in the Greek tragedies, “the people is the chorus, passive, deedless; the heroes perform the deeds and incur the consequent responsibility. There is nothing in common between them; the people have no directing power, but only appeal to the gods.” Such regimes could not endure. Once royalty had done what needed to be done—primarily, securing their peoples from violence foreign and domestic—”it rendered itself superfluous.” “A calmer state of things,” with less immigration but no “united undertaking” prevailed under the conquering dynasty of the Heraclids. Eventually, the people rose to greater authority, and since industry in the modern sense didn’t exist and all wealth was landed wealth, only colonization could preserve “some degree of equality among the citizens.” Where colonization proved an inadequate remedy, tyrants took over.
By the time of Cyrus the Great “we see the various [Greek] states now displaying their particular character” and, simultaneously, we see “the formation of the distinct Greek spirit” pervading all the many states. With no overall despotism or indeed any other national regime, “men’s attention is more largely directed to themselves, and to the extension of their slight powers,” “thrown back on their inner spirit and cautiously circumspect.” They perceived nature acutely while “showing boldness and independent vigor in contending with it.” They wondered at nature, conjecturing about it; in this, Aristotle’s remark that philosophy begins with wonder means that Greece had proved hospitable to the initiation of the philosophic quest, even if it also felt threatened by it to the extent of killing philosophers. Greeks responded to nature as they had done to most foreigners—not as “something given” but as something “which is friendly to the human spirit, and to which it may sustain a positive relation,” something to which one might both adapt to and adapt to oneself. “The natural,” like the foreign, “holds its place in their minds only after undergoing some transformation by spirit, not immediately. Man regards nature only as an excitement to his faculties”—a dialectical excitement—”and only that which he makes spiritual from it can have any influence over him”; one thinks of Plato’s Ideas.
Strauss emphasizes Hegel’s interest in Greek religion. To those who reply that religion consists only of myths, “Hegel would say: Are not such myths much more revealing about human beings than chronicles about income, the revenues of kings, or maybe victories and defeats? That is not a bad point.” In religion, Hegel proposes, “the position of curious surmise, of attentive eagerness to catch the meaning of nature, is indicated to us in the comprehensive idea of Pan.” Pan “is the general shiver in the silence of the forests”—not representative of “an objective whole, but [of] that indefinite ground which likewise is connected with the element of the subjective.” You can hear him playing his pipe, but you only glimpse him in the shadows; you fear him just enough to want to imagine and explain him, or hear such an imagining and explanation from the Muses. “Nature answered the questions which the Greek put to her; this is true in the sense that he answered the questions of nature from his own spirit,” a “purely poetical” form of contemplation whereby “spirit supplies the signification which the natural image expresses.”
Hence also Pallas-Athene. When Achilles thinks of drawing his sword against King Agamemnon, it is the goddess of “wisdom or consideration” who restrains him. “Such an explanation denotes the perception of the inner meaning, the sense, the underlying truth; and the poets, especially Homer, were in this way the teachers of the Greeks,” adding “a richly intelligent perception” to their poetry, never letting imagination ‘run wild’ as the “capricious indulgence of fancy.” In this the Greek spirit lives “free from superstition, since it changes the sensuous into the sensible—the intellectual—so that [particular] decisions are derived from spirit.” Thus in Hegelian-historicist terms the Greeks “evolved the spiritual from the materials which they had received” (emphasis added). Hegel never supposes that the arts came down to the Greeks from the gods, as the Greeks themselves believed.
Fundamentally, the Greek spirit is a free spirit, “conditioned by,” and with “an essential relation to, some stimulus supplied by nature,” but transforming that stimulus, ‘making something out of it.’ “This phase of the spirit is the medium between the loss of individuality on the part of man (such as we observe in the Asiatic principle, in which the spiritual and divine exists only under a natural form), and infinite subjectivity as pure certainty of itself—the position that the ‘I’ is the ground of all that can lay claim to substantial existence.” Within the Greek’s individuality, the subject, “the same harmony is produced,” as “heart, disposition, passion, temperament” all develop “into free individuality.” “This stamps the Greek character as that of beautiful individuality, which is produced by spirit, transforming the merely natural into an expression of its own being”—”the spirit of the plastic artist, forming the stone into a work of art.” Greek art integrates forms into coherent wholes, unlike Egyptian art, which jams the head of a man onto the body of a lion. Greeks know themselves as free in their artistry, but also think of their art as an embodiment of the “innate essence” of the material with which they work—never as pure human creation. The Greek artist “feels calm in contemplating” the products of his spirit, whether they are statues, edifices, or the laws of the state. In this he is “not only free in himself, but possessing the consciousness of his freedom; thus the honor of the human is engulfed in the honor of the divine. Men honor the divine in and for itself, but at the same time as their deed, their production, their existence; thus the divine receives its honor through the respect paid to the human, and the human in virtue of the honor paid to the divine.”
