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 first of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures.

Many of Professor Strauss’s classes at the University of Chicago were tape-recorded, and typewritten transcripts of these recordings have circulated among his former students for many years. Leo Strauss on Hegel is the first of these transcripts to be carefully edited and published, with a trenchant introduction by Professor Franco, who has also provided footnotes with extensive excerpts from the transcript of a previous class Strauss offered on Hegel in 1958. 

 

Strauss asks why we should study Hegel “in our capacity as political scientists,” giving four reasons. Hegel decisively influenced Karl Marx, whose political importance the past century, Strauss’s century, would be hard to exaggerate. The Lectures provides a good point of entry into Hegel’s thought, precisely because it consists of lectures, presentations intended for students, “much more easy to follow” than Hegel’s books, which he wrote for philosophers and philosophy professors. Further, Hegel signals a transition away from the study of politics and toward the study of “culture” “as the comprehensive theme of reflections on human society.” And finally, Hegel was “the first to make the understanding of the history of political philosophy an essential ingredient of political philosophy itself.” That is, Hegel ‘historicizes’ philosophy, including political philosophy.

Strauss cites three “minimum facts one must know if one wants to understand Hegel.” The first is the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781; the second is Jacobi’s 1785 book on Spinoza, touching off the “Pantheism Controversy” in Germany; the third is the French Revolution.

Kant asserted that “man is faced with a fundamental alternative between pure reason (‘Platonism,’ spiritualism) and empiricism (‘Epicureanism,’ materialism). The problem is that in Kant’s opinion “each of these schools proves its thesis.” If so, then “the demonstrations must be based on a fundamental defect.” Kant resolves the problem with a new kind of dualism. Empiricist assertions are “true of the phenomenal world, of anything which can occur to us in ordinary life or in science.” “Atheistic-materialism is the only way in which we can proceed in trying to understand, say, the growth of a tree, a thunderstorm, or whatever it may be.” However, what empirical things are or may be ‘in themselves’ is unknowable; Kant calls this the “noumenal” realm. But the “moral law” is another matter; it “cannot be understood as part of the phenomenal world, according to Kant.” We do know it (unlike the noumenal dimension of things) but this isn’t empirical knowledge. Empiricism has nothing to tell us about morality, which governs “the right or wrong use of [human] freedom.” Kant then proceeds to formulate a non-Biblical, non-natural-rights based morality on the principle of the “categorical imperative.”

Spinoza, however, is a sort of ‘pantheist,’ denying the existence of a personal God, the immortality of the soul, and of freedom. ‘God’ in Spinoza’s vocabulary means nature, and nature is the realm of causation, necessity, not of freedom. Nature consists of extension and cogitation, “which are irreducible to one another” but “attributes of the one substance, i.e., God.” An object takes up space; it has extension. I feel pain if the object hits me, that is “a mode of the attribute of thought, of cogitation.” “The highest form of knowledge of God, which Spinoza calls intuitive knowledge, is knowledge of the singular things or events as modes of God.” “A thing is free if it exists by virtue of the necessity of its nature alone and is determined to act by itself alone,” which means that freedom is “a special form of necessity,” self-determination as distinguished from both indetermination and being determined by some external force.

Hegel in effect asks Kant, if what we know about the phenomena are those attributes we register as thinking subjects, not the things in themselves, “what about the activity of the subject?” “The activity of the subject both in building up the phenomenal world and the moral law” is “the thing in itself” that Kant thinks impossible to know. “Kant has discovered the true thing in itself without being aware of it,” as Strauss puts it. ‘Pantheism’ is true, but (as it will transpire) a different way than Spinoza supposed. “By this combination of Kant and Spinoza, Hegel, and also some of his German predecessors, brought forth a new kind of metaphysics which cannot be mistaken for the pre-Kantian metaphysics…. The first ground or grounds, we can say, is not transcendent, as God or the Epicurean atoms are; it is not outside of man.” The chief theme of this metaphysics is the life of the human mind, which turns out to be part of a larger, ‘pantheistic’ Being, a Being moreover that acts historically, changing over time in accordance with certain laws of change, actuated by dialectic or the clash of opposites. In this, Hegel is able to merge or ‘synthesize’ two very important pairs of philosophic opposites, theory and practice, ‘is’ and ‘ought.’

Because Hegelian history is a sort of secularized Providence, “it is,” Strauss says, “a scrutable providence,” knowable to the reasoning human mind, the activity of the subject that knows. It hasn’t been known before Hegel, however, because prior to him Being had not unfolded itself sufficiently to make itself fully cognizable. “Order comes out of disorder without being intended: this is, one can say, the simple formula of Hegel’s philosophy of history,” a philosophy which is itself the culmination of all history, whose “rational order” is now discernible, now conscious of itself through the thought of its particular instantiation, the mind of G. W. F. Hegel. If one asks, “If the philosopher is the son of his time, how can he have found the eternal truth?” Hegel replies (in Strauss’s words), “He can, if he lives in the moment in which time as it were coincides with eternity,” the ‘absolute moment’ in which Being has revealed itself after its long, dialectical progress toward this end.

Strauss offers his own explanation of how these problems arose in the first place. For Plato and for Aristotle, “it is possible for man to know what is right by nature.” But subsequent philosophers sought to discover knowable laws of nature; this effort began before the Middle Ages, but intensified and was refined then, perhaps in response to the Bible, in which God presents morality as a set of laws or commands. But after that, thinkers like Vico asked a pertinent question of natural-law philosophers: If a law, to be a law, must be promulgated, must be made known to those it rules, how “can man be obliged to act according to natural law if he hasn’t the slightest inkling of its character?” After all, many peoples evince no knowledge whatsoever of ‘nature’ as a whole, let alone of the laws of nature. And no people knew those laws at first. Vico thus needs to know how “these more or less benighted men build up their societies, how did they find their bearing,” so that the laws of nature, of morality, became known? “This is already a kind of philosophy of history”; “the immediate, entering wedge for philosophy of history is the question of the promulgation of natural law.” In the Bible, God issues his first command early on, but if “the biblical account of the origin of man and of humans as a whole is no longer literally accepted,” but law is nonetheless indispensable to understanding one’s moral obligations, something along the lines of a philosophy of history will be needed, urgently.

For Hegel, here is where the historical dialectic comes in. Plato discusses dialectic, but “never presented [a] dialectics of the ideas.” Hegel does, in his Science of Logic. [1] “One can say Hegel presents in the Logic the highest genera of being, the megista genera.” In Platonic terms, Hegel attempts to show “why the whole realm of ideas necessarily externalizes into nature on the one hand and mind on the other hand.” In this, “Hegel surely is the most radical rationalist that ever wrote. Nothing is accepted as given; everything must be understood as necessary by seeing its genesis,” and seeing this is, and is made possible by, the dialectic of Being. In the Lectures on History Hegel shows how Being has worked itself out in the course of human events.

Hegel’s lectures have been organized into five parts: an extensive introduction followed by discussions of “The Oriental World,” “The Greek World,” “The Roman World,” and “The Germanic World,” respectively. The Introduction also consists of five parts: (a) “Methods of Treating History; the General Principle of the Philosophical Approach”; (b) “The Philosophical Approach Examined in Greater Detail”; (c) “The Course of World History”; (d) “Geographical Basis of History”; and (e) “Classification of Historical Data.” Thus the lectures follow the ‘dialectical’ pattern familiar to Hegel’s readers. The Introduction is the ‘seed’ or condensed form of the ‘being’ that is the lecture series, the seed that contains the remainder of the lectures, wherein the thesis unfolds or self-differentiates into several stages which contradict one another before being resolved in the final stage, wherein all elements of the series are reconciled into a synthesis or culmination, namely, “the Germanic World” as it has coalesced in its highest form, namely, in the thought of G. W. F. Hegel.

(a) Methods of Treating History; the General Principle of the Philosophical Approach

Hegel identifies three methods of (as we’d now say) ‘doing’ history. They are “original” history, “reflective” history, and “philosophical” history. Historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides write “descriptions limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had before their eyes, and whose spirit they shared.” As always in Hegel, “spirit” or Geist is the crucial word; as shown in his Logic and in The Phenomenology of Spirit, all Being consists of dialectically unfolding iterations of the Absolute Spirit. These iterations consist not only of things and of events, but of thoughts and speeches—indeed, especially of thoughts and speeches. Original history translates an “external phenomenon” into “an internal image” in his mind, then translates that image into words, so as to preserve the memory of it. The distinctive feature of original history is that “the author’s spirit, and that of the actions he narrates, is one and the same.” Each historical epoch has its own spirit, the Zeitgeist, and the writer of original history in no way transcends the spirit of his time. This holds true even when Thucydides (for example) makes up all or part of a speech by a political man. Even such a speech isn’t “foreign to the character of the speaker” because Thucydides shares the same “cultural formation” as the putative speaker.

Hegel brings out a distinction between ancient and modern historians. “Among the ancients, these annalists were necessarily great captains and statesmen” because “only from such a position is it possible to get a proper overview of affairs and see each, not from below, from some miserable cranny.” A statesman or general can form a more comprehensive view of any policy or action, than, say, a common soldier or slave, who isn’t privy to strategic considerations by those ‘at the top’; even today, we might say of someone that he has ‘a commanding view’ of a topic. “In modern times,” by contrast, “the relations are entirely altered,” as “our culture is essentially comprehensive, and immediately changes all events into historical representations.” What we moderns call ‘news’ we also call ‘the first draft of history.’ Why so? Could it be the general ‘enlightenment’ of ‘the many,’ in modern times, and the concurrent democratization of modern culture? Hegel leaves this unexplained, for now.

“Reflective” history features a “mode of description [which] is not connected to the times but which regards the spirit, above and beyond the present.” There are four types of reflective history: “universal,” “pragmatical,” “critical,” and “conceptual.”

Universal reflective history aims at gaining “a view of the entire history of a people or a country, or of the world.” As in all reflective history, “the workman approaches with his own spirit, a spirit distinct from that of the content”; “the spirit of the writer is quite other than that of the times of which he treats.” Strauss jokes, “the professors have taken over.” Hegel’s own rather more august example is Livy.

Pragmatical reflective history consists of making the past present, as it were, often for purposes of moral instruction. The historian wants us to learn lessons for today from the events and persons of yesterday. Americans might think of Parson Weems’s biography of George Washington. Hagiography would fit the category, but a cautionary tale would, as well. “Whether such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening depends on the writer’s own spirit”; it is one thing to read a life of Marlborough by Winston Churchill, another to read one written by some mediocrity. A cat may look at a king, but who cares (other than the cat)? Hegel doubts the value of such histories. “What experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on the teaching to be drawn from it.” Given the incommensurability of one Zeitgeist with another—one Zeitgeist being “a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic” as to make comparisons both facile and odious—”its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone,” making it “useless to revert to similar circumstances in the past” when seeking guidance in the present. “A vague remembering has no strength against the vitality and freedom of the present.” Hegel has in mind particularly the way in which French revolutionaries of 1789 tried to model themselves on ancient Greeks and Romans; “nothing can be shallower” because “nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and that of our times.”

This notwithstanding, pragmatical reflective history can prove true and interesting if informed by “a thorough, liberal, comprehensive view of historical relations.” Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois exemplifies pragmatical reflective history done right; it instructed the Framers of the United States Constitution, and might have moderated and smartened up the French revolutionaries, too, had they studied more carefully and taken both its esprit and its examples of lawmaking into their minds and hearts. Hegel must be careful to avoid suggesting that Zeitgeists are like windowless monads, utterly incomprehensible to persons outside of them. The Absolute Spirit is, after all, absolute: It provides a standard for all the Zeitgeists that come and go, and it is accessible to a historian of Montesquieu’s caliber.

Critical reflective history, a “new current in Germany,” “the so-called higher criticism” seen most strikingly in studies of the Bible, amounts to “a history of history, a criticism of historical narratives and an investigation of their truth and credibility.” Hegel views it with suspicion, as a “pretext for introducing all the historical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest,” replacing “subjective fancies in the place of historical data.” That is, critical-reflective historians often do exactly what they intend to puncture, ‘debunking’ previous narratives—typically dismissed as self-serving or blinkered by prejudices—with a narrative no less, and often more self-serving and blinkered—all in the name of ‘realism.’

Conceptual reflective history organizes itself around a general topic. The history of art, the history of law, the history of religion are topics that cross-cut particular cultures and ‘times.’ “When reflective history has advanced to the adoption of general points of view, if the position taken is a true one, these are found to constitute not a merely external thread, an external order, but are the inward guiding soul of the occurrences and actions that occupy a nation’s annals. For, like Mercury the spiritual guide, the idea is, in truth, the leader of peoples and of the world; and spirit, the rational and necessitated will of that conductor, is and has been the director of the events of the world’s history. To become acquainted with spirit in this its office of guidance, is the object of our present undertaking.” That is, conceptual reflective history points to the third and final mode of history, philosophical history.

Philosophical history “means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it.” Thinking is what “distinguishes us from the brutes,” and philosophical thinking is the best, the highest, the most comprehensive kind. This immediately leads to a problem. As the previous discussion has shown, “in history thinking is subordinated to what is given and what exists; it has these as its basis and guide, while philosophy has its own thoughts ascribed to it, which speculations bring forth from itself, without reference to that which exists.” Isn’t “philosophical history” an oxymoron, then?

Not necessarily, given Hegel’s understanding of Being and logic—that is, given his claims about the sophia philosophers so ardently seek by thinking rationally, and by the right way so to think. “The only thought that philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history is the simple thought of reason, that reason rules the world, and therefore that what has gone on in world history has gone on reasonably.” This is the philosopher’s claim—as we’ll see, Hegel regards it as much more than a hypothesis—with regard to the course of events: The result of Hegel’s philosophic speculation—namely, that Being consists of the Absolute Spirit, which has unfolded itself according to a certain kind of dialectical logic—can be discovered by the investigation into and the contemplation of the course of events, including thought-events, over time and leading up to Hegel’s own time. Such consideration will show reason “to be substance as well as infinite power… itself infinite matter underlying all natural and spiritual life, as well as infinite form, which is the actuation of this matter, its content.” By “substance” Hegel means “that by which and in which all reality has its being and existence.” Reason isn’t a mere capacity of human beings, angels, or God; reason is the stuff of human beings, angels, God, and all else besides, including the many beings which have no capacity for reasoning or even of thought and sentience, such as water, earth, air, fire. All unfold dialectically, that is, rationally, in accordance with discernible ‘laws.’ This means that reason is no weak thing, no still-voiced protest against a careening mob; “reason is not so powerless as to be incapable of producing anything except an ideal, an ought, existing only outside reality, who knows where, as something peculiar in the heads of certain human beings” like Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock. Reason is infinite form, actuating matter; it is “all essence and truth, and is itself its matter,” not dependent on anything (or any One) other than itself. “It supplies its own nourishment, and is itself the matter which it processes,” “its own prerequisite and absolute final aim,” “not only of the natural universe, but also the spiritual, in world history.” “That such an idea is the true, the eternal, the absolutely powerful, that it reveals itself in the world, and that, in that world, nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory, this what… has been proved in philosophy, and is here [i.e. in the Lectures on History] regarded as demonstrated.” As Strauss puts it, for Hegel “reason is the form and the matter, and therefore there is nothing which is not rational.”

Hegel concurs with Plato, Aristotle, and the other ‘ancient’ philosophers in defining philosophy as animated by a kind of eros. Philosophy is “the wish for rational insight”—the desire for it—”not the ambition to amass a mere heap of knowledge.” However, now distinguishing his own philosophic quest from theirs, Hegel defines the philosopher’s “subjective need” for noetic perception as “not abandoned to chance, but [a desire that] must show itself in the light of the self-cognizant idea.” The self-unfolding dialectic that is reality must manifest itself in someone, somewhere. In this sense, Hegel’s philosopher resembles a Biblical prophet—the ‘chosen’ vessel of the true teaching about Being, ‘selected’ by Being to be such. Moreover, lucky you: “What I have said thus provisionally, and what I shall have further to say, is not to be regarded as hypothetical even with reference to our branch of science, but as a summary view of the whole, the result of the investigation we are about to pursue, a result which happens to be known to me, because I already know the whole thing.” “We must proceed historically—empirically,” but be assured that I, Hegel, am your Mercury. I shall guide you through the forest of facts to the Castle of Wisdom.

In his class, Strauss emphasized that the original historian and the philosophic historian “have something in common” that reflective historians do not have. Both original and philosophical historians bespeak the spirit of the time they consider. The reflective historian does so as a person alive at that time, partaking of its “spirit.” But while the philosophic historian lives long after that time, he too partakes of its spirit he describes the progress of the Absolute Spirit as seen in the time he studies. By considering that time in the light of that spirit, he addresses what “is still present and will always be present, namely, that which forms a part of the spirit as a whole in its completion.” One might add that both the original and the philosophical historian enjoys a comprehensive view of the matter: the original historian has the statesman’s or the general’s overview of events; the philosophical historian lives in the eternal present of the absolute moment, when all of history has made itself manifest.

