In the introduction to The Philosophy of History Hegel takes up the Aristotelian distinction between philosophy and history. Aristotle ranks history below philosophy (and below poetry) because history lacks generality. Hegel replies that the events of history reveal a rational process, that reason is not only prescriptive but productive. To speak theologically, Hegel resolves Aristotle’s history-philosophy distinction, and vindicates history, by claiming that god is not an unmoved mover but a self-moving mover. Hegel’s God is neither Anaxagorean nous nor the Biblical disposer of Providence. ‘God’ or the Absolute Spirit is immanent, moving not only over the waters but within the waters; the waters themselves are congealed or self-alienated, concretized, Absolute Spirit. In Platonic terms, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit amounts to a synthesis of logos and thumos, reason and spiritedness, emerging from the apparently material desires. It is this melding of reason and spiritedness that gives Hegel’s thought its characteristically ‘modern’ (Machiavellian-Cartesian-Baconian) air, that telltale whiff of grapeshot. The mastery of fortune and the conquest of nature remain, redefined as aspects of the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit as it moves toward the end, the purpose of ‘History.’
The Absolute Spirit is free (the Rousseauian theme) because self-determined; unlike matter, it is not determined by gravity or anything else. History consists of the working-out of Absolute Spirit. With no false modesty, Hegel claims that the Germans discovered that man as such is free—in contrast with the Greeks, who supposed that only some men are, and in even sharper contrast with the Asians, Africans, and native Americans, who have yet to ascend to even that small degree of self-conscious spiritedness. (For example, the native Americans are said not merely to lack reason but to lack spiritedness, to be merely passive, a mere quantitative mass, like nature itself—and unhistorical therefore.)
Seeing is not the same as achieving, Hegel sees. Real history, even in Germany, has been a slaughter-bench. Passionate self-seeking coexists in a matrix with eruptions of Absolute Spirit; sometimes, as seen in great men or world-historical individuals, the passion and the eruption coincide. Lesser men follow great men, feeling “the irresistible power of their own Spirit thus embodied”; the life-force philosophy of Nietzsche is here, but still in rationalist form. (Nietzsche is the Rousseau of the Hegelian Enlightenment.) Apparently chaotic historical concatenations are all part of “the cunning [which literally means ‘knowing’] of history,” as the passions of men are gratified but simultaneously and often unwittingly build up the edifice of rationality: the State. Right comes out of this concordia discors of selfish wills, superintended by the Absolute Spirit, which struggles out of matter in the manner of never-finished Michelangelos.
True freedom is therefore collective, within the State, not ‘bourgeois-individual.’ All individual worth is possessed through the State, as shaped by great men, in the conflictual-thumotic and rational self-development of the national spirits or Volkgeists, themselves particular expressions of the Absolute Spirit. Rousseauian perfectibility comes not according to nature but in contradiction to it, even as nature itself exists only via the Absolute Spirit’s self-alienation. The ascent from the Cave of mere opinion—the most noteworthy achievement of Plato’s philosopher—has been illusory, inasmuch as religion, art, and even philosophy and science are subsumed under the larger category of ‘culture.’ The ‘Idea’ or final manifestation of Absolute Spirit is no mere ‘ideal,’ never to be actualized, but something to be struggled for, achieved conceptually in the thought of G. W. F. Hegel (again, no false modesty), and achieved in politics by the realization of a stable constitutional monarchy buttressed by a bureaucracy whose members will have been culled from the very bourgeoisie that is now merely commercial-selfish. Thus shall logos and thumos triumph together (as they could only do in speech, hitherto) in what might be called an attempted synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem, theory and practice, rationality and providence. That is to say, if Absolute Spirit/ideas are productive, and find their consummation in discourse, then the dreams of sophists and rhetoricians shall be realized, and speech will complete reality; in theological language, words shall become flesh or, more precisely, flesh words.
The metaphysical connection between man’s freedom/conscious human will and Freedom/Absolute Spirit/historically inevitable dialectical progress may be seen in Hegel’s Logic, to which he refers more than once in his Introduction. To make a long story short, Hegelian logic attempts to account for change; it proceeds dialectically not analytically. Deeper than contradiction is thinking the thing contradicted. To think ‘X,’ and then to think ‘not-X,’ is not to annihilate ‘X’ but to retain both ‘X’ and ‘not-X’ in one’s mind; contradiction simultaneously is and is not ‘X’; we posit as we negate. Hegel avoids subjectivism by saying that this sagacious knowing, and not merely wisdom-loving or philosophic, thinking is the mind of a particular sage. One function of contradiction is to show the impossibility of apartness; everything is part of a Whole. This logic of Becoming contains both Being and Nothing; nothing, or negating, is what keeps Being from inertia. The Absolute Spirit is neither a thing (as is nature for some Greeks) nor a subject (as is the God of the Bible); it is the formation-process of subjects and objects; wisdom is the knowledge of the formation process. This obviates the problems associated with epistemological foundationalism. Hegel is a sage or so-phist, not a philo-sopher, because the whole is itself Proteus-like (and therefore Protagoras-like!), a changeling. Sagacity or wisdom sees the slaughter-bench of history with equanimity, knowing itself to be the final result of the slaughter, physical and intellectual/dialectical. Sagacity satisfies, because the sage embodies the unity of what humans want and need, the grand assimilation of every ‘X’ and ‘not-X.’
Politically, this means that ‘otherness’ is relational, not destructive, but one must be very cautious here. Hegel is no college administrator, playing a more sophisticated version of ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ by commending the love of ‘diversity.’ Hegel’s idea of a great man in political history is Napoleon, whose assimilations involved real spilt blood.
Having jettisoned the Biblical God and undermined its own conception of natural right by making nature unteleological (which founders on the ‘is-ought’ problem, as Hume sees), modern thinkers first tried to found morality on natural freedom (Rousseau), then on rationality divorced from nature (Kant). The latter scheme of reason-as-lawmaker runs afoul of the nihilist implications of the universalization principle of the categorical imperative, which, as Hegel remarks, could as well result in the command, ‘Thou shalt steal’ as ‘Thou shalt not….’ ‘History’ is the next way-station, wherein Absolute Spirit replaces the General Will and the Categorical Imperative. The historical ‘struggle for recognition’ replaces the Hobbesian state of nature, but now struggle itself is rationalized, albeit ‘cunningly’ or concealedly.
The plausibility of Hegel’s magnificent scheme depends on accepting the link between logic and phenomenology: Does Hegel’s point about the logic of contradiction ‘transplant’ to any correct observation about phenomena? It is clear that his process of Spirit alienating itself into matter (its apparent opposite) bears some resemblance to Einstein’s famous equation of matter and energy. But Einstein also accepted the inevitability of entropy, not ‘progress.’ Nor is it entirely clear that the Absolute Spirit is finally any less mysterious, less cloud-shrouded, than the Creator-God of the Bible. How does any thing come to be? If Einstein is right, this process does not need mind. On the level of logic: If the actual is brought into being by the discursive revelation that occurs only after the actual presents itself, how do you avoid linguistic constructivism, and the deconstructivisms that follow in its wake? On the level of theology: If the sage is a sort of mortal God, a mighty Leviathan of the intellect who settles the intellectual war of all against all, is not divinity something you need before you experience totality, not after? If the answer is, ‘We have met God, and he is us,’ this may be an intoxicating or a disappointing revelation, depending upon one’s estimate of men who claim to be gods. Politically, the parallel question is: How much like a (Hegelian) syllogism is political society ever likely to be?
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