Beautiful individuality “realizes itself” through the subjective work of art, “the culture of the man himself”; through the objective work of art, “the shaping of the world of divinities”; and through the political work of art, “the form of the constitution [regime], and the relations of the individuals who compose it.” For his part, Strauss remarks that “Hegel is perhaps more responsible than anyone else” for the claim that “aesthetics is concerned with the beautiful in art and not with the beautiful simply.” For the Greeks themselves, “a living horse is more beautiful than a beautifully sculptured horse which has no life,” but “for Hegel it is the opposite. The sculptured horse is higher in rank than the living horse.” “For Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas,” and human beings find their place within the all-encompassing beauty of the cosmos. But “for Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it”; the true consists of the Absolute Spirit, which encompasses the cosmos, produces the cosmos, and reshapes the cosmos through the spiritual agency of itself in man. “The difference truly is this: for Aristotle, the fundamental distinction which is underlying this discussion is that between nature and convention, and for Hegel it is that between nature and mind” or spirit (Geist).
Having identified and described the elements of the Greek spirit, Hegel has prepared the ground for his second and most elaborately articulated topic, “the shapes of beautiful individuality,” the forms that spirit made. There were three, as indicated: subjective, objective, and political.
In its subjective dimension spirit confronts objects. “Man with his necessities sustains a practice in relation to external nature, and because he makes it satisfy his desires and exhausts it, he has recourse to means…. In order to subdue [natural objects], man introduces other natural agents, and thus turns nature against itself, and invents instruments for that purpose.” Thus far, Bacon. The Hegelian dimension comes in only when he adds, “human inventions belong to spirit, and such an instrument is to be respected more than a mere natural object for that reason.” Although not vain, the Greeks did subdue nature to “gain special distinction and consequent enjoyment,” quite apart from their desire for security. “Free as a bird singing in the air, man only expresses what lies in his untrammeled human nature, in order through such expression to prove himself and gain recognition”—the struggle for which stands at the core of Hegelian morality. Such freedom and desire for recognition extended to sport, to the Olympic Games, a dialectic of bodies wherein “man shows his freedom, viz., that he has transformed his body into an organ of spirit.”
Respecting the objects produced by the spirit of the plastic artist, Hegel directs his students’ attention to the religious dimension of Greek art. Indian artists represent a god as “some power of nature for which the human shape supplies only an outward form.” Greek artists attempt to represent the divine itself; the “essence” of their art-works “is the spiritual itself.” True, “the divinity of the Greeks is not yet the absolute, free spirit, but spirit in a particular mode, fettered by the limitations of humanity—still dependent as a determinate individuality on external conditions.” In plain language, he means that the Greek gods were represented as individual human figures—the Venus de Milo. “Individualities, objectively beautiful, are the gods of the Greeks.” The spirit is “not yet regarded as itself spirit which is for itself, but which is there, still manifesting itself sensorially, but so that the sensorial is not its substance, but is only an element of its manifestation.” The advance on Asian art is that for the Greeks the natural is “merely the point of departure” in a line of thought that aims at matters of the spirit. “The Greek gods in themselves express what they are. The eternal repose and clear intelligence that dignifies the head of Apollo is not a symbol but the expression in which spirit manifests itself, and shows itself present.”