“The key point is this.” Strauss tells his students: “reflection is simply controlled by the principle of contradiction, and [Hegelian] reason is dialectical, i.e., thinks through contradiction” by noticing how opposites first contradict or clash but then combine or synthesize into new forms, each retaining features of the now-surpassed opposites. Hegel refuses to dignify the principle of contradiction by calling it ‘reason.’ It is only “understanding”—”essentially undialectical.” But because it is dialectical, because it proceeds by resolving contradictions the way historical characters and forces clash and then combine, bringing forth new realities, reason is omnipotent, originating all natural and spiritual life. As Strauss puts it, “there is nothing outside of reason, nothing which is not rational.” “Reason is the form and the matter, and therefore there is nothing which is not rational,” not in principle knowable. “In and through Hegel” the workings of ‘Providence’ “have become rationally clear.” ‘God’ no longer works in mysterious ways, thanks to the now-possible science of wisdom, a science made possible through the ‘pantheistic’ character of Being, whereby God is not holy or separate from Creation but immanent in it, knowable by its now-completed ways.

The faithful interpretation of “that which is historical,” Hegel writes, requires acknowledgment of the historian’s mindset. Even “the ‘impartial’ historian, who believes himself that he maintains a simply receptive attitude, surrendering himself only to the data supplied him” is “by no means passive as regards the exercise of his thinking powers”—”bringing,” as he does, “his categories with him” and seeing “the phenomena presented to his mental vision through these categories.” “To him who looks upon the world rationally, then does the world present a rational aspect.” To those who don’t, it won’t. Hegel mentions “two forms and points of view” representing “the generally diffused conviction that reason has ruled and is still ruling in the world, and consequently in world history.” One is that of Anaxagoras, that nous or reason rules not as spirit or self-conscious reason but in the form of natural laws; the solar system, for example, operates according to those laws but none of the planets “can be said to have any consciousness of them.” The second such claim is that of divine Providence; in his own way, Hegel endorses it, although “divine” means something rather different to him than it does to, say, Martin Luther. In religious dispensations generally, Providence is said to be manifest to us in particular occurrences but the overall plan is held to be a mystery. Hegel maintains that the doctrine “that it is impossible to know God” is a “prejudice,” nowhere stated in Scripture. “While one thus puts the divine Being beyond our knowledge, and outside the limit of all human things, we have the convenient license of following our own fancies.” But “God wishes no petty tempers or empty heads for His children.” “The development of the thinking spirit which has proceeded from this foundation of the revelation of the divine Being must ultimately advance to comprehending with thought that which was originally presented to the feeling and imagining spirit. The time must eventually come to understand that rich product of creative reason, which is world history.” To “know God,” in Hegel’s sense, we do not so much consult Scripture, which is a presentation to the feeling and imagining spirit, not to the inquiring and rational one. What is more, for Hegel we don’t come to know God as a Person but as “divine wisdom, i.e. reason”; this reason is “one and the same in the great as in the small,” with no mystery in principle about either the great or the small, the general plan of Providence or its specific actions.

“Our treatment is, in this aspect, a theodicy—a justification of the ways of God”—such that “the ill that is found in the world may be comprehended, and the thinking spirit be reconciled with evil.” Neither Anaxagorean nous nor Providence as presented in Scripture suffices to explain the problem of evil, why evil exists in the world. Reason as Hegel understands it can do so, Hegel asserts. Thus “an adequate definition of reason is the first desideratum.”

(b) The Philosophical Approach Examined in Greater Detail

What is reason’s purpose, “the ultimate goal of the world” which consists of reason’s unfolding, the “destined” goal “to be realized” by the world? What is the content of that final goal, and how will it be realized? By “world” Hegel means “both physical and psychical nature”; however, when considering world history one need contemplate nature “only in relation to spirit,” to the psychical. “For the purpose of comprehending the general principles which it embodies in the shape of its concrete reality, we must premise some abstract determinations of the nature of spirit.” There are three of these: the “abstract elements of the nature of spirit”; the “means for realizing the Idea of spirit”; and the “existential shape of this realization.”

To bring his students to understand the abstract elements of the nature of spirit, Hegel distinguishes the essence of spirit from the essence of matter. The essence of matter is gravity. Gravity drives matter to a “central point,” that is, toward “unity.” Matter strives after “the ideal” because “in unity it exists ideally.” Spirit, however, is the center itself. “It is in itself and with itself,” being-with-itself. Matter is subordinate, dependent upon the law of gravity, and therefore unfree. Spirit depends on nothing but itself; “the essence of spirit is freedom.” “This is freedom, for when I am dependent, my being is referred to something which I am not,” but “I am free… when I am with myself.” Moreover, I am free when I am conscious of myself. Consciousness consists of two elements: “the fact that I know” and “what I know.” In self-consciousness these are merged in one; for spirit knows itself… It is the judgment of its own nature, and at the same time the activity to come to itself and so produce itself, to make of itself that which it is in itself.” At first glance, this seems consonant with the command of the Delphic oracle, obeyed by Socrates, but the Delphic oracle doesn’t claim that a “self” knows itself in part by producing itself. That is a claim that merges (to use Hegel’s dialectical language, synthesizes) Delphi with Jerusalem, nature with creationism. Spirit creates itself, ultimately with self-consciousness achieved by itself in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel.

In terms of world history, Hegel cites first the “Orientals,” typically ruled by one man, who alone is free, then the Greeks and Romans, who “knew only that some are free, and not man as such,” and finally “the Germanic nations, under the influence of Christianity,” who were “the first to attain the consciousness that man as man is free, that it is the freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence.” [2] The one, the few, the many: Hegel takes the ‘quantitative’ aspect of Aristotle’s account of political regimes and turns it into an account of cultural orders, adding the claim that reason or world history has proceeded from freedom of the one to freedom of the few, now to freedom of the many. He cautions that the mere introduction of Christianity didn’t transform the world all at once. “This consciousness arose first in religion, the inmost region of spirit; but to introduce the principle into the various relations for the actual world is a vast task, the solution and application of which require a difficult and lengthy process of culture.” (For example, “slavery did not cease immediately on the reception of Christianity,” and “still less did freedom predominate in states, or did governments and constitutions adopt a rational organization, or even recognize freedom as their basis.” A principle is one thing, its application another; it is “a point of fundamental importance” in history to distinguish “between introduction and execution in the reality of spirit and life.” Indeed, “world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom,” which is “the final goal of the world.” To put it in Christian terms (as Hegel takes care to do for his students in a German university in the early years of the nineteenth century), God, being “absolutely perfect,” wills “nothing other than Himself,” that is, “His own will.” The nature of His will, God’s nature itself, “is what we here call the idea of freedom,” since God depends on nothing and no one other than Himself. To describe God this way is “putting the religious imagination in terms of thought.”

What then are the means for realizing the Geist, the Idea of freedom? The means are external or “phenomenal.” In this, Hegel concedes little to those called ‘realists.’ “The actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents,” which are “the springs of action.” Although some of these are benevolent, even noble, “such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the world and its doings.” Rather, “passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desire” stand as the “most effective springs of action.” Hegel will later cite Mandeville’s famous formula, ‘private aims, public benefits.’ The “power” of passions, private aims, and selfish desire inheres “in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them”; “these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality.” Such impulses constitute “a fatality which no intervention could alter”—surely none so feeble as moral precept and attempts at moral self-improvement. In the harsh light of truth, history is “the slaughtering block at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed.”

What possible goal could justify the long slog of human misery? In the beginning, Hegel remarks, we must understand that what we call a final goal, as “the nature and concept of spirit,” is only “general and abstract.” Principle is “something inward”; it exists in our thoughts, in our intention, “but not yet in reality.” To make a principle or purpose real, actual, we must introduce “a second element,” that of “the will, the activity of man in the widest sense. “I wish to assert my personality in connection with” my principle or conception; “I wish to be satisfied by its execution.” Hegel calls this “the infinite right of personal existence—to find itself satisfied in its activity and labor.” This is true of individuals and of Being as a whole. The rightness of the individual’s struggle derives from its being part of the overall dialectical struggle of history. “If men are to interest themselves for anything, they must themselves be involved in it, find their pride gratified by its attainment.” “He who is active in promoting an object is not simply self-seeking, but he is self-seeking as well.” That is, he seeks self-satisfaction along with the object or purpose he has set for himself—another example of Hegelian synthesis. “Without passion nothing great in this world has been accomplished. In this, the idea, object, principle, purpose is the Idea, the “warp” of the weaving; the passion, will, desire is the “woof” of the weaving. In terms of Hegelian dialectic, the Idea is the “thesis,” the will the “antithesis.” The union of the two, the fabric produced by their interweaving, “the concrete mean and union of the two,” their “synthesis,” is “ethical freedom in the state.”

Hegel thereby sharply separates himself from those we now call libertarians or individualists. An individual may be moral or immoral, but moral life isn’t “ethical” life. Ethical freedom exists when “a state is well constituted and internally powerful,” and that occurs “when the private interests of its citizens are adjusted to the common goals of the state, when the one finds its gratification and realization in the other.” “This vast congeries of volitions, interests, and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world spirit for attaining its goal, of elevating it to consciousness, and making it reality”: “this goal is none other than finding itself, coming to itself, and contemplating itself as reality.”

Crucially, this means that “reason is immanent in historical existence,” “accomplish[ing] itself in history and through history” in “the union of the general” —what is “in and for itself”—with “the individual, the subjective.” That union “alone is truth.” Dialectical logic, which involves precisely the clash of opposites, captures all the phenomena because it is immanent in all of them, guiding them to their final goal. The dialectical/rational drive or unfolding of all Being is a necessity; in consciously aligning themselves with this necessity, in seeing and accepting it as necessity and in their own interest, human individuals are free. To resist the dialectic is to be unfree. “Philosophy shows that the idea advances to an infinite antithesis between the idea in its free, universal form—in which exists for itself—and the contrasted form of abstract introversion, reflection on itself, which is formal being-for-self, personality, formal freedom, such as belongs to spirit only.” “To comprehend the absolute connection of this antithesis, is the profound task of metaphysics,” addressed in The Phenomenology of Spirit. But even the religious man, “the pious individual,” sees that “to be saved and blessed” as an individual he must align his will with that of God.

So, what about evil? Hegel begins by observing that happiness and unhappiness must be sharply distinguished from the work of history. “World history is not the soil of happiness.” Historical dialectic only advances in periods of disharmony. Human beings only will, and strive, when opposition or what they call evil, exists. This activity is “the middle term of the syllogism, one of whose extremes is the general, the idea, which reposes in the inner core of spirit, the other being externality in general—objective matter.” The human struggle, insofar as it is spiritual in Hegel’s sense, consists of conceiving, willing, and acting on the principle of conquering nature or brute matter, shaping it to human purposes. In this, Hegel is in full concurrence with modern philosophy generally, starting with Machiavelli’s adjuration to princes to conquer Fortuna, and Bacon’s urging of experimental science as the means of conquering nature. Hegel provides the example of building a house. It begins with “an inner goal,” to secure the owner against nature’s hostile elements, “and design,” its architectural plan. The means to achieving the goal and the plan are the very elements themselves: “fire to melt the iron, wind to blow the fire, water to set wheels in motion to cut the wood, etc.” By design, the natural law of gravity, which presses down the stones and beams, “allows the high walls to be borne up” in defiance of gravity. Just as “the elements are made use of in accordance with their nature, and yet to cooperate for a product which ends up restricting their operation,” so in human society “the passions of men are gratified,” “develop[ing] themselves and their aims in accordance with their natural tendencies,” but with the result of “building up” that society, “by which they have procured rights and the order of power against” those very passions.

In the case of building a house, this playing-off of natural elements is intentional. In societies, this isn’t always or even usually so. Criminals may find themselves punished, very much against their own intentions. More importantly, in history we find “momentous collisions between existing, acknowledged duties, laws and rights, and those contingencies which are opposed to this system, which injure and even destroy its foundations and existence; which at the same time have content which might seem good, largely advantageous, essential, and necessary.” We see the truly great criminals, the law-breakers, the regime-destroyers, the “world-historical individuals” who introduce (as Machiavelli would say) new modes and orders.

Take Caesar. His seized the power to rule Rome motivated not by “his private gain merely, but [by] an instinct that occasioned the accomplishment for that for which, in and for itself, the time was ripe.” That is, one Zeitgeist had fulfilled itself, another was ready to replace it and Caesar was the individual in which that spirit-change embodied itself, made itself manifest. Caesar expressed “the will of the world-spirit.” Such men “may be called heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanction by the existing order, but from a found the content of which is hidden, and which has not advanced to present existence; from that inner spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than the kernel belonging to the shell in question.” With “no consciousness of the general idea they were unfolding while prosecuting those aims of theirs,” world-historical individuals still have “an insight,” however limited, “into what was needed and what time it was.” They saw the next step, the “next-in-line stage of their world,” and made “this their aim,” “put[ting] their energy into it.” When they take this step, others approve or at least go along because the same spirit “is the inmost soul of all individuals”—but only latent, unconscious. “The great men in question bring” that spirit “to consciousness” among their contemporaries. “Their fellows, therefore, follow these spiritual guides,” these Mercuries, “for they feel the irresistible power of their own inner spirit which encounters them” [italics added].

Although these heroes, “the agents of the world spirit,” do not find happiness, they may find satisfaction. “Their whole nature was naught else but their passion” to achieve the ‘next step’ they saw, and this (as Burke would say) is a thing of sublimity not beauty, of suffering not harmony. As for those who contemplate such individuals, “the free man, we may observe, is not envious, but gladly recognizes what is great and exalted, and rejoices that it exists.” [3] To call them immoral is irrelevant, an instance of “Thersitism” or resentful carping deserving only of a summary and painful smack on the back, which history itself will surely deliver by pushing such critics aside, roughly—even leading some of them to its slaughter-block. “So might a figure must trample down many an innocent flower, crush to pieces many an object in his path.”

“The special interest of passion”—the self-interest, even self-aggrandizement, of individuals—”is thus inseparable from the activity of the general, for it is from the particular and determinate, and from the negation thereof, that the general results.” For all the turmoil and suffering endured by individuals great and small, “it is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat,” “exposed to danger.” The general idea “remains in the background, untouched and uninjured,” its dialectical progress continuing. “Such may be called the cunning of reason—that reason sets the passions to work for itself, while that which it puts into existence pays the penalty, and suffers loss.” Cunning, a low instance of practical reason or prudence, which is the kind of reasoning that attends to particular means to ends perceived ‘in theory,’ thus forms an integral part of the overall plan of the Absolute Spirit in its grand unfolding. The unification of theory and practice requires the unification of reason theoretical and practical reasoning, which is not to say that Hegel fails to differentiate them. In Hegel, synthesis always entails articulation of the parts, even as the parts combine.

All this notwithstanding, Hegel refuses to abandon or reject “morality, ethics, religion.” Strauss observes, “Hegel’s conception of the world-historical individual is more moral than that of Machiavelli.” In a nod to the moralizing philosophers (especially his nearest great predecessor, Kant, who contended that a moral person must never use another as a mere means to an end), Hegel allows that human beings are not “mere means to the great goal of reason.” They share in that goal, “which makes them goals in themselves.” “Man is a goal in himself only in virtue of the divine that is in him”—immanence, ‘pantheism’—”which from the beginning was designated as reason and, to the degree it is active and self-determining, freedom.” Religion, ethics, and morality have their source in that very principle of freedom. “To the extent that they are committed to their freedom,” all men “have guilt regarding ethical and religious ruination,” knowing “what is good and what is evil,” guilt indeed “for the good and evil belonging to his individual freedom.” “Only the brute is truly innocent” because only human beings are ‘free to choose.’ In modernity, such choice takes on a new cast, thanks to the Enlightenment.

“At no time as much as in our own have such general principles and notions been advanced with greater pretension.” Passions now direct themselves not only toward persons, divine and human, not only to selfish interests, but to ideas. Modern history “exhibit partly a predominance of the struggle of notions assuming the authority of principles, partly that of passions and interests essentially subjective but behind the mask of such higher sanctions. When ‘ideological’ projects fail, men lament that their lofty ideals have not been “realized,” that their “glorious dreams are destroyed by cold actuality.” Hegel disparages such talk. “The fancies which the individual in his isolation indulges cannot be the model for universal reality, just as universal law is not designed for single individuals alone.” Genuine ideals, however, are precisely those that are realized; “universal reason does realize itself”—as indeed it must, if reason is immanent in all things. “The real world is as it ought to be.” “The truly good, the universal divine reason, is not a mere abstraction, but also the power capable of realizing itself. This good, this reason, in its most concrete presentation”—presentation, that is—”is God.” “Philosophy wishes to recognize the content, the reality of the divine idea, and to justify the scorned reality of things, for reason is the examination of the divine work.” That last sentence sounds pious. Put in philosophic terms, the means for realizing the Idea of Spirit “is the activity of subjects in whom reason is present as their absolute, substantial being, albeit which initially is a ground that is still obscure to, and hidden from, them.” Reason, he continues, “can be both form and matter” because “the earlier stages of the mind are matter for the higher stages.”

What “shape” will such realized ideals take? And since shape or form in a world of immanence implies matter to be shaped, “what is the material in which the reasonable final goal is wrought out?” “Initially,” the matter “is the subject itself, human needs, subjectivity generally.” Human beings will goals, goals “in which the truth is a reality, to the degree that it is a great world-historical passion.” To realize willed goals, individuals need to unify their subjective wills with “the rational will: the ethical whole, the state.” However, “this must not be understood as if the subjective will of the individual attained its implementation and enjoyment through the general will, as if the latter were a means for it,” and that when not so engaged the individual might retreat to “a small space in which to indulge himself.” No: “law, ethics, the state—and they alone—are the positive reality and satisfaction of freedom,” the freedom that is true rationality, restricting the so-called freedom of mere “caprice, which deals with the particularity of needs.”

So, then: the Idea is inward; passion activates it; the state is the extant, actual, ethical life with which subjective passion and the general will unite. “The goals of ethical life are not accidental, but are the essence of the reasonable,” the fullest currently-possible unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. “Herein lie the justification and merit of heroes who have founded states, however rude these may have been,” and this is why “in world history, only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state.” Because “all the value that human beings possess, all spiritual reality, they possess only through the state. For man’s spiritual reality consists in this, that the reasonable become objective to him, as him knowing his essence, that it can have objective immediate existence for him. Thus only is he conscious, thus only is he in ethical life, legal and ethical state life.” In this sense, “the state is the divine idea as it is present on earth.” Only that which “obeys law is free; for it obeys itself, and is with itself and free.” Insofar as “the subjective will of man submit[s] itself to the laws, the contradiction between liberty and necessity vanishes.” This truth was actually clearer in ancient times, when each true citizen aspired only to “doing his duty,” whereas in the (falsely) liberal modern state, where merely “reflective” morality often sets “one’s own conviction” against the state, we confuse ourselves. “But ethical life is duty, substantial right, a second nature, as it has been justly called,; for the first nature of man is his immediate, animal being.” Substantial right realizes itself with the state, not against it.

Hegel therefore criticizes two errors concerning the philosophy of law, one committed by Rousseau and the other by such writers as Robert Filmer. Against Rousseau, and consistent with his own phenomenology, Hegel denies that man is ‘born free,’ naturally free, and chained by society. Just the opposite. Freedom isn’t “something immediate and natural; rather, it must first be acquired and gained, and that by an interminable agency of the discipline of knowledge and will.” In this, Hobbes not Rousseau is right: “The state of nature is… predominantly that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings.” Society limits such “brute emotions and rude instincts” and, after accomplishing that, goes on to limit “reflective discretion regarding caprice and passion.” Society encourages thought by bridling such emotions, instincts, caprices, and passions.

As for patriarchy, it properly reigns in the family, tempered by bonds of “love and confidence.” “But this unity is in the case of the family essentially one of feeling, not advancing beyond the limits of the merely natural.” Such Antigone-like piety “should be respected in the highest degree by the state” (Creon is wrong) because the family teaches its members to eschew selfishness. Once family relations extend beyond the family to a tribe or a people, typically toward theocracy in which “the head of the patriarchal clan is also its priest,” it will prove increasingly inadequate. Large-scale patriarchal societies require separation of civil society from the state, including the separation of religion and state, in order to prevent the depersonalizing of its members, inasmuch as no patriarch can possibly know his subjects the way a father knows his children. Patriarchal statism destroys freedom.

Under conditions of statism, one must consider the two aspects of freedom, the objective and the subjective. To say that freedom consists in the consent of individuals in its institutions, this is only subjective freedom. And majority rule in such matters subordinates the minority, makes it unfree. “It is a dangerous and false prejudice, that the people alone have reason and insight, and know what is right; for each popular faction may represent itself as the people”—a phenomenon seen all too often in the centuries subsequent to Hegel. Similarly, and on the opposite extreme, radical libertarians are wrong. “If the principle of regard for the individual will is the only provision laid at the foundation of political liberty,” then “nothing should be done by or for the state to which all the members of the body politic have not given their sanction”—thereby precluding any political constitution at all.

To consider the state rightly, Hegel considers “the distinction between the governing and the governed” to be “the primary consideration.” The state governs, the civil society is governed. The state will have a regime, ruled by one, few, or many. The rule of the one can be a despotism or “monarchy proper”—here Hegel tracks Aristotle. He departs from Aristotle by making no similar distinction between the good and the bad rule of the few, the good and the bad rule of the many. Here he more nearly resembles Machiavelli. Hegel also departs from ‘the ancients’ in dismissing the quest for the best regime or constitution as a matter of theory; this would only be “an affair of subjective independent conviction,” a matter of “entirely free choice” that no individual can realize in practice. A real constitution is “something which is most intimately connected with and dependent” upon existing “spiritual forces”; what is more, it depends upon “the specific nature of the whole spiritual individuality” of a people, a nation—its beliefs, its way of life. And this “is only a moment in the history of the grand whole,” the “entire process” of the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.

In accordance with this unfolding, each people has undergone, first (in terms of Hegel’s logic) a thesis (patriarchal or else military kingship), then an antithesis (aristocracy and democracy, often struggling against each other in a dialectic within the larger dialectic). Under those regimes “particularity and individuality assert themselves” against the severe unity imposed by monarchy. Finally there comes a synthesis, what Hegel calls the “secondary” kingship, whereby the separate interests of the few and the many are subjected “to one power” outside of which these interests have “an independent position.” That is, secondary monarchy is assuredly not a modern tyranny, a ‘totalitarian’ regime crushing all freedom. Such a regime obviously would destroy the freedom Hegel esteems as the goal of history. “In a constitution, the key is the self-development of the reasonable, that is, the political condition,” not rule by terror. A rightly ordered constitution will enable “the particular powers in the state [to] distinguish themselves, become complete in themselves, and yet likewise in this freedom cooperate towards a goal and [be] upheld by that goal,” forming “an organic whole.” “In this manner the state is reasonable freedom objectively knowing itself and existing for itself,” realizing itself according to the spirit of the nation so organized. “The state is the spiritual idea in the external manifestation of human will and its freedom,” characteristic of its own time, place, and people. This is why the French revolutionaries were so foolish to model themselves on the ancient Greek and Roman democrats and republicans, and why modern absolute monarchs were foolish to model themselves on the Oriental despots of Turkey and China. “Since our states are so large, and there are so many of ‘the many,'” the many must be entitled to “express their will” by electing representatives who frame the laws. However, the many are not all; they are scarcely entitled to legislate according to their subjective will or caprice. “Only the reasonable will is the general will, which determines and develops itself in itself and independently determines and unfolds its own being, and displays its successive aspects as organic members.” For such objective, substantive freedom the state must become “the basis and center of the other concrete sides of the life of a people, of art, of law, of morals, of religion, of science”—of “all spiritual activity.” This seems to point to a much more elaborate, manifold regime than even Aristotle’s “mixed regime,” which balances the rule of the few and the many. Hegel cites the complexity of the Gothic cathedral, a structure well beyond the conceptions of the ancients.

Of these elements of Hegel’s modern mixed regime, religion “occupies the highest position” because “in it the secular spirit becomes conscious of the absolute spirit,” causing “the will of men” to renounce “its particular interest,” sacrificing it to the general will. “The religious concentration of the heart appears in the form of feeling; it nevertheless passes also into contemplation; liturgy is an expression of contemplation.” This give piety some rational content; in Hegel’s state one finds not so much freedom of religion, much less freedom from religion, as freedom within religion, the opening of religious feeling to reason. Clearly, this will mean the replacement of the mysterious Holy Spirit with the knowable Absolute Spirit, at least among the most thoughtful citizens, but Hegel doesn’t press that point, here. “The second form of the union of the objective and subjective in the spirit is art.” More “actual and sensorial” than religion, art represents not the spirit of “God” but “the form of God”; “its office is to render visible the divine, presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty.

As always, thesis and antithesis lead to a synthesis, in this case the incorporation of “conception and feeling, as in religion, and intuition, as in art,” within the comprehensive “thinking spirit,” which is philosophy. “This is, to that degree, the highest, freest, and wisest form.” All these forms find their place in the state as its “culture,” that is, “the general which manifests itself and becomes known in the state, under which all that is, is brought.” Here Hegel acknowledges his debt to a central Christian concepts, which he takes his phenomenology to make rationally understandable. In Christianity, God unites “the general and the particular,” especially “in the idea of the Incarnation.” The Christian God synthesizes the general and the particular and thus upholds or exemplifies what Hegel calls substantive freedom. “In this aspect, religion stands in the closest connection with the state principle. Freedom can exist only where individuality is known as affirmed in the divine being,” as Jesus is affirmed as the Christ. To put it in terms of the state, which for Hegel is the kingdom of God, the instantiation of the Absolute Spirit, “secular being as temporal, occupied with particular interests, is hereby only relative and unauthorized, and receives its authorization only to the degree that its general soul—its principle—is absolutely authorized; and this only becomes so, while it becomes aware of the determinateness and existence of the essence of God. This is the reason that the state is based on religion.” Religion teaches dialectical reason by analogy. More, it exemplifies the working-out of the rational dialectic that is history. In this sense, “the state is based on religion,” “has its roots in it” as it develops organically and dialectically toward its purpose, the ‘end’ of history. Meanwhile, individual states are “known to be determinations of the divine nature,” limited realizations of the Absolute Spirit.

It is therefore folly to attempt, as the modern Enlightenment did, “to invent and implement state constitutions independently of religion.” To do so would be to cut off the state from its roots, to kill the tree. “The vitality of the state in individuals is what we call ethical life,” as distinguished from the individualism of moralism and immoralism. “The state, its laws, its arrangements, are the rights of the individuals who are its members; its natural features, its mountains, air, and waters, are their country, their fatherland, their external property; the history of this state, their deeds; what their ancestors have produced belongs to them and lives in their memory. All is their possession, just as they are possessed by it; for it constitutes their substance, their being” as a “matured totality” with “one essence, the spirit of one people,” a “determinate spirit” which is also “determined by the stage of its historical development,” possessing a “specific national genius [which] is itself only one individual in the course of world history.” “For world history is the exhibition of the divine absolute process of the spirit in its highest forms, this stepwise progression, by which it attains its truth, its consciousness of itself.”  “To realize these stages,” these progressive steps, “is the boundless impulse of the world spirit,” which “gradually comes to the consciousness of and the willingness regarding the truth; this dawns on it; it discovers salient principles, and at last arrives at full consciousness.” Hegel now turns to a description of history’s course, the way in which it flows, and where it flows.

(c) The Course of World History

Natural changes are merely cyclical; Hegel calls them boring. “Only in those changes which take place on a spiritual foundation does anything new arise,” and man is the agent of such change. Human nature exhibits “a real capacity for change, and that for the better—an inclination of perfectibility.” Like the discoverers of modern mathematics, the calculus, Hegel seeks laws of change, a rational account of change and thus of contradiction. He emphasizes that change by itself would be purposeless, and so seeks not only a law of change but the end or purpose of change, the standard of perfection toward which the human inclination of perfectibility strives. Rousseau had posited perfectibility as the human characteristic, but lacked a philosophy of history, remaining ‘stuck’ in natural right. Meanwhile, on the ‘conservative’ side, partisans of such institutions as the Catholic Church and “states which consider being static or at least stable to be their just right” oppose history from the opposite angle.

To refute their pretensions and to describe how his phenomenology works itself out in the course of world history, Hegel divides this section into three subsections: the principle of historical development; the beginning or genesis of history; and the manner or way of the course of history “and historical progress.”

The principle or archē of historical development contains within it its own purpose, as a seed ‘contains’ the tree. The image is apt because development “is also a property of organic natural things,” if not of inorganic ones. Again, Hegel anticipates the doctrines of ‘vitalism’—most impressively, Nietzsche’s—that would follow in his philosophic wake. Like an organism, the spirit “makes itself into what it is in principle.” The difference between organic and spiritual development lies in the mediation of “consciousness and will” in the latter. Spirit is dialectical, self-overcoming, as one stage of its existence resists its antithesis (as for example paganism resisted Christianity), with both eventually synthesizing into a new stage. Historical development “does not present the harmless tranquility of mere growth, as it does with organic life, but a stern reluctant working against itself,” toward “the concept of freedom,” the full “consciousness of freedom” not merely ‘in theory’ but in actuality, theory and practice both.

How does history begin? What (to use the Biblical terms Hegel never forgets) is its genesis? It isn’t in the ‘state of nature,’ which Hegel dismisses as a myth. Nor is it in the Garden of Eden, wherein divine truth is said already to have been made manifest, only to be distorted by human “error and depravity.” These claims are sub-philosophic, lacking in evidence acceptable to rational inquiry. The “blessed ignorance” of Adam and Eve “regarding freedom, that is to say, regarding good and evil and thus of the laws, is itself not a subject of history.” The curse imposed by God on Adam, the requirement to labor, is the philosopher’s blessing, and humanity’s, because “nature and spirit can become open and transparent only through the labor of a further, and in time extremely distant, cultural education of the will-become-self-conscious.” [4] “Freedom is nothing but knowing and willing such general substantial objects as right and law, and to bring about a reality in accordance with them—the state.”

Hegel now makes a crucial observation about Germany, the nation which (it will transpire) embodies the highest level of history, its end or purpose, its culmination. In the German language, he remarks the word “history” itself denotes a synthesis, “unit[ing] the objective with the subjective side” by meaning both the historia rerum gestarum—the story or narrative of the things that are born—and those things themselves, the res gestae. “This union of the two meanings we must regard as of a higher order than mere outward accident”; like any story, it proceeds to an end. “It is an internal common foundation that produces [narrations and events] synchronously.” It is philosophical history as Hegel had previously defined it. “The state… first brings about a content that is not only adapted to the prose of history, but helps to produce it” by “requir[ing] commands, laws, general and universally binding regulations, and thus produces both a record of and an interest in, intelligent, definite, and, in their results, lasting acts and occurrences, which Mnemosyne, for the sake of the perennial goal of the formation and composition of the state, is impelled to confer enduring remembrance.” The course of events meets consciousness in the form of “intelligent reminiscence.”

Hegel then gives his version of the story of the Tower of Babel. “Speech is the act of theoretical intelligence in the true sense of the word, for it is the external manifestation thereof.” As human beings spread “over the earth, their separation from each other, their comminglings and wanderings,” all “remain shrouded in the obscurity of a voiceless past,” a past which was pre-historical. Often isolated from one another these shards of the original humanity organized themselves into increasingly different language groups; these nations founded states, and only then did they feel the need to ‘write it down,’ to remember, to have histories in the full, Germanic sense of the word.

In what way, what manner, did history go, in its “stepwise progression,” in its “self-determined” (and thus free), “logical, and even more, dialectical” movement towards “a richer and more concrete specificity”? The manner of history is seen in the nations, each with its “peculiar national spirit”—”its religion, its political constitution, its ethics, its legal system, its mores, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill.” As nation-states collide, “the deeds of great men,” ‘beyond good and evil’ in the moralistic sense of these terms, “appear justified not only in view of their inner unconscious significance, but also from the global point of view.” “The litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, philanthropy, and forbearance—must not be raised against them.” Such men contribute not only to politics but to all the cultural domains mentioned, and to philosophy, which is “thought about thought”—that is, consciousness of the dialectical course of Being—is “prepared by the general culture.” “It is not the brute, but only the man that thinks, so also is it he alone—and only because he is a thinking being—who has freedom,” who in comprehending himself as a person “comprehends itself in its single existence as in itself general, the abstraction, capable of yielding everything particular, thus as inherently infinite.” [5]

Such Asian peoples as the Indians and the Chinese as yet lack this consciousness of the infinitude or true divinity of the Absolute Spirit in its human instantiation, which is its peak of power and consciousness, united. Human nature is thus literally self-divinizing or self-overcoming, and at the same time inherently Delphic/Socratic, its “highest attainment” being “self-knowledge.” Athens and Jerusalem unite, synthesize, in Hegelianism. “World history, we know, is thus generally the construction of spirit in time, just as nature constructs itself in space.” And in this, Asian or “Oriental” culture contributes an important image, that of the phoenix, “a type of the life of nature, eternally preparing for itself its funeral pyre, and consuming itself upon it, but so that from its ashes is produced the new, renovated, fresh life.” Beyond nature, however, the spirit does not merely “rise from the ashes of its previous figuration; it comes forth exalted, glorified, a purer spirit.” It isn’t only Aristotle’s self-moving mover but a self-creating creator. Out of nothing: “The abstract thought of mere change gives place to the thought of spirit manifesting, developing, and forming its powers in every direction of its fullness.” What Paul the Apostle calls, in his letter to the Ephesians, the manifoldness of God becomes, in Hegel’s formulation, the manifoldness of the Absolute Spirit. [6]

Spirit doesn’t only think; it acts. “Peoples are what their deeds are”: Englishmen (for example) who “navigate the ocean and have the commerce of the world,” along with a parliament and juries of one’s peers, but indeed every people with its own ways of life. Each nation may strive for “a higher, more general proposition” or self-definition “of itself—a transcending of its principle—but this very act would involve a further determinate principle, a new spirit.” Thus Chronos or ‘Father Time’ “produced his son, Jupiter, who devours his father and then generates Minerva out of his head.” Jupiter “is the political god, who produced an ethical work—the state”—which then produced the goddess of wisdom. “The highest point in the culture of a people [is] to have grasped the thought of its life and condition the science of its laws, its rights, and ethical life; for in this unity lies the most intimate unity that spirit can attain with itself.” Great poets and philosophers do not so much transcend the cave; they express the spirit of their cave, itself an instantiation—no more, but also no less—of the Absolute Spirit in its manifold unfolding. Ultimately, Jupiter/Zeus “and his race” of gods “are themselves swallowed up, and that by the very power that produced them, the principle of thought, cognition, reasoning, insight based on reasons, and the requirement for reasons.” Devouring is after all a kind of synthesis. Hegel devours, synthesizes, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, in constructing the vast synthesis that is his science of wisdom.