In terms of mythology, “the reduction of nature” to a place subordinate to the spirit was expressed “as the war of the gods, the overthrow of the Titans by the race of Zeus,” which Hegel understands as “the transition from the Oriental to the Occidental spirit.” Greeks thereby moved from the “merely natural, nature itself,” to the Olympian spirit of “the new divinities, who embody a spiritual import and themselves are spirit.” The Greeks continue to venerate nature, but as a thing subordinate to spirit. Their “new gods retain natural elements, and consequently a determinate relation to the powers of nature” (‘Zeus cloud-gatherer,’ as they call him). However, Zeus is also “the political god, the protector of the ethical and of hospitality,” a gatherer of human beings under the spirit of Greekness and indeed of humanity. Hegel esteems Apollo even more; he is “the prophesying and discerning god, light that makes everything clear,” the “healer and strengthener” and destroyer, too; “he himself is pure,” having “no wife” and careening into no “disgusting adventures, like Zeus.” He sings; he dances; he partakes in the arts. ‘On the distaff side,’ as the Greeks would say, Artemis replaces Cybele; this “chaste huntress and destroyer of wild beasts” effects another instance of the “change of the natural into the spiritual.” “This transformation of the natural into the spiritual is the Greek spirit itself.” Although “the abstract understanding cannot comprehend this blending of the natural with the spiritual,” Hegelian dialectic, founded upon immanence not creationism, encompasses it. [2]
And like Greece itself, the Olympian Pantheon cannot be understood as “a system.” Zeus “perhaps” rules the other gods, “but not with real force, so that they are left free in their peculiarity,” their individuality, just as the Greek city-states are both Greek and particular, identifiably themselves. Given “the scatteredness of the origin of Greek life,” Athens and Sparta are both recognizably Greek, but no one would confuse them. “That higher thing, the knowledge of unity as God, the One Spirit, was not yet known to the Greeks.” “The local gods stand alone,” “conditioned by the particular consciousness and circumstances of the areas in which they appear,” in this respect similar to the Indian gods and, looking forward, the Catholic saints.
But what (Nietzsche will demand) of Dionysus? Hegel knows. “A second source of origin of particularities is natural religion,” the “Mysteries.” “These mysteries of the Greeks present something which, as unknown, has attracted the curiosity of all times, under the supposition of profound wisdom.” Hegel doubts that there was much profundity in the Mysteries. “The mysteries were rather antique rituals”—”sensorial usages and exhibitions, consisting of symbols of the universal operations of nature,” such as eclipses. “It is as unhistorical as it is foolish to assume that profound philosophical truths are to be found there.” The mysteries amounted to the Greeks’ acknowledgment of “the universal vital force and its metamorphoses,” perceived with “shuddering awe” because they are “an element alien to the pure clear forms, and threaten them with destruction.” “On this account, the gods of art remain separated from the gods of the mysteries, and the two spheres must be strictly dissociated.” Hegel leaves no doubt as to ‘whose’ side he’s on. In his non-rationalist variety of vitalism, Nietzsche will seek more balance, always at the risk of overbalancing on the side of vital chaos.
Hegel applauds Greek anthropomorphism. “Man as the spiritual constitutes the element of truth in the Greek gods, which rendered them superior to all nature-gods and all abstractions of the one and highest being.” However, they “must not be regarded as more human than the Christian God.” In living, suffering, and dying, Jesus is “infinitely more human than the humanity of the Greek idea of the beautiful.” To put it in Burke’s terms, Jesus, and humanity, are not only beautiful but also sublime. What the Greeks did see, however, was that “if God is to manifest Himself, His naturalness must be that of spirit, which for sensorial conception is essentially man; for no other form can manifest itself as spiritual.” A ‘sacred cow’ makes no sense, because cows have neither speech nor reason. [3]
Hegel then asks, “Must God manifest Himself?” Yes, because “there is nothing essential that does not manifest himself.” (In this Hegel shows himself a child of the Enlightenment, although he proves in some way a rebellious child.) “The real defect of the Greek religion, as compared with the Christian, is, therefore, that in the former the manifestation constitutes the highest mode, in fact the entirety, of the divine being, while in the Christian religion, the manifestation is regarded only as a moment of the divine,” as Christ lives His life as human, dies, and then “elevates Himself to glory.” “The Greek god, by contrast, exists for his worshipers perennially in the manifestation—only in marble, in metal or wood, or as figured by the imagination.” This was so because in Greece “man was not duly estimated, did not obtain honor and dignity, till he had more fully elaborated and developed himself in the attainment of the freedom implicit in the aesthetic manifestation in question; the form and shaping of the divinity therefore continued to be the product of a particular subject.” The Greeks “did not yet realize spirit in its generality.” “Only the inward spirit, certain in itself, can bear to dispense with the aspect of appearance, and has the security to trust one of these, the divine nature” (emphasis added), rather than several of its many aspects, as Greek polytheism does. “Subjectivity was not comprehended in all its depth by the Greek spirit”; “the human spirit was not yet absolutely legitimized.” [4] This is why the Greeks believed that even their gods, spirit manifest, were ruled by fate, which could be known only by means of consulting oracles. They did not understand, as Hegel contends, that all is spirit, that spirit is absolute, not fate. Again, Nietzsche will deny this, and insist on a core of fatum within himself, as an individual. Nietzsche re-valorizes the Greek tragedians.