Historical dialectic in the course of time because time negates the world perceived by the senses, a world that is born and passes away in that course. Thought also negates, “but it is the deepest, the infinite form of it, in which therefore all which exists is dissolved: first finite existence, the determinate form”—whether understood as Platonic ideas or Aristotelian ends, stable things unchanging in themselves. Modernity replaces the stabilizing natural laws of the ancients with the dynamic laws of movement, change, progress. “The result of this process… is that spirit in objectifying itself and thinking this as its being, on the one hand destroys the determinacy of its being, one the other hand grasps the general thereof, and thereby gives a new determination of its principle.” Just as the individual both changes and remains the same throughout his “various stages of education,” so does a people in the persons of its great men. The activity of the Absolute Spirit “is the transcending of its immediacy, the negation thereof, and the retuning into itself.” “The principle of the national spirits in a necessary progression of stages are themselves only steps in the development of one general spirit, which through them, in history, elevates and completes itself to a self-comprehending totality” in which “nothing in the past is lost, for the idea is ever present, the spirit immortal,” “comprehend[ing] within it all earlier stages” in Hegel’s system, which is the end or purpose or culmination of history.

(d) The Geographical Basis of History

With all this talk of spirit and its self-constructing self-overcoming, one might take Hegel to move toward the Platonic idealism he rejects. It may be to correct this possible misapprehension that he now brings us down to earth, that is, to geography. Spirit-filled though it may be, a nation consists of people, and people are physical as well as spiritual beings, needing a place to live. Its national territory is the “essential and necessary basis” for its spirit, a space and not only a time. [7] “Separateness is the form of naturalness”; each separate national territory will have its own “type,” its own unique mixture of soils, water, and topography. “The natural type of the locality” is “intimately connected with the type and character of the people which is the offspring of such a soil.” “Nature should be rated neither too highly nor too low: the mild Ionic sky certainly contributed much to the charm of the Homeric poems, yet this alone can produce no Homers,” and “in fact” it never produced another one. However, climatic extremes—arctic cold, tropical heat—have prevented human freedom from arising. “Nature, as contrasted with spirit, is something quantitative, whose power must not be so great as to make its single force omnipotent,” and Hegel rightly cites Aristotle as the philosopher who had remarked this. “The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone, or, rather, its northern half, because the earth there presents itself in a continental form, and has a broad breast, as the Greeks say. In the south, on the contrary, it divides itself, and runs out to many points”—notably, the capes of Africa and South America. Broad lands make for substantial human settlements; narrow lands make for isolation in cramped quarters. Hegel contends that this even extends to animal and plant species; in the north, they share “common characteristics,” presumably due to ease of interbreeding, whereas in the south the species “present individual features contrasted with one another.”

Be this as it may, Hegel divides Earth into the New and Old Worlds. The New World has an “immature” geographical character, with shallow soils. (Hegel evidently didn’t know much about the American Midwest.) “America”—north and south—”has always shown itself physically and spiritually powerless, and still shows itself so. For after the landing of the Europeans in America, the aborigines gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.” “A mild and passionless disposition, want of spirit, and a crouching submissiveness towards a Creole, and still more towards a European, are the chief characteristics of the native Americans; and it will be long before the Europeans succeed in producing any independence of feeling in them.” Hegel evidently has believed Buffon, not Thomas Jefferson: “the inferiority of these individuals in all respects, even in regard to size, is very manifest.” This said, Hegel regards the European settlements in North America as clearly superior to those in the South. “In North America we witness expansion, both through an increase of industry and population, through civil order and firm freedom; the entire federation constitutes but a single state, and has its political center.” South America, by contrast, features republics which “depend only on military force; their whole history is a continued revolution,” with army coup following army coup. More in even broader military terms, “South America was conquered, but North America colonized.” North Americans consequently live more civil lives. In addition to this political contrast, there is the religious one, North Americans being “fundamentally Protestant,” South Americans being Catholic. Protestantism fosters “the principle of mutual trust in individuals,” whereas “among Catholics… the basis of such a confidence cannot come to pass; for, in secular matters, only force and voluntary subservience are the principles of action; and the forms which here are called constitutions are in this case only a resort of necessity, and do not protect against lack of trust.” Catholicism endorses nations ruled by throne and altar, whereas in Protestant nations “church religious works are all of life, the activity of life generally.” Protestants synthesize sacred and secular; Catholics don’t. As always, Hegel esteems synthesis as the higher ground.

Trust enables political prosperity. While admitting North America’s superior vitality to the South, Hegel criticizes the American approach to political economy. In contrast Europe, North America gives us “the perennial example of a republican constitution” and features “general protection of property.” This regime channels “the private person to acquisition and gain” and “the predominance of particular interests, turning to the general only to benefit its own enjoyment.” As a result, the laws have no “integrity,” as they protect citizens’ “dishonest dealings.” Protestantism may engender trust but it also inclines to faction by validating “the aspect of feeling to such a degree as to give encouragement to the most disparate whims,” causing a religious sectarianism that can “reach the very acme of folly.” “Those who adopt this standpoint maintain that everyone may have his own world view, and thus his own religion as well.” Real states have religious establishments.

Even North America’s political condition raises questions. “The general object of the existence of this state is not yet fixed as something form for itself, and the necessity for a firm combination does not yet exist; for a real state and a real government arise only after a distinction of estates has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme, and when such a condition of things presents itself that a large portion of the people can no longer satisfy its necessities in the way in which it has been accustomed so to do.” The well-articulated Hegelian type of mixed regime, with settled social classes, a mature and therefore inegalitarian civil society, has yet to arrive in the United States. It will, and of course we now know that the American Progressives, taking their cue from Hegel, would seek to establish the characteristic institution of modern statism, a professional bureaucracy, modeled on European practice. [8] Meanwhile, “a comparison of the North American free states with European lands is…impossible”: Americans can solve overpopulation in its cities by moving its young men west; Europeans can’t do that, which leads to political repercussions. “Had the forests of Germany yet been in existence, the French Revolution would not have occurred,” as the men who formed the street mobs in Paris would have moved out, axes in hand not to kill aristocrats but to cut trees. (Had Hegel lived a century later, he might have accounted for the failure of the proletarians in Moscow and St. Petersburg to move east into Siberia, and thereby obviate their desire for revolution, by pointing to the extreme climate there.)

“America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the world-historical will reveal itself—perhaps in a conflict between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical armory of old Europe.” But for Hegel’s purposes this means he can turn from it, for, “in regard to philosophy” and particularly philosophical history, “we have to do with that which (strictly speaking) is neither past nor future, but with that which is, and is eternally—with reason; and this is quite sufficient to occupy us.” The Old World remains “the scene of world history.” Anticipating Halford Mackinder’s notion of the “World Island” consisting of the three connected continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, Hegel observes that the Old World is more geographically unified than the new world, its continents comprising “a totality,” with the Mediterranean Sea at its “heart.”

The Old World features three topographical types “which are to be regarded as essential, rational distinctions by contrast with the variety of merely accidental circumstances.” These are: arid, elevated land with “extensive steppes and plains”; the valley plains, “permeated and watered by great waterways”; and the coastal region, “in immediate connection with the sea.” As one might anticipate, Hegel considers the elevated land as “solid, unvarying, metallic,” scarcely ‘historical’ because “intractably shut up within itself.” The valley plains form “centers of culture” and “as yet undeveloped independence.” As the link between mountains and coasts, it exhibits stability without stasis—the condition of all culture, first of all agriculture. The coastal region in its ‘fluidity’ “represents and maintains the global connection.” The arid highland has “no inherent principle of vitality.” The valley plains form “the basis and foundation of the state” because its agricultural character, leading to “property in land,” issues in “legal relations.” As for the coastal lands, “nothing unites so much as water.” “The sea gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite; and in feeling that infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited”—to conquer, to plunder, but also to pursue “honest gain and commerce.” The sea is the realm of dialectic par excellence, where men pursue gain by risking “both property and life to attain it.” “This is what exalts their gain and occupation above itself, and makes it something brave and noble,” as “courage is necessarily introduced into trade, daring is joined with wisdom,” with the “cunning” required to survive on “the treacherous, the most unreliable and deceitful element.” Venturing onto the sea, which “looks boundlessly innocent, compliant, friendly, and insinuating,” yet almost instantly can turn “dangerous and violent,” man hazards himself in “a simple piece of wood,” a sailing ship, thereby “taking his artificial ground with him” in “a machine the invention of which does the greatest honor to the boldness of man as well as to his understanding.” This synthesis of daring and prudence is a trait of the European Old World, however; for the Chinese and other Asian peoples, “the sea is only the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relation to it.”

The three Old-World continents do not correspond simply to the three Old World topographies. Africa’s “leading feature” is indeed the arid highland, but in Asia river valleys exist in opposition to highland, and in fortunate Europe the three elements intermingle. Hegel’s Africans (and here he means those living in sub-Saharan Africa, not the Egyptians or other nations living along the Mediterranean) have “not yet attained to the contemplation of any firm objectivity—as for example God or law.” “The African has not yet attained the distinction between himself as an individual and his essential generality, so that the knowledge of an absolute being, an other and a higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting.” As he has shown, Hegel has little esteem for natural man as such, and “the Negro… exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.” The “only thing which in any way brings the Negroes within the range of culture” is Islam, a harsh medicine indeed. But without being brought under the yoke of Allah, the African’s pure subjectivity yields what we now call ‘magical thinking’; “even Herodotus called the Negroes sorcerers,” sorcery being a form of religion with the “ethical faith” seen in peoples who have states, who consequently live in “an empire of right.” “For the spirit of man, God must be more than a thunderer, whereas among the Negroes this is not the case” because the gods are as ‘subjective,’ impassioned, and whimsical as they. Sorcery-religion attributes a spirit to each individual thing; each thing—animal, tree, stone, wooden idol—has its own ‘genius,’ and religion consists of a human individual attempting to overpower other subjectivities, human or not, with incantations and rituals—”nothing other than the fancy of the individual projecting itself into space.” This fetishism extends to the worship of the dead, of ancestors who continue to “exercise vengeance and inflict upon man various injuries.” Hegel compares these superstitions and practices to those of European “witches in the middle ages,” and it’s important to see that Hegel is no ‘racist’ in the sense of claiming biological superiority for Europeans over Africans (as he does regarding native Americans); Africans are as we Europeans were. The Absolute Spirit will unfold there, too, but it is geography and not biology that has held them back.

And it has held them back. Sorcery is an empty, vain attempt to master nature. “But when man regards himself as the highest, it follows that he has no respect for himself; for only with the consciousness of a higher being does he reach a point of view that inspires him with real reverence.” The Absolute Spirit in no Holy Spirit, but it is greater than man, who is its instantiation even as in modernity he progressively masters those elements that lack consciousness. “The Negroes indulge, therefore, that perfect contempt for men, which regarding justice and ethics is the decisive consideration And although haunted by specters, they have no knowledge of the immortality of the soul. The worthlessness of men among them reaches an incredible degree of intensity. Tyranny is regarded as no injustice, and cannibalism is widespread and looked upon as allowable.” Crucially, given Hegel’s understanding of spirit as freedom, slavery is a “characteristic fact” upon Negroes. True, “Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere thing—an object of no value.” Parents sell their children, children sell their parents, “as either has the opportunity.” The English, who have actually attempted to abolish the slave-trade and slavery, “are treated by the Negroes themselves as enemies” who interfere with the slave-entrepreneurial patriarchs. Polygamy exists at the service of slavery, to provide more slaves to sell and thereby to enrich the patriarch who sires them. The same “contempt for humanity” manifests itself in the African way of war, whereby “the Negroes allow themselves to be shot down by thousands in war with Europeans.” “Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object”; the African way of life, so far, has not vitality.

Under such conditions, in this “stage” of development, wherein “mere sensuous volition” combines with “energy of will,” constitutions must be impossible. “There is absolutely no bond, no restraint upon that arbitrary volition” except external force. “Sensuous barbarism can only be restrained by despotic power.” This comports with Islam, which means ‘submission,’ as does “fanaticism, which notwithstanding the yielding disposition of the Negro in other respects,” when “exerted, surpasses, when aroused, all belief.” Then “every idea thrown into the mind of the Negro is caught up and realized with the whole energy of his will; but this realization involves a wholesale destruction” due to his “want of self-control”.  At this time, therefore, there is little or no hope of African development. “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” In the following parts of The Philosophy of History Hegel will survey entities combining unmoving geography with spiritual movement or history: the Oriental world; ancient Greece and Rome; modern Germany. Here, the divisions will be between East and West, cross-cut by antiquity and modernity and everywhere by geography, with special emphasis on the river valley regions which see the development of agriculture. “Agriculture involves the cessation of a roving life. It demands foresight and solicitude for the future; reflection on something general is thus awakened; and herein lies the principle of property and productive industry.” Especially where associated with water, and at best the sea, agriculture causes history to accelerate. “The Near East has both elements in one, and consequently relates to Europe,” “present[ing] the origination of all religious and political principles” whereas Europe “has been the scene of their perfection.” Unlike Asia, “we have in Europe no highlands immediately contrasted with plains,” and this facilitates commerce on land as well as on the sea. Europe has three sections: southern Europe, along the Mediterranean, where “Greece and Italy long presented the theater of the world history”; “the heart of Europe, which Caesar unlocked by when conquering Gaul,” a more productive achievement than the Eastern conquests of Alexander; and the northeastern region, consisting of Poland, Russia and the Slavonic kingdoms, which have “come only lately into the series of historical states, and form and perpetuate the connection with Asia.”

(e) Classification of Historical Data

This final section of the Introduction serves as a preface to the remainder of the lectures, as Hegel explains their organizational plan. He begins with a lyrical description of “the course of history the great day’s work of the spirit,” a day culminating in man having “erected a building constructed from his own inner sun.” In this his book will redeem the Enlightenment, but on Hegel’s terms not its own.

Since “world history travels from East to West,” he will begin with the day’s dawn in the “Oriental World” before moving to Greece, then Rome, then Germany, thereby showing the development of the state, the home of “the general spiritual life” of individuals, of their “substantial freedom.” Unlike Africa, the East is the place in which “the subjective will first sustains a relation” with “this world” in “the form of faith, confidence, obedience”—a “realized rational freedom” in “the childhood of history.” The “Greek World” “may then be compared with the period of adolescence, for here we have individualities forming themselves,” uniting subjective will with “the ethical” in “the kingdom of beautiful freedom.” The “Roman World”—specifically, in its imperial stage—sees “the hard labor of the manhood of history,” a life lived “neither in accordance with the will of a despot,” as in the Orient, “nor in obedience to a willful caprice of its own,” as in Greece, but in service to ‘the general aim” of the state, whereby “the individual is submerged and attains his own private goal only in that general goal.” The Greek “geniality and joy of soul” have “given place to harsh and rigorous toil.” This imperial toil leads to universality, as “Rome becomes the pantheon of all deities, and all that is spiritual,” although “these divinities and this spirit do not retain their peculiar vitality.” In the Germanic World human life achieves its “old age.” Whereas “the old age of nature is weakness,” the old age of spirit “is its perfect maturity, in which it returns to unity, but as spirit.” Here, “the empire of thought is brought to reality” as “the antithesis of church and state vanishes” and “the spirit finds itself in secularity and develops this latter as an existence organic to itself.” Here, “the state no longer comes after the church, and is no longer subordinate to it”; “freedom has found the means of realizing its concept and its truth,” “the goal of world history.”

All of this suggests that Hegel’s system, as seen in these lectures and indeed in his works as a whole, amounts to an attempt to replace the Bible with rational wisdom, a “science of wisdom” of self-conscious omniscience and omnipotence or, as the phrase now has it, ‘explanatory power.’ Hegel undertakes a rationalized or secularized version of the imitatio Christi, speaking (and writing) the world into existence with what he intends as an all-comprehending logos.

 

Notes

1. For an unsurpassed account of The Science of Logic, see Stanley Rosen: G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. For a review of Rosen’s book, see “Historicity and Reason: Two Studies” on this website in the “Philosophers” section.
2. By contrast, Tocqueville finds in the advent of Christianity not the beginning of widespread consciousness of freedom but of human equality—the recognition that all men are of the same species. That is, for Tocqueville Christians enlightened human beings about their nature, for Hegel they enlightened them about their spirit.
3. André Malraux chose a slightly shorter version of this sentence as the epigraph for his dialogue with Charles de Gaulle. There, de Gaulle is also treated as a hero/founder, although in Malraux’s treatment the founder firmly upholds the moral virtues and is never supposed to have been ‘beyond good and evil.’ See Malraux: Felled Oaks (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.
4. As Strauss puts it, “it is not enough to be innocent and to be obedient and law-abiding”—Adam and Eve were not adequate, even before the Fall—”but you need knowledge or principles.” Strauss adds an important observation concerning Hegel’s relationship with Enlightenment thought. The valorization of simple morality, seen in Rousseau and Kant, “took on this crucial philosophical point only in the eighteenth century, in the context in which it seemed to be necessary to ascribe the highest worth to morality in order to be entitled no longer to ascribe it to religion, i.e., positive religion.” In so-to-speak re-crowning reason over morality, Hegel “is in this sense an old-style philosopher in that the highest is thinking rather than morality: thinking is somehow based on morality, but morality itself is not the highest.” (See Strauss, 73-74). That is, in order to philosophize, to life the way of life centered on reasoning, a soul must exhibit some virtues, at very least including courage—the willingness to follow reason where it leads you, whatever others may say and whatever you might want to believe—and moderation—the capacity to resist bodily forms of eros in order to clear your mind for intellectual eros. It might be added that among Strauss’s students there has arisen a divide between ‘East Coast Straussians,’ who are said to eschew morality for philosophy, thus veering toward nihilism, and ‘West Coast Straussians,’ who are said to vindicate morality and indeed (according to their critics) succumb to moralism. According to Strauss here, neither ‘side’ is correct if this characterization, not to say caricature, accurately portrays his students.
5. Strauss alerts his students to the difference between this ‘cultural’ conception of human society and earlier political philosophy; see Strauss pp. 79-80. Given the contrast in size and complexity between the ancient polis and the modern state, the importance of politics in the latter is easily obscured. As a result, analyses of the modern state often eschew classical regime theory for explanations derived from anthropology, economics, sociology and other sub-political or semi-political ‘disciplines.’ Strauss may go too far in saying “there is no concept of culture in Aristotle,” inasmuch as one dimension of the regime as Aristotle defines it is the way of life of a polis, its Bios ti.
6. Strauss contrasts Hegel with Aristotle. “In Hegel there is no cosmos; you can say there is no cosmos proper. The material universe, as it is called, is of no great importance for Hegel, but the place—I speak now provisionally—of physis or cosmos is taken in Hegel by the historical process. Therefore the cultures, if one uses post-Hegelian terms, are the Hegelian or Comtean or modern substitute for physis.” In Aristotle and in the ‘ancients’ or ‘classics’ generally, physis or nature contrasts with nomos —conventions. Conventions are man-made, nature is a ‘given.’ Plato’s Socrates presents the most striking, stark image of this distinction in the Republic, where he describes the philosophic quest as an ascent from the cave, which represents the polis, where citizens are chained in position so as to watch the manipulation of the shadows of man-made idols to the above-ground world illuminated by the sun, where nature can now be seen. “What Hegel implies, if I try to state it now in classical terms, is that the sequence of the nomoi—China, India, etc.—this is the true physis, the absolute…. There is therefore a radical change of course in the approach to political things.” See Strauss, p. 82. One might then ask how this synthesis of nature and custom relates to Hegel’s introduction of culture, which supplements or even begins to replace politics as the center of attention for ‘social scientists.’ It has everything to do with it, inasmuch as culture is said to encompass politics and all other features of human societies, just as history is said to encompass both nature and custom.
7. Strauss points out that Hegel’s understanding of cultural is hierarchical; cultural bodies exist in a rank order, as for example in the several “estates.” For Hegel, “religion has the central position” and religion itself posits a firm hierarchy, beginning with the distinction between the divine and the human. “But the present-day view of a culture is egalitarian.” Under the egalitarian dispensation, “one has no right whatever to say one of these elements is more important or interesting than the other, except from the purely subjective point of view. Some people like art more than they like technology and so they will study the arts, but in themselves they are all equal.” (Strauss is of course thinking first and foremost of the modern American university, with its courses called ‘electives,’ chosen by the students themselves.) One sees this egalitarian trend in the study of human societies already in the 1920s, when the influential anthropologist Ruth Benedict taught that what came to be called ‘cultural relativism’—”any culture is a culture.” In this, Strauss says, “the concept of high culture is lost.” See Strauss, p. 82. This too might be said to relate to the replacement of politics with culture and the synthesis of nature with custom; although Hegel intends many traditional ‘aristocratic’ features of human societies to remain in place, it has proven easy, under conditions of democracy, to take the act of synthesis as a sort of indiscriminate ‘mushing together’ of all elements comprising the synthesis. In this, American Progressives may be said to have led the way in democratizing Hegelianism, as seen in the thought of Woodrow Wilson and (rather less ‘spiritually’) John Dewey. Paradoxically, the powerful effect of democracy tends to confirm the ‘classical’ insistence on the priority of the political over other modes of inquiry into the character of human societies.
8. Strauss tells his students, “this discussion of geography has a very crucial meaning.” History consists of the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, over time. Nature is much less changeable than spirit, although finally it too is an instantiation of the Absolute Spirit. “The rationality of history is guaranteed by the fact that the carriers of history are folk-minds and therefore parts of the universal mind. But there is another side to that: there is an obvious connection between the visible—the nations—and nature. The very name ‘nation,’ derivative from nasci, from which nature is also derived, intimates that: for example, the connection between folk-mind and the climate, the nature of the territory, the nature or characteristics of the people.” If the nations were nothing but pieces of nature “there would be no rationality of history, because nature does not have the rationality which the mind has…. Hegel has therefore to show, while admitting the connection between nations and nature, that this does not make the nation simply a function of nature.” “The folk-mind is the mediation between nature and mind.” As seen above, but now in Strauss’s words, “The maximum nature offers is opportunities, but it never exerts a compelling influence,” and “while there is no dependence of mind on nature there is a certain correspondence.” See Strauss, pp. 50, 65,104.

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. In Victor Gourevich, editor and translator: Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

 

In his First and Second Discourses, Rousseau praises one ‘ancient’ thinker, Socrates, while condemning one set of them, the pre-Socratics. He praises one Christian, Jesus, while condemning one set of Christians, the Scholastics. Among the ‘moderns’ he praises Bacon, Descartes, and Newton while condemning Voltaire, the man Voltaire praises as le sage Locke, and Locke’s predecessor, Hobbes. Among the ancient regimes, he singles out Sparta for praise among the ‘ancients,’ Switzerland among the ‘moderns.’ He proceeds to navigate his argument among these lighthouses, and although he, like Locke, raises self-contradiction to the level of a literary technique, his argument sails carefully through dangerous waters. He wants to confuse some who would track his vessel but always knows where he wants to go, and how to get there.

The First Discourse responds to a question proposed by the Academy of Dijon in a contest it sponsored in 1750: “Has the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of moeurs?” No, just the opposite, Rousseau famously replies. Enlightenment leads to “the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the disparagement of virtues.” In defending this claim he alludes to and quotes Socrates. He takes a Socratic pose, calling himself “an honest man who knows nothing” and quotes Socrates’ criticism of people who believe they know something but really know nothing, whereas he, Socrates, knows he knows nothing—and that is his wisdom. Glancing not only at Socratic self-knowledge but at Cartesian self-examination, he calls the effort “to return into [oneself], there to study man and to know his nature, his duties, and his end” a grander project that the modern Enlightenment. Hence his criticism of the arch-Enlightener, Voltaire. In the essay’s central paragraph he cites Socrates’ opposition to unnamed pre-Socratics, proponents of the Sophistic Enlightenment, “those artful and subtle Greeks who seduced virtue and enervated the courage of his fellow citizens.” Initially, he suggests that among us ‘moderns,’ Socrates would not have drunk hemlock but he would have drunk scorn. In a later footnote he revises this judgment, suspecting that even in ‘enlightened’ times and regimes Socrates would be killed.

What goes for philosophy goes for religion, too. Virtue is “the sublime science of simple souls,” “engraved in all hearts” and therefore conducive to equality. Jesus teaches pure morals; the Scholastics obscure the simplicity of His teachings with their elaborate argumentation. The problem comes back to the misuse of philosophy. Genuine philosophers, thinkers of the stature of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, need no guides; they teach themselves. Once philosophers or would-be philosophers attempt to flatter the people by giving them reason to suppose they have become ‘enlightened,’ then the esteem for talent begins to replace the esteem for virtues. The people begin to imagine that they are sophisticated. And they are, in the literal sense: transformed into sophists. “It is good that there be Philosophers provided the People do not pretend to be Philosophers.” There is a place for egalitarianism, but the life of the mind isn’t it. Enlightenment amounts to a sort of drug, whereby talented men boost themselves into positions of authority by pretending that they have assisted the people in becoming wise. In fact they have satisfied and stupefied them, the better to rule them.

Hence his praise of Geneva in the Epistle Dedicatory of the Second Discourse. Geneva, he tells the Genevans, has rightly combined natural, moral equality with institutional inequality of talents “in the means most clearly approximating natural law” and “most favorable to society, to the preservation of public order, and the happiness of individuals” by instituting representative government. Representative government ensures that the people themselves don’t administer the (long-established) laws—a task for the talented—while keeping the administrators on the short leash of annual elections. Thus simple souls, wise in the sublime science, monitor the virtue of magistrates, wise in the ways of the world. As for Geneva’s “amiable and virtuous Citizen-women,” they rightly confine themselves to their household, where their “chaste power” is “exercised in conjugal union alone,” and not in the public square. Since “it will always be the lot” of women to rule men, such women as the Genevans will rule in modernity as Spartan women ruled in antiquity, “despis[ing] vain luxury,” loving the laws, and “correct[ing] the misconceptions which our young Men acquire in other countries” that run counter to the “august freedom” Genevans enjoy at home.

In his preface, Rousseau recurs to the ‘Socratic turn’ away from the direct study of nature and from sophistry, the preeminent features of Enlightenment ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’: “The most useful and the least advanced of all human knowledge seems to be that of man” and, like Socrates, he will heed “the inscription on the Temple at Delphi,” which adjured its readers, “Know thyself.” The question proposed by the Academy at Dijon is: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural law.” This seems to point essayists to a historical account, but Rousseau asks a preliminary question: “How can the source of inequality among men be known without first knowing men themselves?” To answer this question, not history but introspection is necessary because the human soul has been “altered” in “the lap of society,” altered so much as to have become “almost unrecognizable,” altered so much that “man’s constitution” has changed. Modern souls are no longer simple; progress makes us ignorant of ourselves. Such progress in artful knowledge is by no means necessary; Rousseau rejects teleology, natural or historical, because he sees that some human populations have ‘progressed’ in the sciences and the arts whereas some have not. Only the Socratic way of self-knowledge and the Cartesian ‘method’ of introspection can clear away the crust of conventions and habits but more, show us how the constitution of man itself has changed. Only self-knowledge can ‘recover’ the sense of human nature as it is by nature, which for Rousseau means at its origin and not at its end.

Rousseau emphasizes the non-historical character of his inquiry. “It is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature, and to know accurately a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions in order accurately to judge of our present state.” Unlike Hobbes and Locke, for whom the state of nature has existed, sometimes still exists, and always will exist (at times), Rousseau rules out empirical evidence from the core of his thinking; in this he anticipates Kant. At the same time, he will not abandon scientific method, the method of Bacon, insofar as it disciplines thought by experiment. Rousseau asks, “What experiments would be needed in order to come to know natural man; and by what means can these experiments be performed within society?” He cedes nothing to the Enlightenment, in that. In the central paragraphs of his preface he charges, as he had in the First Discourse, that some ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ have erred in making knowledge of natural law too abstruse; “for it to be natural, it must speak immediately with the voice of Nature.” “Hence, disregarding all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human Soul”—as did Descartes and indeed Locke, before him—I believe I perceive in it two principles prior to reason.” One “interests us intensely in our well-being and our self-preservation,” the other “inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer.” The first principle is identical to that asserted by Hobbes and Locke; the second, pity, amounts to a ‘secularized’ (actually naturalized) version of Christian agape or charity. He endorses the teaching of Hobbes and rejects that of Locke in calling sociability unnatural to man, but unlike Hobbes he tempers this with the sentiment of pity.

“This way one is not obliged to make a Philosopher of man before making a man of him.” Making a man out of man makes man a beast insofar as he shares sentience with other beasts; further, being sentient, both beasts and man partake in natural right. One “must at least give the beast the right not to be uselessly maltreated by man.” The ‘animal rights movement’ begins with Rousseau. Natural law and natural right are simple and comprehensive. “As long as [man] does not resist the internal impulsion of commiseration, he will never harm another man or even any sentient being, except in the legitimate case when, his preservation being involved, he is obliged to give himself preference.” We fail to see this only because arts and sciences have over-complicated our way of life, denaturing man, and especially modern man.

Rousseau addresses the question of the origin of inequality more squarely in his Exordium. Here, he posits a dualism, if not the mind/body dualism of Descartes—that is, Descartes as he is usually taken to claim. There are “two sorts of inequality in the human Species”: natural or physical inequality (“differences of age, health, strengths of Body, and qualities of Mind or of Soul”); and “moral or political inequality,” which depends on “a sort of convention and is established, or at least authorized by Men’s consent.” Rousseau, then, is no less a materialist than Hobbes or Locke and, like them, does not regard human beings as political animals by nature. The precise issue, on these terms, is when Right replaced violence, when Nature was subjected to Law, when the strong resolved to serve the weak, when the people purchased “the idea of repose at the price of real felicity.” No philosopher has yet reached “the state of Nature” because none has begun as Rousseau does, “by setting aside all the facts”; facts “do not affect the question.” Rousseau begins not with facts but with a hypothesis in what we now would call a ‘thought experiment.’ This experiment will have no recourse to revelation, either, but rather to “what Mankind might have become if it had been abandoned to itself,” with no Serpent and no God (at least, no God after Creation). Rousseau insists on this because nature “never lies,” inasmuch as it never speaks, as gods, men, and serpents do.

Part I of the Second Discourse initiates the experiment consideration on the body of man. Rousseau won’t try to trace man’s physical development, which would entangle him in facticity. “Stripping” man of his supernatural, God-made aspects, and of his artificial, man-made aspects, Rousseau finds “an animal,” “the most advantageously organized of all animals.” This animal “perhaps” has no instincts, and so will feed on anything. It ate the fruits and vegetables supplied by an earth that was much more fertile than it is now, and “since prey is almost the only object about which Carnivores fight, and Frugivores live in constant peace with one another, it is clear that if the human species were of the latter kind, tit would have subsisted more easily in the state of Nature, and would have had much less need and fewer occasions to leave it.” The state of nature was neither Hobbes’s war of all against all nor Locke’s condition of scarcity. It was peaceful and abundant.

The state of nature had a ‘regime.’ Nature dealt with early men “exactly as the Law of Sparta did with the Children of Citizens; it makes those who have a good constitution strong and robust, and causes all the others to perish; differing, in this, from our societies, where the State kills children indiscriminately before their birth by making them a burden to their Fathers.” There was no abortion in the state of nature; the right to self-preservation began before birth. Without tools other than his own body, natural man had no weapons other than that. Accordingly, he was stronger and more agile than men today, “ever ready for every eventuality” and largely self-sufficient, carrying “all of [him]self along with [him].” Indeed, he soon finds that he surpasses all the other animals “in skill more than they do him in strength”; he does not live in terror, as Hobbesian natural man does. Without any formidable natural enemies and therefore no fear of violent death, he has no fear of a peaceful death, either. Natural men “eventually die without anyone’s noticing that they cease to be, and almost without noticing themselves.” Their life is solitary, but not nasty, poor, brutish—except in a good way—or short.