The final work of Greek art, its architectonic or masterwork, was political. “The state unites the two phases just considered,” namely, the subjective and objective work of art. Neither “a mere object, like the deities” of Greece, nor “merely subjectively developed to a beautiful physique,” the state is both “a living, universal spirit” and “the self-conscious spirit of the single individuals” who live within it as citizens. The East saw despotic regimes, as befits its naturalism, its unfreedom. The West, beginning with Greece, sees democracy, wherein “the freedom of the individual exists but has not yet advanced to the degree of abstraction whereby the subject depends simply upon the substantial, the state as such,” in the form of a modern, centralized bureaucracy or administration. By contrast, Rome, while not yet bureaucratic, will see “a harsh rule dominating” individuals—reestablishing centralization although not sliding back into Oriental despotism. Germany will see constitutional monarchy, “in which the individual participates and is co-active not only in the monarch but in the entire monarchical organization,” the administrative state.
To break from Asian political practice, however, Greeks needed to establish democracy, with its laws, with consciousness of “legal and ethical foundation,” with its genuinely political life, which Aristotle would describe as ruling and being ruled as distinguished from ‘one-way’ or ‘top-down despotic rule. The patriarchs of the Homeric Age gave way to the lawgivers—the Seven Sages, including Solon of Athens. The sagacity of the Seven Sages encompassed no real science; their wisdom was prudential; “they were practical politicians,” not philosopher-kings or scientific administrators. As always in Hegel, Greek ethics should not be confused with morality: “As in beauty, the natural element is present in its sensorialness, so also is it present” in the customary, objective nature of Greek law, custom presented “in the manner of natural necessity.” In this as in all things, “the Greeks remain in the midst of beauty and have not attained the higher standpoint of truth.” “No principle has as yet manifested itself, which can contravene such willing custom”—for the Greeks wholeheartedly, ‘subjectively,’ affirm their customs—”and hinder its realizing itself in action.” As with the gods, so with customs; for the Greeks they are real insofar as they are manifest, insofar as they appear, in both senses of the term. Hegel contrasts this with “modern conceptions of democracy,” which involve appeals to such foundational justifications as the common good, interests of state, and so on.
But in Greece, “that very subjective freedom”—the moral concept of the good will—”which is the principle and characteristic form of freedom in our world, which forms the absolute basis of our state and religious life, could not manifest itself in Greece otherwise than as ruination.” The Greeks “had no conscience” in our sense of the term; “with them was predominant the habit of living for their country without further reflection.” To reflect upon the goodness of custom was to undermine it. Hence the Athenians’ hostility to Socrates and also to the sophists, who preceded Socrates in their practice of reflecting upon custom, of suggesting reforms, of encouraging individuals to ‘think for themselves’ “even in defiance of the existing constitution” or regime. “Each has his principles, and as he so opines, so is he also convinced, that this is the best and must be fancied as reality.” For Greece, then, morality was corrupting. It diluted the authority of lawgiving sages and the laws they gave. “As soon as any of these great men had performed what was needed, envy intruded, which is to say, the feeling of equality with regard to special talent—and he was either imprisoned or exiled.”
There were, moreover, “three other circumstances” limiting Greek freedom, constraining its further development. First, the aforementioned consultation of oracles, the attempt to know what ‘fate’ decreed, prevailed in public and private. This practice eroded over time, but since no overarching or general spirit replaced it the people were left with “their individual convictions” as the basis for “forming their decisions,” leading to “corruption, disorder, and an ongoing process of change in the constitution.”
Then there was slavery, “a necessary condition” of what Hegel calls “aesthetic democracy,” meaning, a regime in which citizens must be freed from the lower, ‘vulgar’ “handicraft occupations” so as to participate in the free-spirit higher art of giving laws to themselves and setting policies for their city. “Slavery does not cease until the will is reflected infinitely in itself, until right is conceived as appertaining to every freeman, and the term freeman is regarded as a synonym for man in his generic nature as endowed with reason.” But the Greeks, as Hegel has already remarked, remained at the level of ethics, not yet at the level of morality.
Finally, “such democratic constitutions” as the Greeks fashioned “are possible only in small states,” city-states in which “the interests of all” can “be similar.” Large empires—the alternative to city-states in antiquity—always feature such “diverse and conflicting interests” as preclude a democratic regime. In antiquity, democracy meant citizens who were fully citizens, men who personally voted to frame laws and set policies, but more, men who “see each other daily,” making “a common culture” possible, “a living democracy.” [5] “In a large empire, a general canvas might be made, votes might be gathered in the several communities, and the results reckoned up—as was done by the French convention. But a political existence of this kind is destitute of life, and the world dissolves and departs into a paper-world,” into what we would call a ‘virtual reality,’ one none too virtuous in either the classical or even the Machiavellian sense. What goes for the ancient empire goes for the large modern state, as well. It is too big for true democracy. “In the French Revolution, therefore, the republican constitution never actually became a democracy; tyranny, despotism, raised its voice under the mask of freedom and equality.” Hegel might even have viewed the decidedly more sensible tenth Federalist doubtfully, had he read it. For modernity, he prefers the administrative state under a constitutional monarchy, and his disciples in America, the Progressives, in effect have also preferred that regime to the American one.
Because the Absolute Spirit evolves dialectically, Hegel scarcely will rest content with analysis. He historicizes, by which he means not only putting Greece ‘in its context’ but narrating the course of Greek events—albeit philosophically, that is, in light of that dialectic. The next phase of Greek political and cultural history was marked by a great change or kinēsis, the Persian Wars. In “the first period” of its development “the Greek spirit attain[ed] its aesthetic development and reach[ed] maturity,” its ‘being,’ in the second phase that spirit was “revealed,” “mak[ing] itself into a work for the world, assert[ing] its principle with an antagonistic force,” in which dialectical struggle for recognition it triumphed. In its conflict with Persia, with the East, with old Asia, Greece “exhibited itself,” revealed itself, “in its most glorious aspect.” In spite of their disunion, the Greek city-states united to defeat the Persians on the element the Greeks had mastered, the sea, wrecking the Persian fleet at Salamis. “Thus was Greece freed from the burden which threatened to overwhelm it. But not only Greece: “Greater battles, unquestionably, have been fought” than those Herodotus (the first historian) recounts. But the battles of the Persian War “live immortal, not in the historical records of nations only, but also of science and of art.” The Greek ships were superior instruments of war; Greek politics proved superior to Persian despotism. “These are world-historical victories; they were the salvation of culture and spiritual vigor, and they rendered the Asiatic principle powerless.” “Oriental despotism—a world united under one lord and sovereign—on the one side, and separate states—insignificant in extent and resources, but animnated by free individuality—on the other side, stood face to face. Never in history has the superiority of spiritual force over material bulk—and that of no contemptible amount—been made so gloriously manifest.” The West defeated the East, and continued to defeat it, up to Hegel’s day and to this, as (for example) such vast cultures as Japan, China and India have scrambled to ‘modernize’ themselves and even to assert hegemony in Asia and (in Japan and China’s case) throughout the world. Additionally and far from trivially, it would have been impossible for the young Germans listening to Hegel to overlook the analogy between ancient Greece and modern Germany, then divided into more than thirty small states. Hegel’s Prussia aspired to their unification, especially against neighboring France— long unified, but with political tendencies Hegel and his students alike considered unacceptable, incompatible with the conditions of the modern, centralized state.
Triumphant, Greece remained fundamentally divided, most importantly between its two major ‘powers,’ Athens and Sparta, to which Hegel next turns. As “a sanctuary for the inhabitants of the other areas of Greece,” Athens had “a very mixed population,” and consequently “much dissension,” especially between the old, wealthy families and the new, poorer ones. “The polity of the state was wavering between aristocracy and democracy” until Solon’s regime balanced the few and the many by forming a popular assembly for “deliberation and decision on public affairs” while reserving the offices for the few. Soon a tyrant took over, as the “constitution” or regime had “not yet entered into the blood and life of the community,” not yet “become the habit of ethical and civil existence.” Fortunately (and as optimists now hope Mr. Putin is doing in Russia), Pisistratus and his sons “repress[ed] the power of great families and factions, to accustom them to order and peace, but to accustom the citizens generally to the Solonian legislation. This being accomplished, that rule was necessarily regarded as superfluous, and the laws of freedom enter[ed] into conflict with the power of the Pisistratidae,” who were exiled. The democratic and aristocratic factions then revived, but the democrats gradually gained ascendancy, an ascendancy marked by the rise of Pericles. This “light-minded but highly refined and cultivated people” could tolerate no ruler but a man who evinced the character of one “thoroughly noble” and “intent upon the weal of the state,” superior to his fellow-citizens “in native genius and acquired knowledge.” Characteristically, the Athenian Greeks respected well-developed individuality: “In terms of the power of individuality, no statesman can be compared with him.” [6]
“As a general principle, the democratic constitution affords the widest scope for the development of great political characters,” as it enables them not only “to assert their talent” and indeed “require[es] them to do so.” Athens saw “a vital freedom” combined with “a vital equality of manners and spiritual culture”; even property, necessarily unequal, wasn’t very unequal. “The predominant elements of Athenian existence were the independence of the individuals and a culture animated by the spirit of beauty,” seen in Pericles’ patronage of the arts and his orations, the great tragic and comic dramatists, the historian Thucydides, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato. Industry, excitability, and the development of individuality, all “within the sphere of a custom-oriented spirit,” animated Athenian flourishing. (“The blame with which we find them visited in Xenophon and Plato attaches rather to that later period when misfortune and the corruption of the democracy had already supervened.”) At its height, the great Pericles ruled as “the Zeus of the human Pantheon of Athens” in “a state whose existence was essentially directed to realizing the beautiful, which had a thoroughly cultivated consciousness respecting the serious side of public affairs and the interests of man’s spirit and life, and united with that consciousness hardy courage and practical ability”—as indeed Pericles himself said of his city in his Funeral Oration.