This is “the simple, uniform and solitary way of life,” the regime, “prescribed to us by Nature.” It is noteworthy that Rousseau’s claim about man to some extent follows from his method; philosophic introspection focuses the mind on the individual and, sure enough, it finds natural man living alone. Moving away from the body, Rousseau argues that this method is nonetheless necessary now to understand man as he existed then. True, “the state of reflection is a state against nature,” and “the man who meditates” is “a depraved animal”—no longer a machine-like being whose life consists of feeding, attacking, and defending, of simple willing and not willing, desiring and fearing. “Man in the state of Nature” is healthy, simple. But to rediscover him, philosophers—the most meditative, the most depraved of civilized men—can only as it were ‘double down’ on their depravity, use it to get beyond it, at least in their theorizing.

Like all animals, men “lose half” of their “vigor, strength, and courage” when domesticated; as man becomes “sociable and a Slave, he becomes weak, timorous, groveling, and his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage.” Worse, because man has it in him to put other domesticated animal species into his own service, and to invent “conveniences” that sap his strength even more than mere domestication alone would do, civilized man has degenerated even more than other animals. Hobbes and Locke are dead wrong; civil society doesn’t secure natural rights, it compromises them. Machiavelli is right to say that Christian religiosity effeminates man, but so do all the trappings of civilized life. The human senses themselves have become denatured. Living in conditions of hardiness, natural man’s “touch and taste will be extremely crude”—these senses “are perfected only by softness and sensuality,” neither of which prevail in nature—but “his sight, hearing and smell” are “most subtle,” as seen in primitive peoples today. Machiavelli’s ‘epistemology’ of touch is therefore an excrescence of civilization, a realism only in unnatural, civil, society.

Moving from physical man to “the Metaphysical and Moral side,” Rousseau sees “in any animal nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to wind itself up and to a point, protect itself against everything that tends to destroy or to disturb it.” So too with natural man, “with this difference”: “man contributes to his operations in his capacity as a free agent,” a being that “chooses or rejects” freely, not by instinct alone. “As a result the Beast cannot deviate from the Rule prescribed to it even when it would be to its advantage to do so, while man often deviates from it to his detriment.” In man, “the Mind depraves the senses, and the will continues to speak when Nature is silent.” It isn’t the capacity to reason that differentiates human beings from other animals; reasoning is unnatural. “It is his property of being a free agent” that differentiates him, “and it is mainly in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul exhibits itself.” That is, in examining himself, Rousseau finds not only man’s original physical attributes but also consciousness of his own freedom. The emphasis on “consciousness” seen in subsequent thinkers starts here. It can be seen even today in the valorizing slang term, ‘woke,’ and it has been esteemed by thinkers from Hegel and Marx to contemporary feminists and libertarians, who make ‘choice’ a ‘value’ in itself. Here is a more nearly Cartesian kind of dualism. Rousseau needs something along these lines because nature is not teleological, in his theory; finding un-mechanical dimensions in himself, he explains them in terms of the power of choosing, “and in the sentiment of this power”—”purely spiritual acts about which nothing is explained by the Laws of Mechanics.”

Even more teleological, without being a natural teleology in (for example) Aristotle’s sense is a related natural power of human being, its “faculty of perfecting itself.” This power typically leads man not to the flowering of his best potential; quite on the contrary. “It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all of man’s miseries; that it is the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend calm and innocent days; that it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causes his enlightenment, and his errors, his vice and his virtues to arise, and eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant.” Sad, but true. His labor and sciences only “feed his insane pride and I know not what vast self-admiration.” While man— by nature solitary, peaceful, vigorous, and content—”is naturally good,” men—living under civil-social conditions but retaining their essentially solitary, ‘individual’ characteristic (if nothing else)—”are wicked.” Such creatures, living socially, bump up against each other, moving themselves “to hate one another in proportion as their interests cross.” Society consists of a collection of such individuals, whose natural traits, harmless when living in natural isolation, become lethal in close quarters. They see “how one man’s loss almost always makes for another’s prosperity,” and “more dangerous still,” how “public calamities” offer opportunities for private gain and are therefore “waited and hoped for by a host of private individuals,” who never let a ‘good crisis’ go to waste. In civil society, Machiavelli is more nearly right than Hobbes or Locke, inasmuch as “men are forced to flatter and destroy one another” there.

“Savage man, once he has supped, is at peace with all of Nature and a friend to all of his kind.” Asocial, and therefore with no sacred honor to defend, and indeed no sense of either the sacred or of pride to inspire such a sentiment, his fights over food will be brief, “end[ing] with a few fisticuffs”; “the victor eats, the vanquished goes off to seek his fortune.” Not so with “man in Society,” where the passions for luxury, distinction, and mastery feed on one another, and “my Hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is the sole master of the Universe”in his quest to satisfy “the secret aspirations of the heart of every Civilized man.” In effect, civilized man dreams of returning to his original, natural solitude, but now spurred by libido dominandi at the service of supreme vanity. International and civil war, piracy, crime, abortion, infanticide, join with such lesser evils as miserable marriages, unhealthy occupations, and luxury to make civil society anything but civil. “As industry and the arts spread and flourish, the scorned farmer, weighed down by taxes needed to support Luxury, and condemned to spend his life between labor and hunger, abandons his fields to go look in the Cities for the bread which he should be bringing there,” resulting in the modern state which “on one side grows rich, grows weak and is depopulated on the other,” soon “the prey of the poor Nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them,” growing “rich and weak in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others.” To complete the horrors, civilized man cannot return to nature; only religion is left to him. Alone among the civilized, a philosopher might rediscover a natural way of life, as Rousseau himself did, becoming the solitary walker, in but not of modern society. The solitary walker communes not with God; he is the restless desert saint of the self.

How can such rare souls establish such a way of life for themselves? In Rousseau there is no philo-sophia, no intellectual eros striving for noetic satisfaction. “Human understanding owes much to the Passions”; “it is by their activity that our reason perfects itself,” as “we seek to know only because we desire to enjoy.” “The Passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs and their progress to our knowledge.” The only goods Savage man knows are “food, a female, and rest; the only evils he fears are pain, and hunger”—not death, as Hobbes supposes, “for an animal will never know what it is to die.” As savages interact with circumstances, they will respond with different ways of satisfying these modest goods and avoiding or ameliorating these evils. The arts—and therefore civilization—first arose in Egypt because the cyclical flooding of the Nile River forced savages to invent in order to survive. Egypt turned out to be the exception to a general rule: “the peoples of the North are more industrious than those of the south because they can less afford not to be so, as if Nature wanted in this way to equalize things, by endowing Minds with the fertility it denies the Soil.”

If so, and if the path to civilization widens and lengthens in the manner Rousseau sketches, only a few men will resist the decadence. They will do so by means of Rousseau’s version of Cartesian introspection, beginning by taking measure of “the distance between pure sensations and the simplest knowledge.” They will then be in the intellectual position to ask themselves, “How many centuries perhaps elapsed before men were in a position to see any other fire than that of Heaven? How many different chance occurrences must they have needed before they learned the most common uses of this element?” Such men will ask themselves how a non-rational animal could develop the language that was necessary before the principle of non-contradiction could be discovered. How long did it take before the random sexual reproduction seen in nature led to the institution of the family? In nature, mothers initially nursed their infants only to relieve their own discomfort, and then out of habit-induced love of their own. Even as Hobbes is wrong about the state of nature as the state of war, Locke is wrong about conjugal society. Why would a man stick around to assist in providing for his mate or his children? (Rousseau well knows that many don’t want to do that, even now.) “There is, therefore, no reason for the man to seek out the same woman, nor for the woman to seek out the same man. Locke’s argument collapses.”

As for language, the centerpiece of the classical philosophic understanding of man as the being of logos, of speech and reason, and equally the centerpiece of Biblical creationism, Rousseau addresses it in the Discourse‘s central paragraph. “Man’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature,” a cry “wrested from him only by a sort of instinct on urgent occasions,” never in the ordinary course of his life. Accordingly, savage man had no ideas. Contra the Book of Genesis, “Each object was at first given a particular name without regard to kinds and species”—one oak was called Ed, another Ralph. Or something like that. Locke’s “general ideas can enter the Mind only with the help of words,” and the only natural language consisted of cries of passion in extremis and, eventually, names assigned to particular objects. A simple thought experiment will relieve you of any other notion: “Only the definition of a Triangle gives you its genuine idea; as soon as you [frame the] figure [of] one in your mind, it is some one given Triangle and not another.” Ideas and the abstract or generalized word arose “by means which I cannot conceive.” Philosophic inquiry stops here.

But philosophic inquiry does give the rare soul a glimpse of what the natural life for man was. Asocial natural man was “a free being whose heart is at peace and body in health,” not the miserable being imagined by Hobbes and Locke. Savage man never commits suicide; he was not so much beyond good and evil as prior to those conditions, “neither good nor wicked.” In this, the Bible is right, if for the wrong reasons. (Here, one should notice, Rousseau revises his previous claim that natural man was good.)  “In instinct alone he had all he needed to live in the state of Nature,” whereas—and here he speaks to the rare souls—”in cultivated reason he was only what he needs to live in society.” What savage man knew by natural instinct, the philosopher can re-learn by the right use of reason—beginning with introspection.

Introspecting further, Rousseau finds another sentiment in savage man. Human self-love, amour de soi, aims at self-preservation. So much Hobbes and Locke saw. But further, “self-preservation prior to the birth of vanity”—amour-propre—”tempers his ardor for well-being”—that is, a life beyond the satisfaction of physical necessity—”with an innate repugnance to see his kind suffer.” This is “the force of natural pity,” a pure movement of Nature prior to all reflection,” a sentiment that causes savage man to “identify” with suffering fellow-humans. Pity predates the Golden Rule and is “perhaps more useful”; “the first sentiment of humanity,” it is the source of all “social virtues” today, leading us to the maxim, “Do your good with the least possible harm to others.”

This raises a serious problem. How could savage man feel repugnance at the sufferings of his kind if he couldn’t recognize species, if he had no power of abstraction? If George sees that Oglethorpe in pain, what is it to George? Rousseau does not ask himself that question, here.

Instead, he considers reason and the philosophy it underpins. These isolate man within civil society. Reason “turns man back upon himself,” as it does for Descartes and for Rousseau. In this it reestablishes certain men in something close to man’s natural condition. But “although Socrates and Minds of his stamp may be capable of acquiring virtue through reason, Mankind would long ago have ceased to be if its preservation depended solely on the reasonings of those who make it up.” If reason originates under social conditions, if deployed socially in projects for the general ‘enlightenment’ of whole societies, it merely serves vanity, amour-propre. If used introspectively, however, it can turn away from the vanities of civil society, back toward the rediscovery of human nature, abandoning the sorrows that will soon torment Young Werther, the soul-agonies of civilized man. Sexual passion, for example, will redirect itself. Natural, physical love is fleeting and harmless, serving to preserve the species without knowing it does so. “Any woman suits” savage man; there were no epic wars over a Helen in the state of nature. Moral love, however, “gives this desire its distinctive character and focuses it exclusively on a single object,” a “factitious sentiment” leading young men to submit to the tyranny of women, who extol moral love “in order to establish their rule and to make dominant the sex that should obey.” When man was always free to move on from his current mate, there could be no conflicts over women, a condition which “renders vain the Law of the stronger.” Even under the conditions of decadence prevailing in civil life, the philosopher will discover this, and begin to live according to the natural standard insofar as prudence enables him to negotiate his way through the artificial reefs and shoals of society.

“It remains for me to consider and bring together the various contingencies that can have perfected human reason while deteriorating the species, make a being wicked by making it sociable, and from so remote a beginning finally bring man and the world to the point where we now find them.” This is his task in Part II. There he turns to the ‘historical’ account he had eschewed earlier, but this can now be a story decisively inflected by his experiment in philosophic introspection. Rousseau offers the sort of history of inequality’s origins that the essay topic implies, but it is a philosophic history.

Whatever beginnings language and other social relations may have had prior to the event, “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” and therefore the origin of inequality among men. What had happened between the state of nature and the idea of property, bringing human beings to this point?

“Man’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that of his preservation.” (This is the experience the philosopher seeks to recreate, as it were, in the Reveries.) “The earth’s products provided him with all the assistance he needed, instinct moved him to use them”—a “blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart,” led to reproduction, after which “the two sexes no longer recognized one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the Mother as soon as it could do without her.” In defending himself against his few natural enemies, savage man used “natural weapons” (stones, branches), “learn[ing] to overcome the obstacles of Nature.” As the human population grew, “difficulties multiplied” along with it. Necessity being the mother of invention, “they invented line and hook,” becoming “fishermen and Fish-eaters.” “Lightning, a Volcano, or some happy accident acquainted them with fire a new resource against the rigors of winter”; once they learned to conserve and to reproduce fire, savage man began “to prepare the meats they had previously devoured raw.” Crucially, “this repeated interaction of the various beings with himself as well as with one another must naturally have engendered in man’s mind perceptions of certain relationships,” such as those “we express by the words, great, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, fearful, bold, and other such ideas, compared as need required and almost without thinking about it, finally produced in him some sort of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence that suggested to him the precautions most necessary for his safety.” This was the first “enlightenment,” as man “became the master of those [animals] that could be useful, and the scourge of those that could be harmful to him.” At the same time, he must have begun to recognize his similarity to some of those animals, enabling him to take the next step of association with them.

“Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole spring of human actions, he was in a position to distinguish between the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on the help of his kind, and the even rarer occasions when competition should make him suspicious of them.” He “united with them in a herd, or at most in some kind of free association that obligated no one and lasted only as long as the transitory need that had formed it”; at other times, “everyone sought to seize his own advantage” by force or by fraud, depending upon whether he had an advantage of physical or mental strength. For this level of cooperation he needed no more language than the cries, gestures, and imitative noises we see in other ‘social’ animals, such as crows and monkeys.

Such free associations, if transient, eventually led to “a first revolution”: “the establishment and differentiation of families” along with some sort of property, “from which perhaps a good many quarrels and Fights already arose.” Conjugal and paternal love—amour de soi under changed circumstances—could now exist, but with it, and property, came leisure and the degeneration of man’s natural hardiness. From families came nations, “united in morals and character, not by Rules or Laws.” Familial and ultimately family rivalries, including jealousy, flowed from this newly-complex version of self-love. Cain and Abel, yes, but they were competing for the favor of some woman, not God. “The moment men needed the help of another” to satisfy their newly-real but artificial needs “equality disappeared, property oppressed, work became necessary”—Rousseau’s understanding of the curse of Adam resulted not in death, which had existed all along, but “slavery and misery.”

“Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a value.” Who sings or dances best? Who is “the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent”? Hence vanity and contempt, shame and envy, inequality and vice—in a word, civil society, the earliest versions of which Hobbes and Locke mistook for the state of nature. “All subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual”—deluded by amour-propre —”and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species.” No wonder that the few remaining savages today resist our “civilizing missions.” “Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts the invention of which brought about this great revolution. For the Poet it is gold and silver; but for the Philosopher it is iron and wheat that civilized men, and ruined Mankind.” This explains Europe’s advantage over other parts of the world, as it “is both the most abundant in iron and the most fertile in wheat.”

Once some men began to melt and forge iron, others were needed to feed them. The invention of the plow brought metallurgy and agriculture together; division of land followed, itself followed by the need for “the first rules of justice” designed to stabilize property ownership. With this, conventional right supplanted the natural law. More, the primitive capacities to hunt and to gather take little ability, but farming and metallurgy do. This made certain natural capacities the basis for ever-increasing civil-social inequality. Under these conditions, if you don’t have much natural ability, you fake it until you make it. “To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the ices that follow in their train,” including “consuming ambition, the ardent desire to raise one’s relative fortune less out of genuine need than in order to place oneself above others.” “All these evils are the first effect of property, and the inseparable train of nascent inequality.”

The war of all against all that resulted induced men for form social contracts to “protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse common enemies, and keep us in eternal concord.” Or so the first ‘founder’ told his dupes, who then “ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom,” chains with which “gave the weak new fetters and the rich new forces, irreversibly destroy[ing] natural freedom, forever.”

Forever: there will be no return. Philosopher can come the closest; civil societies, for their part, may at least redesign their chains in a manner that loosens them, making them citizens instead of slaves of some master. At best, the vast majority of men can only craft “a true Contract between the People and the Chiefs it chooses for itself.” Hence Du Contrat Social. From the first Discourse to the Reveries, each book in Rousseau’s oeuvre has its exact place in the outline provided here, in this book.

These vast changes in human life suggest to Rousseau one of his most influential and (as it proved) dangerous notions. “The Mankind of one age is not the Mankind of another age.” By this, Rousseau doesn’t mean simply that different regimes or ways of life reward some human types and punish others. Human nature itself changes as “original man gradually vanishes.” Whereas “the Savage lives in himself,” man in civil society, “sociable man,” lives “always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his existence solely from their judgment.” Sociable men “have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without wisdom.”