To the Athenian ‘thesis’ the Spartans posed an ‘antithesis’ of “rigid abstract virtue, a life devoted to the state but in which the activity and freedom of individuality are put in the background,” a state “whose object [was] a lifeless equality rather than free movement.” In Sparta, slavery was far more severe than in Athens, as the Athenians “had a family life” and many of their slaves were household servants, whereas the Spartans, who “disparaged family life” and dined in common messes, segregated the Helots, using them as training dummies for young soldiers and on occasion as soldiers when needed to fight especially formidable enemies. (“On their return” from such wars “they were butchered in the most cowardly and insidious way,” treated as enemies themselves, despite their forced service to Sparta.)
Although the lawgiver, Lycurgus, had divided the land equally among the citizens, this equality couldn’t be maintained, even though the land could not be sold. Daughters inherited, and shrewd families married strategically, amassing substantial tracts, “as if to show how foolish it is to attempt a forced equality, an attempt which, while ineffective in realizing its professed object, is also destructive of a most essential point of liberty, the free disposition of property.” (Thus does Hegel refute Marxism avant la lettre.)
Politically, Hegel classifies Sparta as democratic at its foundation but so modified as to make it “almost an aristocracy and oligarchy.” With two kings, a senate/court “chosen from the best men of the state,” a “council of the kings,” and finally the ephors, who enjoyed “full authority to convoke popular assemblies, to put resolutions to the vote, and to propose laws”—powers they came to deploy tyrannically, “like that which Robespierre and his party exercised for a time in France.” In “their intercourse at home, they were, on the whole, honorable,” but perfidious respecting foreigners. Their overall way of life “directed their entire attention to the state”; consequently, they “were not at home with intellectual culture, art and science.”
In the Peloponnesian War these regimes collided in an especially spectacular instance of Hegelian dialectic. “Greek ethics had made Hellas incapable of forming one common state; for the dissociation of small states from each other, and the concentration in cities, where the interest and the spiritual culture pervading the whole could be identical, was the necessary condition of this freedom.” Instead of union by consent, states struggled for hegemony. Hegel defines corruption as “inwardness become free for itself” in the form of thought, or what we now call ‘critical thought,” morality endangering custom or ethics. This corruption “lies in the principle of Greek freedom, because it is freedom that thought must become free for itself,” whether it be thought in the form of science, sophistry (which Hegel elides with rhetoric), or philosophy. The sophists were especially threatening. “For all questions they had an answer; for all interests of a political or religious order they had general points of view; and the further development of this consisted in the ability to prove everything and to find a justifying aspect in everything.” (In sum, the sophists anticipated Hegel.)
Unlike Hegel, however, the sophists taught that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ by which they meant not man as the embodiment of spirit, but “man simply as subjective,” making “mere liking the principle of rights” and “advantage to the individual” the “ground of final appeal.” In modernity, they’d be called ‘relativists,’ and then as now “the doors were thrown wide open to all human passions” in the breeze of their speeches. There were also rationalist individualists, Socrates most prominently, in whom “the principle of inwardness, the absolute independence of thought in itself, attained free expression, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war.” Hegel calls Socrates “the inventor of morality,” the first who not only “wills and does what is right” but “has the consciousness of what he is doing.” In effect, he made himself an oracle, but an oracle who reasoned. As Strauss puts it, “”without being known, morality is not proof. To that extent, one can speak of an invention.” Under Socrates’ influence and that of his student, Plato, “many citizens now seceded from practical life, from state activities, to live in the ideal world,” causing a revolution in the Athenian state. In condemning him to death, “the Athenian people condemn[ed] its deadliest foe,” but tragically because they soon understood “that what they reprobated in Socrates had already struck firm root among themselves,” making them “just as guilty” or, alternatively, “just as much to be acquitted.” Understandably, they acquitted him, post-mortem, furthering the ruin of their own ethos. “In Sparta the same corruption [was] introduced, with the subject seeking to assert himself,” but there “we have merely the isolated side of particular subjectivity—corruption in its undisguised form, naked immorality, vulgar selfishness, avarice, venality,” most ruinously among the vaunted Spartan generals.