With human nature deemed malleable, subsequent philosophers, especially under the very different but complementary influence of Hume, would seek the source of right elsewhere, eventually in ‘History’ now reconceived not as the story of the course of events but as the course of events itself. The optimism of the Enlightenment, which Rousseau intended to bridle, would not only return but overwhelm the political sense of limits, of moderation and balance in ways that would magnify the vices of civilization Rousseau deplored.

 

 

 

 

Stephen Schwartz: A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

 

“Personally and passionately involved in the enlightening and edifying enterprise of analytic philosophy,” Professor Schwartz calls it “the dominant Anglo-Saxon philosophical movement of the twentieth century” and also of this century, so far. He is unquestionably correct, especially with respect to academic philosophizing. With the compartmentalization of academic research, and with the division of labor institutional departmentalization reflects, academics ‘doing philosophy’ have needed a way to distinguish their enterprise from mathematics and science ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’ At the same time, they could not ignore the intellectual authority of mathematics and science in the modern world, seen in the thought of Bacon and Descartes, two of modernity’s philosophic progenitors. This authority has increased in the centuries subsequent to their work, and it includes the application or attempted application of scientific method to the work of governments in the form of the ‘administrative state.’ Even its recent philosophic, often ideological rival, ‘post-modernism,’ which rejects rationalism in the name of a democratized Nietscheism, nonetheless eagerly uses the apparatus of the administrative state as its preferred instrument of ruling.

“I am personally and passionately involved in the enlightening and edifying enterprise of analytic philosophy,” Schwartz writes. This engagement seldom injures his account of its history. Quite the contrary, for the most part: History written by a lover almost always outranks history written by despiser, as a lover will attend to the features of his beloved, always wanting to know more about her.

Modern philosophers have tended to group themselves into two major encampments, empiricists (‘Baconians’) and rationalists (‘Cartesians’). Although analytic philosophers began by distancing themselves sharply from Hegelianism, with its grand thesis-antithesis-synthesis historical dialectic, it’s hard to deny that they began by attempting to ‘synthesize’ modern empiricism and rationalism. Empiricists hold that all knowledge is based on experience; ‘experimental’ science tests ideas, initially demoted to the status of hypotheses, testing them by concrete results under the rationally controlled conditions of the laboratory—that is, a place of labor, of action, not of contemplation. Modern scientists, including Einstein himself, were quite relieved that the mathematical formula E=mc² found confirmation in the lab. Modern rationalists concentrate their attention on ideas thought to be innate in the human mind, ideas based on ‘pure’—that is to say, non-empirical, non-factual—reason. Can these two opposite approaches to philosophizing be combined? How?

Bertrand Russell took the first, and very deep, stab at accomplishing this in his Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1903. Russell sought nothing less than to break with both Aristotelian and Hegelian logic. Taking over a project begun by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, Russell treated logic like the calculus. As Jacob Klein has shown, the calculus itself was invented to register the interest of modern philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli in kinetics. [1] Moderns are less interested in the stable figures of Pythagorean geometry as in a geometry of motion—of plotting points along a curve. Aristotelian, syllogistic logic seeks to understand things in accordance with their forms and ‘essences.’ Hence such standard syllogistic locutions as “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” “Socrates” is the subject, “man” the predicate. To say “All zebras are animals” is logically the same as to say “Socrates is a man,” despite the fact that a zebra is a species, Socrates a person. Additionally, in syllogistic logic, “Socrates is married to Xanthippe” is logically identical to these other propositions because “married to Xanthippe” is the predicate—this, despite the fact that “married to” is a relation, whereas “is a man” is a statement about the intrinsic nature of Socrates.

In mathematical logic, “predicates represent functions from objects to truth-values,” “functions” being a term from calculus. To say “Socrates is a man” is to say “Socrates satisfies the function ‘man.'” “‘All zebras are animals’ says that if any object satisfies the function ‘x is a zebra,’ then it satisfies the function ‘x is an animal.'” And to say that “Socrates is married to Xanthippe” is to say that the pair Socrates/Xanthippe satisfies the function “is married to.” Such sentences are structured like equations in calculus. They say nothing about the substance of the things equated. They do not posit essences, only the verbal equivalents of points on a line.

Russell’s logic differs from Hegel because it is analytic. It does not aim at producing a synthesis. When X meets not-X there is no necessary Y that comes out of the meeting. The logical principle of non-contradiction enables us to analyze but tells us nothing about synthesis. Analytic philosophy is as kinetic as Hegelianism, but it doesn’t try to tell us where we are going. No wonder Lenin hated it. [2]

Because it is analytic and kinetic, not ‘essentialist’ or substantive and not synthetic, either, “The name ‘analytic philosophy refers more to the methods of analytic philosophy than to any particular doctrine that analytic philosophers have all shared.” For such philosophers, “insight comes from seeing how things are put together and how they can be prized apart; how they are constructed and how they can be reconstructed.” Schwartz notes the similarity between analytic philosophy and the more recent philosophies of ‘deconstructionism.’ The difference, it might be added, stems from the influence of Nietzsche on deconstructionists, which is entirely absent from the minds of the ‘analysts.’ Like the deconstructionists, and like Nietzsche, “analytic philosophers rejected the pretensions of the Enlightenment philosophers,” their grand schemes of rationally-controlled progress. Unlike the deconstructionists and Nietzsche, they did not question the Enlightenment philosophers’ “commitment to reason.” At any rate, analytic philosophy “is not a unified movement or school,” and indeed Russell himself changed his opinions on all manner of things throughout his long career.

“The basic aspects of modernism—rejection of past traditions, experimentation with new methods and forms; fascination with and anxiety about technology and use of new technical methods; focusing on method, surface, expression, and language—all characterize analytic philosophy.” This method also comports with the ambition of modernism to master nature; by basing logic on a particular form of modern mathematics, the calculus, it intends to overcome reality even as it seeks to understand it. As Schwartz puts it, the analytic philosophers “saw their work as freeing philosophy and even society, from its past forms and obsessions.”

“Mathematics is a priori and universal, so how can it be empirical?” Following Frege, Russell initially “treat[ed] logic mathematically, and then treat[ed] mathematics as a form of logic.” By abstracting from experience, mathematical equations give us certainty; for example, we can’t know empirically that there are infinitely many prime numbers because we can’t know if the one we’ve just mentioned is the last one. This appears to lead to a strict form of rationalism. Frege replies that “mathematical propositions are not based on experience or observation, but they are not the results of pure rational insight into the ultimate nature of reality, either.” They may not be ‘about’ anything other than themselves. Russell replies to Frege by counter-example: The famous Liar’s Paradox (a Cretan says, “All Cretans are liars”) doesn’t only yield an ’empty set,’ as mathematicians say; it isn’t a set at all. Originally a Fregian, Russell now could “no longer plausibly claim that mathematics was reducible to pure logic—that it was all analytic.” What he did claim (and here is where empiricism comes in) was that language can be analyzed. The Epicureans’ atomism can return because sentences can be rationally reduced to what Russell called “ultimate simples” or “logical atoms.” They are the objects perceived through the empeiria of this new empiricism; for logical purposes they have the same status as the natural atoms for Lucretius, the sense-data for Locke. And these empirical facts can be analyzed by means of symbolic logic, a logic that takes on the form of mathematical equations but without the need to need to translate the things analyzed into numbers. (In this, Russell sharply diverges from such system as the Gematria in Judaism, which does indeed translate words into numbers. Russell would deny that such a move makes sense.)

It was Russell’s sometime colleague, G. E. Moore, who attacked the then-dominant school of German Idealism, especially as seen in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic of Hegel. Hegel and his followers claimed that the dialectic had ontological content, that it registered the logical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. Moore (with Russell) denied this. The negation of a ‘thesis’ by an ‘antithesis’ yields nothing more than a contradiction; there is no ‘synthesis’ at all. The logical atomists or, as they also called themselves, logical positivists (contrasted with Hegelian ‘negationists’) was nothing but airy “metaphysics.” Logical positivists insisted on limiting reason to matters of common sense, that is, sense data, with which we are all “directly acquainted,” as Schwartz puts it. But we are only acquainted with the sense data we perceive; such notions as whiteness, diversity, and brotherhood are not immediate perceptions. It is through a mental process that we become aware of them. I perceive the appearance of a table sensually, but I know it only indirectly, through words, “by description.” And, in Russell’s words, “Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.” These are logical atoms because any attempt at forming a conception that is exposed as illogical, as self-contradictory, thereby falls apart in our mind, becomes inconceivable. In mathematical terms one might call it a failed function, a pseudo- or dys-functional function.

“Analytic philosophers proudly contrast the clarity, technical proficiency, and respect for natural science of analytic philosophy versus the ultra-sophistication, contrived jargon, and mystification of Continental philosophy.” They are working very broadly within the British philosophic framework of empiricism, seen in Hobbes and Locke, but they add a linguistic layer to perception that the earlier empiricists did not emphasize. To the logical positivists, we truly know only what we make, and what we make first and foremost is concepts, out of sense perceptions mixed with words.

Schwartz adds that there was a political-historical element to all of this. At the time, “Hegelianism was something like the official philosophy of Germany, and especially Prussia.” Germany generally and Prussia particularly had taken on a bad odor for Englishmen as it rose to challenge the British regime at the beginning of the twentieth century. This may or may not have had philosophic relevance (the positivists denied that there can be such a thing as political philosophy), but it aided in obtaining a respectful hearing for a philosophic method distinct from and indeed contradictory to that of the Germans.

Russell and Moore were logicians who called themselves positivists, but ‘logical positivism’ as the term for a philosophic school came to be deployed in Vienna in the 1920s. Its most important proponent was Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Like Russell and Moore, the members of the Vienna Circle reacted against Hegelian German idealism,” very much including its political dimension; “many blamed the Prussian aristocratic traditions for starting the war and for not being able to pursue it successfully”—quite the failure of historicist dialectic, that. “If Frege is the pioneer and Bertrand Russell the father of analytic philosophy, then Wittgenstein’s writings provide the backbone.” Wittgenstein had read the Principia Mathematica before the war, studied with Russell at Cambridge, and then became a decorated artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Presumably, his stint in an Italian P.O.W. camp provided the leisure to contemplate the defects of the German-Austrian misalliance, along with the philosophic reasons for doubting Hegelianism and for refining positivism. He published his Tractatus in 1924.

Wittgenstein sees that language attempts not only to represent the world—what analytic philosophers would come to call the “actual” world we perceive with our senses—but also to represent “non-actual states of affairs,” the stuff of plans and fantasies. “In order for us to be able to think about the world and talk about it, there must be a fundamental similarity of structure or isomorphism between thought and language, and between language and the world. This structure is represented by formal logic.” He breaks with Russell, however, in denying that logic describes “very abstract or fundamental facts or truths about the world or thought or even language”; language provides only “the framework or scaffolding that makes statements of facts possible.” The limits of the linguistic framework are tautologies on the one hand, self-contradictions on the other; this is what keeps Wittgenstein within the realm of logic. “Russell was still yearning for some sort of intellectually satisfying certainty, whereas according to Wittgenstein the only certainty available is empty and formal.”

An analytic proposition is self-evident only because it is a tautology. In this it is identical to a mathematical proposition, whether an axiom, postulate, or theorem. This returns mathematics to the apodictic certainty of pure abstraction, and it denies that any certainty can result from empirical investigation. As another member of the Vienna Circle put it, there are statements about facts and statements which “merely express the way in which the rules which govern the application of words to facts depend upon each other.” The latter “say nothing about objects and are for this very reason certain, universally valid, irrefutable by observation.” Therefore, as Wittgenstein writes, “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences”; it aims only “at the logical clarification of thoughts” and not at “a body of doctrine.” It “does not result in ‘philosophical propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions.” A decade later, A. J. Ayer concurred, asserting that “The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.” Philosophers have been the dupes of language, goofed by grammar. Such a conception as ‘God’ is neither provable nor disprovable. ‘Moral philosophy’ is equally a contradiction in terms, as moral claims have no cognitive content but express nothing but attitudes and emotions. At best, logic will tell us if a moral judgment coheres logically with the moral standard asserted by the one making the judgment.

Logical positivism, popularized (well, at least among academics) by Ayer’s 1936 book, Language, Truth, and Logic, held sway among philosophy professors well into the 1950s. “Much of the development of philosophy and methodology in the sciences since the 1950s has been driven by the criticisms of the doctrines of the logical positivists.” One of the critics would be Wittgenstein himself. These criticisms, however, were undertaken in “the spirit of the logical positivists’ motivation,” deploying many of the same “methods, standards, and attitudes.”

Wittgenstein, for example, came to reject “the use of symbolic logic to dissolve philosophical problems.” He now took “the meaning of a statement” to be not “a picture of reality or a fact” but a tool, a matter of how the statement was used in “practical life.” This begins to move toward a reconception of language as rhetoric: “Language is used to elicit a response in listeners, to coordinate our activities, and so on.” This is the theme of Wittgenstein’s philosophic notebooks, published posthumously (he died in 1951) as The Philosophical Investigations. This shift distinguishes what scholars have come to call the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus from the “later Wittgenstein.”

After Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine took up the mantle. To understand meaning as use is to recall the American pragmatist school, led by John Dewey and William James. Radicalized, the tendency of pragmatism is to reject all attempts to ‘verify’ the truth of a statement; indeed, ‘truth’ itself comes to be guarded by inverted commas, too. Accordingly, Quine rejects even Karl Popper’s more modest principle of falsification, which asks us not to verify anything in accordance with some standard but more modestly to eliminate those claims which contradict that standard. Quine regards all claims, whether they are assertions of the existence of the Homeric gods or of the existence of physical objects, as “cultural posits.” ‘We moderns’ believe in the existence of physical objects only because that belief (as Quine puts it) “has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” That is, meaning is Machiavellian in intent; it seeks to master Fortuna. “There is no first or fundamental philosophy that discovers truth or rather TRUTH underlying or separate from science”—which is a matter of ‘grasping,’ of touch, not of seeing (noesis) or of hearing (revelation).

If an ‘analytic’ statement has a meaning independent of facts and a ‘synthetic’ meaning is grounded in facts, can we really distinguish between the two? Quine doubts it. What is a ‘cigarette’? Tobacco rolled in cylindrically-shaped paper? What about marijuana rolled in paper? And does a ‘cigarette’ need to be rolled in paper at all? Why not a tobacco leaf? “We begin to see the difficulty of distinguishing pure elements of the linguistic meaning of ‘cigarette’ from empirical facts or generalizations about cigarettes. The notion that the term ‘cigarette’ has a pure linguistic meaning begins to dissolve,” and with it its logical ‘analyticity.’ Quine says that the only way to assign meaning to ‘cigarette’ is to consider it within “the whole of science,” “the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs,” which he deems “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges,” a (rather disorderly) “web of belief.” What “positivists and other modern empiricists failed to recognize” was this “holistic character of knowledge.” Human knowledge or science is never comprehensive (as it is in such a great systematizer as Hegel); when a given experience contradicts it, we can and should adjust it accordingly. “Even the laws of logic and mathematics are not immune to revision.” But there is no standard ‘above’ the myth or story of science; we are simply adjusting the “paradigm” (as the historian of ideas Thomas Kuhn calls it). More, we rarely discard an old paradigm for a new one. Kuhn writes, “Typically the adherents of the old scientific paradigm are not defeated by the results of experiments or observations. They are defeated by the grim reaper,” as “older scientists are replaced in positions of scientific power by younger colleagues with fewer intellectual commitments.” (Notice that this last point strengthens the intellectual hands not only of analytic philosophers but of post-modernists, ever alert to ‘will to power’ Nietzsche so vehemently asserted to be the pervasive principle of all life.)

Why, then, do Quine and Kuhn persist in favoring scientific paradigms over others? It can’t simply be a matter of “cultural predilections.” Rather, scientific paradigms have proven more accurate than, say, astrology as tools “for making predictions.” We judge science the same way “we judge any tool. How useful is it? How well does it work? Does it do the job for which it is designed?” Philosophy and philosophizing thus can assist the modern scientific enterprise, so long as philosophers abandon their pretension to see nature and stick to the task of sharpening the tools by which we grasp and shape it.

All of this is quite reminiscent of Dewey, as Quine’s successor, Richard Rorty, insists in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Rorty, along with his contemporary Hilary Putnam, “labored to dismantle the traditional view of science as an attempt, by rigid and formal methods, to get an ever more accurate picture or mirror of a fixed lawlike world.” This led them to question whether science has a monopoly on knowledge. Why can’t painting, sculpture, music, literature, moral codes, “and perhaps even religion” “contribute to the web of knowledge”? These areas of thought, too, may offer “cognitive content with pragmatic value,” even if modern science remains “the Queen” of the knowledges.