Sparta won the war, finding itself “universally hated” in Greece while now lacking the ethical strength to sustain its way of life. When the Spartans and the Phocians were cited by the weak Amphyictyonic Council—Strauss calls it the United Nations of its day—for violations of what the Romans would come to call the law of nations, both refused to pay the fine. Thebes took it upon themselves to punish the Phocians, “but by an egregious piece of violence,” desecrating the Temple at Delphi.” “This deed completed the ruin of Greece” by an act of deicide; “the last support of unity was thereby annihilated” and “reverence for that which Greece had been as it were the final arbiter—its monarchical principle, whether in the form of Zeus or of Fate—was displaced, insulted, and trodden under foot.”
A real monarch moved in to replace the monarchy-in-principle as, in Strauss’s words, “the powerlessness of Apollo was revealed by the act of the Phocians.” Once again, a foreigner arrived. But Philip of Macedon “undertook to avenge the violation of the oracle” by taking its place, “making himself lord of Greece.” Philip served as the harsh precursor to the rule of his son, Alexander, who inherited Philip’s military force without inheriting his reputation for crime. He had the extra advantage of having been educated by Aristotle, “the deepest, and also the most comprehensive, thinker of antiquity.” (“It is hard to say who he regards as possibly competing in modern times with Aristotle,” Strauss interjects. “”Possibly himself.”) Aristotle purged Alexander of his “former bonds of opinion, crudity, and empty imagination,” leaving “this grand nature untrammeled as it was before his instructions commenced” but forming Alexander’s “genius-filled spirit” by opening it to “a deep perception of what the true is.” “Thus educated, Alexander placed himself at the head of the Hellenes, in order to lead Greece over into Asia,” to “avenge Greece for all that Asia had inflicted upon it for so many years, and to fight out at last the ancient feud and contest between the East and the West.” “He also made a return for the rudiments of culture which had come from the East by there spreading the maturity and culmination of culture, and restamped subjugated Asia into a Hellenic land.” Hegel does not hesitate to remark that Alexander died at the age of thirty-three—traditionally considered the age of Jesus Christ at His crucifixion. [7] As the youth Achilles began the Greek world, the youth Alexander concluded it, both “supply[ing] a picture of the fairest kind in their own persons” and “a complete and perfect type of the Greek being,” beautiful and young. Dying without an heir, Alexander nonetheless ruled the world, as “the Greek kingdoms that arose in Asia after him are his dynasty.”
Strauss bases a critique of Hegel on this last flourish. Hegel’s “general thesis is that history is rational; but in order to maintain this, Hegel is compelled, just as the Marxists are, to make a distinction between the essential and the accidental.” Hegel admits that there are accidents in history, insisting rather that the laws of historical progress govern overall trends, which unfold dialectically. “But the question is, of course, how to draw the line…. If Hegel sees that all the characteristic Greek institutions—slavery, oracles, republics, manyness of cities, the Homeric gods—are all forming an essential unity, then he is admirable. One would have to check to see that in each case the item is really true, but his ingenuity in finding this necessity is not only unsurpassed but unrivaled.” But when he gets down to such specific matters as the early deaths of Achilles and Alexander, the procedure becomes dubious. “Now in the case of Achilles at the beginning it makes some sense, because Achilles is a poetic figure and is therefore the work of the Greek mind. But the fact that Alexander died… at age 32 or 33, and to link this up with the workings of the world mind borders on superstition.” Hegel might reply, of course, that regarding Achilles and Alexander he intends only an apt symbolism, not an expression of historical law, but the question of how to draw the line remains.
Hegel expends little time on the third, Hellenistic Age, which saw “the fall of the Greek spirit.” Athens retained its status as “the center of the higher art and sciences, especially of philosophy and rhetoric,” in the ancient world. With the divinity that had pervaded Greek consciousness destroyed, the political particularity of Greece remained, a “repulsive peculiarity which obstinately and waywardly asserts itself, and which on that very account assumes a position of absolute dependence and of conflict with others.” Great individuals still arose—Plutarch gives us their portraits—but even the Macedonian dynasty lacked the strength to defend Greece against the all-conquering Romans.
Notes
- Strauss observes that Hegel omits any discussion of Greek myths concerning the Underworld or “Netherworld.” He suggests that Hegel does so because many religions feature such a doctrine, whereas the Greeks were distinctive in having “the beautiful gods” in human shapes. (Strauss, p. 202) One might supplement this by remarking that the drab Greek Underworld of the dead weighed against Greek youthfulness and vitality, although one might argue that precisely because the Greeks felt life in this world to be sweet, no vale of tears, that their conception of the afterlife promised no charms.
- For his part, Strauss emphasizes that the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians meant that “the good and the ancestral” could no longer be equated. To the earliest Greeks, the good and the natural meant genesis, origin. But nature could no longer be conceived so simply. Aristotle would elaborate nature in terms of four ’causes,’ not just the one, genesis. Hegel contends that the Greeks were getting away from the natural without knowing it, participating in the life of the spirit beyond physical/material genesis.
- Strauss explains this in terms of “the true reconciliation between the divine and the human” seen in Christianity. The Greek gods “are living easily.” But “the ugly,” too, “belongs, in a way, to the truth,” just as much as the beautiful does. Without “pain, suffering, death” the Greek gods “are not truly involved” in the reality of life. This being so, there can be “no true reconciliation” between the gods and men. “If beauty were the highest consideration, the Greeks would be right.” “But the higher thought according to Hegel is that the one God has become man and died as man, truly God and truly man.” Strauss adds, “Whether Hegel understands that in the Christian orthodox manner is very doubtful.” (Strauss, p. 221)
- Strauss connects the modern quest for, and confidence in, subjective certainty first to Christianity, with its emphasis on faith in God, and then to modern philosophy, especially Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, “which is for Hegel the fundamental principle.” “Only modern philosophy, as well as Hegel, gives the adequate interpretation of what Christianity means,” Hegel teaches. (Strauss, pp. 217-219) On the moral side, the Greeks lack the concept of conscience, what James Joyce renders as “in-wit.” Strauss distinguishes conscience from spiritedness or thumos, familiar to readers of Plato’s Republic as the part of the soul that gets angry, demands honor, and, if well-directed, can exhibit the virtue of courage. Nor is conscience consciousness per se. Christian conscience is the capacity to perceive the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to become conscious of sinfulness, especially one’s own sinfulness.
- Strauss contrasts this with Christianity and the modern state. “In Christianity and modernity, we find the freedom of man as a subject who calls everything before the tribunal of his conscience or reason. That does not exist in Greece. Therefore, in Greece we have only the dignity of the citizen, not the dignity of man. And who is and who is not a citizen is determined practically by the nomos, by the law, but the law is here custom, something which is not known to be the work of reason…. This is the limitation of Greek rationality. There is not yet awareness of the right of subjectivity.” For the Greeks, “right means… simply the common good, and even the possibility of a conflict with the private good is not visualized. To be truly a human being means to be dedicated absolutely to the polis, to be a good citizen.”
- Strauss remarks, “Pericles never laughed.” That is, “he was so deadly serious in his dedication to the city that he never laughed. And he went to no banquet after he had become a statesman.” This means that “from Hegel’s point of view” there can be no statesman like Pericles “in any later age,” as “this perfect harmony of the citizen and man belongs to the standpoint of beauty,” the Greek principle, “which has been destroyed by the opening up of the abyss of individuality, for good or for bad.” (Strauss, p. 243) By observing that Pericles never laughed, Strauss almost undoubtedly was thinking of Thomas More’s famous observation that Jesus never laughed. Jesus too was “deadly serious in his dedication” to a city, His city, the City of God. More also observed that Jesus wept two or three times. It isn’t clear that Pericles did, compassion or agapic love not having been the Greek way.
- Establishing parallels between persons seen in the Old Testament and Christ—the claim that Moses is the ‘type’ of Christ, for example—has been a staple of Christian theology from the beginning. To suggest a typology between a pagan figure and Christ, as Hegel does here, is to take a radically different step. Strauss remarks that “the traditional view was that there is a difference between faith and reason”—faith being “suprarational.” Because “it is not rational in itself and in its object,” faith “needs” such “external credentials” as “tradition and miracles.” This leaves reason, the distinctively human characteristic, rather at sea, since “the suprarational cannot be evident” to it. “Now what Hegel claims to have done is to have shown that the substance of the faith of Christianity is rationality. This required considerable sacrifices. For example, the belief in miracles and in the sacredness or quasi-sacredness of the biblical text, the biblical stories: this was of course sacrificed. But we will see later”—that is, in later parts of Hegel’s Lectures —”what Hegel means by the Christianity which he believes to have been transformed into philosophic insight and in this way to have saved.” (Strauss, pp. 253-254)
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