Respecting moral codes, for example, Putnam rejects the fact/value distinction, “which was almost as dear to the positivists as the analytic/synthetic distinction.” Not only such words as ‘cruel’ and ‘kind’ are “value-laden,” but so are “such factual sounding terms as ‘rational,’ ‘logical,’ ‘irrational'”. Putnam considers “his rescuing values from positivist exclusion to be his most important contribution to philosophy.”

Putnam especially insists that this opening-up of knowledge, even combined with the rejection of a standard of truth ‘above the cave’ of our current myth, doesn’t entail relativism. “Denying that it makes sense to ask whether our concepts ‘match’ something totally uncontaminated by conceptualization is one thing; but to hold that every conceptual system is therefore just as good as every other would be something else. If anyone really believed that, and if they were foolish enough to pick a conceptual system that told them they could fly and to act upon it by jumping out of a window, they would if they were lucky enough to survive, see the weakness of the latter view at once.” While “the very inputs upon which our knowledge is based are conceptually contaminated,” such contaminated inputs “are better than none.” And if “contaminated inputs are all we have, still all we have has proved to be quite a bit,” given the success of modern science in doing what its philosophic forebears promised, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.

Meanwhile, in England, philosophy shifted its base of operations from Russell’s Cambridge to Oxford, where C. E. M. Anscombe, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart, Charles Stevenson, and Gilbert Ryle worked. They too rejected Cambridge and Vienna Circle formalism, “tend[ing] to view symbolic logic as an attractive snare for the philosophical intellect.” They retained linguistic philosophy’s emphasis on language but turned (Socrates-like, it might be said) to the consideration of “ordinary language” and common sense. Again like their analytic-philosophy predecessors, they sought to elucidate the meaning of concepts, but focused their attention not so much on mathematics and science as on the more concrete realms of literature, the arts, and politics. Ryle held that “philosophy is messy and the messy problems it confronts cannot be resolved by mathematical formulas.” Even as Aristotle had observed that a cultivated man should not expect more precision in a field of knowledge than its subject-matter allows one to have, the “ordinary language philosophers” sought “precision and accuracy of thought and argument, not the precision of the physicist, chemist, or medical doctor.”

Whether analytic philosophers have maintained that symbolic logic mirrors nature, or whether they have maintained that we find meaning only in uses, in pragmatic refinement of paradigms, they have committed what Ryle regards as the fallacy of dualism, what he called (following Arthur Koestler) “the ghost in the machine,” the Geist or spirit/mind as distinguished from the body. Our minds are not separate from our bodies; they are only “organizations of behavior”. Ryle replaces logical atomism and logical positivism with logical behaviorism. We know what people are thinking and feeling primarily by their actions, which include their vocalizations, linguistic and otherwise. Although Ryle eventually questioned behaviorism, finding it insufficient to account for the experience of introspection, behaviorism has enjoyed a long if often pernicious life in the writings of social scientists seeking, as they do, observable and measurable phenomena to describe.

Resistance to dualism entails a rejection of the superiority of mind over matter. This “reflected changes in society,” Schwartz remarks, and indeed it does look like a continuation of the trend toward what Tocqueville calls democracy, social egalitarianism—the pushing-down of aristocratic claims to rule in all endeavors of mind and heart. Would ‘aristocracy’ make a comeback,? Would philosophers begin to call ordinary language philosophy ordinary-all-too-ordinary?

Not entirely. “Since the decline of ordinary language philosophy in the 1960s, no single movement or school has dominated analytic philosophy.” In Schwartz’s estimation, the “most striking and impressive advances” by analytic philosophers came in the investigation of language. And this marked a return to nature, thanks to the work on the linguist Noam Chomsky, whose research into human beings’ innate propensity to language spurred a rethinking of that large portion of philosophic thought which took its cue from John Locke and his (now clearly mistaken) notion of the mind as a tabula rasa. Before Chomsky, the mathematician Kurt Gödel gave “the final deathblow” to the earliest, pre-Principia Mathematica form of analytic philosophy by showing that arithmetic “cannot be reduced to logic and set theory” because some axioms are un-analyzable, unprovable and therefore “beyond the reach of human knowledge.” To put it in verbal terms (as the philosopher Alfred Tarski did), to say that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white. That doesn’t get you very far. More importantly, it can’t, so don’t waste any effort in trying. It is well worth noticing, as Stanley Rosen does, that analytic philosophy tends to deny cognitive status to intellectual intuition or noesis, and that this one of the “limits to analysis.” [3]

To deal with such a conundrum, Tarski distinguished between “object-language”—the sentences in which we talk about objects—and “meta-language”—the sentences in which we talk about the object-language, in which (as Tarski writes) we “construct the definition of truth for the first language.” Donald Davidson elaborated on Tarski’s proposal, linking meta-language to Quine’s anti-positivist holism or Kuhn’s paradigm theory. Or, reaching back still further, Davidson writes, “Frege said that only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning; in the same vein he might have added that only in the context of the language does a sentence (and therefore a word) have meaning.” Therefore, “an argument must always be interpreted in the way that makes the most sense given the context and other information we have”; “if we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behavior of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.” Taken by itself, this would amount to a highly sophisticated form of classical conventionalism; it took Chomsky to bring nature back in, after it had been driven out by philosophic pitchforks.

Chomsky rejected behaviorism, which “cannot explain our ability to learn a language” because languages are too complex to be learned by an organism starting at zero. “All normal humans are born with a universal grammar already hard-wired in their brains.” This strikes a blow against Quine, a friend of B. F. Skinner, the Harvard psychologist who became the most prominent behaviorist of the postwar decades. [4] Schwartz comments, “Logical behaviorism never had any plausibility. No definitions in terms of behavior and dispositions to behave were ever formulated nor could they be,” inasmuch as “thoughts and day dreams are interior and private and need never be manifested in anything exterior.” They are unverifiable by outside observers.

Further, the natural languages that derive from the universal grammar natural to human beings resemble “a formal logical system.” Whereas Wittgenstein, and Quine following him, denied that the purpose of language “was to express our thoughts,” Chomsky “embraces exactly this view.” Despite his esteem for the Quine insofar as he authored the metaphor of the “web of belief,” Davidson limited such conventionalism by endorsing Chomsky rationalist naturalism: “The dependence of speaking on thinking is evident,” he wrote, “for to speak is to express thoughts.” Schwartz sees that “the next step is not far: [T]he structure of language is isomorphic to the structure of thought, and the world.” The deeper philosophers dove into language, the more they moved toward the classical claim that man is by nature animated by logos, by speech and reason.

From the philosophy of language, then, to the philosophy of mind. Here, philosophers noticed that “the behaviorist cannot forgo appeal to mental states,” which are “functional states of an organism,” that is, states that cause it to behave. External stimuli may ‘push’ the organism to do something, but only as mediated through that mental state (e.g., pain, pleasure, revulsion, attraction). The “functionalist” “views a mental state as a function that takes an input stimulus, plus other mental states, and generates an output that depends on both the input and the other mental states,” indeed, “the entire mental state of the organism.” A computer, which is an artifact imitating the human mind, performing some of the same functions (albeit more efficiently) does much the same thing: its “output depends on the input plus the program the machine is running.”

This is as good as far as it goes, but it “leaves out of the account the subjective nature of our mental lives.” Computers have no consciousness, “as far as we know.” An organism that had no consciousness would feel no pain, even if it were subjected to abuse—a point well known to all of us who have experienced the benefits of anesthesia. Although Davidson and many other philosophers are reluctant to abandon materialism, the idea of consciousness obviously causes a problem for them, even if their web-of-belief organicism disposes of behaviorist simplisme. Schwartz notes, “The problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness are today the central problems in the philosophy of mind.”

And with all this, even much-denigrated metaphysics, the bugbear of analytic philosophers, has reappeared in the thought of today’s analytic philosophers. This “remarkable development” occurred thanks to “developments in formal modal logic in the 1960s.” Formulated by C. I. Lewis, “modal” logic “is the logic of necessity and possibility,” duly translated into symbolic-logic figures (a box symbolizing necessity, a diamond symbolizing possibility). As Quine immediately saw, and abominated, this suggests that symbolic logic might be made into a means of understanding things in nature, reviving the hated ‘essentialism’ of previous schools of philosophy, and with it metaphysics itself. Schwartz counts himself among those who find Aristotelian essential “intuitive and commonsensical,” very far from impossible to think about logically. “In embracing metaphysics,” he hastens to add, “we did not give up commitment to clarity, care, and careful sequential reasoning, nor to honoring science and mathematics.” That part of the analytic-philosophy mindset remains, well, conscious of itself.

The centerpiece of contemporary metaphysical thought is the idea of “possible worlds,” that is, worlds that “could have been” but are not the “actual” world. The notion of possible worlds was originated by G. W. F. Leibniz, the renowned seventeenth-century metaphysician and indeed theologian. The down-to-earth example of such thinking begins with a “counterfactual”: a world in which, for example, Ralph Nader didn’t run in the 2000 presidential election, resulting in victory for Senator Gore over Governor Bush. Such a possible, but not actual turn of events likely would have led to turns in subsequent events (would President Gore have prosecuted Gulf War II?). In this line of thought, a necessary proposition is true in every possible world, whereas a possible proposition is true in at least one possible world; an impossible proposition is possible in none, and a contingent proposition is true in some worlds, false in others. “This is not about language. Even though we speak of possible world semantics, it is metaphysics.” And it reopens philosophic minds to essentialism: “I have the property of being a human being in every world in which I exist,” Schwartz writes. “I have the property of living in Ithaca in some but not others. I am essentially a human but contingently an Ithacan.” “An essence is a property or conjunction of properties that is necessary and sufficient for being a particular individual.” As Alvin Plantinga puts it, “If Socrates”—not to be confused with Schwartz, but the principle is the same—”had not existed, his essence would have been unexemplified, but not nonexistent. In world where Socrates exists, Socrateity is his essence; exemplifying Socrateity is essential to him.” Or, as Schwartz puts it, “In some worlds, some essences are exemplified, and others are not.” Mathematicians have dealt with such an idea for years in the form of probability theory in statistics. As the political writer George F. Will noticed, a Chicago Cubs hitter whose batting average is .203, isn’t necessary ‘overdue for a base hit,’ whatever some cheerleading baseball announcer may say. In the actual world, he may strike out, even if there are possible worlds in which he saves the day with an RBI triple.

On a loftier level, modal logic revives the ontological argument for the existence of God. In Descartes’ version, since God has all perfections and existence is a perfection, God exists. The modal version of the ontological argument is: “If it is possible that God exists, then God exists”—that is, in essence if not in actuality; “if it is possible that a necessary being who is omnipotent” and possesses the other attributes of the Biblical God exists, “then such a being exists.” This doesn’t prove the existence of God, but, as Plantinga argues, “it establishes the rational acceptability of belief in God—the rational acceptability of theism,” because even if one disbelieves that there can be a possible world in which “maximal greatness is instantiated,” believing that there is, “is not irrational.” Therefore, “theism is not irrational” but rather a logical stance taken on the basis of a premise that cannot be proven or disproven, rather as we understand that snow is white only if snow is white. “To my knowledge,” Schwartz writes, “no one has yet succeeded in demonstrating that the concept of God is impossible, self-contradictory, or nonsensical.”

If nature has returned to philosophy, precisely through the thinking-through of analytic philosophy, what is nature? Putnam defines natural kinds as “classes of things that we regard as of explanatory importance… held together [by] deep-lying mechanisms.” According to the theory of “reference”—what we mean to say that our words refer to something—meaning has “intension” and “extension.” “Intension” is what we mean to say by using a given term; the word ‘lemon’ means a certain “conjunction of properties.” “Extension” is a reference to the things to which that meaning applies. The term ‘lemon’ refers to an object currently sitting in the fruit and vegetable section of Market House, among other objects, many of them not lemons. In logical terms, the concept corresponding to the term is its “intension,” and it “must always provide a necessary and sufficient condition for falling into the extension of the term.” “Analytic” truths “are based on the meanings of terms.” From Hume onwards, “all necessity was construed as analyticity or somehow based on linguistic conventions.” This is what’s behind Hume’s questioning of the theory of causality; there is no sort of “extra-linguistic necessity.” That’s what Wittgenstein has in mind when he claims that essence is expressed by grammar, by a linguistic convention, and need not apply to the physical world.

Keith Donellan argues otherwise. To describe something, he remarks, you may make an “attributive” description or a “referential” one. An attributive description is one in which I infer a characteristic of, say, a person without knowing who the person is. If someone explains E=mc² to me, I might think that the person who first formulated that must have been smarter than I am, but I might not know it was Albert Einstein. If I met Einstein and had a conversation with him, and then described him as being smarter than I am, I would be defining him referentially, now having a definite person in mind. Bringing in ‘possible worlds’ theory, Saul Kripke adds that when I say “Albert Einstein” I mean “the same person whether or not he… satisfies some list of commonly associated descriptions.” Those who knew Einstein as a child attributed no genius to him but nonetheless meant the same dude as those who later described him quite differently. Kripke distinguishes between necessity—a category in metaphysics—a prioricity—a category in epistemology—and analyticity—a category in linguistics.

The same goes not only for persons but for natural kinds. Under the older theory, “the concept associated with a term functions like the set of identifying descriptions supposedly associated with an ordinary name”; “gold” is yellow, shiny, metallic, and so forth. It can be analyzed linguistically, broken down into these other words. Kripke observes, however, that such a description doesn’t truly define gold. Only “its atomic structure defines whether some stuff is gold.” Gold is gold metaphysically, that is, it is gold in all possible worlds. Anything that does not have that atomic structure isn’t gold, “even if it satisfies some list of superficial features that we think” characterize it. Our certainty in this classification derives not from “knowledge of a definition” but from “a well-established empirical theory.” It is not analytic, in the analytic-philosophy sense, but “if it is true, it is necessary” metaphysically.

Schwartz provides another way into the question, distinguishing physical possibility and necessity from metaphysical possibility and necessity, and both from logical possibility and necessity. An alternate world that is physically possible must have the same natural laws as our world. An alternative world that is metaphysically possible might be physically impossible in our, actual, world. An alternative world that is logically possible must only meet the criterion of “logical consistency.” So, for example, it is physically possible for Schwartz to have lived in San Francisco, as this would violate “no natural laws”; what is more, this is also metaphysically and logically possible. It is physically impossible for Schwartz to swim across the Atlantic Ocean; it isn’t metaphysically or logically impossible, however. It is not physically possible for Schwartz to be an alligator, nor is it metaphysically possible “(assuming that I am essentially human)”; it is nonetheless logically possible, for example if I (not doubt unwarrantedly) use the term ‘alligator’ as a metaphor to describe Schwartz’s personality.

Speaking of character, analytic philosophers have also begun to admit ethics into their purview, along with metaphysics and nature. G. E. Moore’s moral-philosophic equivalent of the Principia Mathematica was his Principia Ethica, published in the same year as the Russell/Whitehead opus. Moore denied that there can be any such things as moral philosophy; his book centers on what he calls “metaethics,” the “logical and analytical study of ethics” by means of epistemological, logical, and metaphysical categories. Such categories tell one nothing substantive about right and wrong, good and bad because (according to Moore) such ethical topics have no cognitive content if one considers them epistemologically, logically, and metaphysically. Moore argues that ‘good’ is an indefinable term, rather like ‘white’ or ‘yellow.’ Like those terms, it cannot be analyzed. But unlike shades and colors, it can’t be “perceived by the senses,” either; it is “apprehended by moral intuition.” Because it can’t be perceived by the senses it can’t be natural; in claiming this, Moore affirms Hume’s denial that we can derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Philosophers who try to derive ethics from nature commit the “naturalistic fallacy.” The moral intuition amounts to “personal affection” and “appreciation”—to ‘values’ as distinct from ‘facts.’ A later writer in Moore’s line, C. L. Stevenson subsumed ethical discourse under rhetoric: “The point of ethical discourse is to influence not describe.” A. J. Ayer agreed.

Analytic philosophers began to change their minds after World War II, which conflict must have imposed a fairly severe challenge to moral subjectivism. R. M. Hare hoped to stay within the Moore-Stevenson-Ayer orbit, but in the process put an end to their ethical emotivism by remarking (in an unwittingly Aristotelian way) that ‘good’ in morality means essentially the same thing as it means in other areas. We mean ‘good person’ in more or less the same way we mean ‘good dog,’ ‘good car,’ ‘good movie.’ We don’t mean only that we like that person, dog, car, or movie; we also mean that it has some intrinsic quality that fulfills the definition of the noun we use to classify it. And so, to use Schwartz’s example, if Conan the Barbarian understands the good life as the victorious life cannot be right, as victory in itself contributes nothing “to human flourishing,” does not fulfill the meaning of the noun ‘human.’ “It is mere self-interest.” But more, one might argue. Insofar as mere victory in battle might deform the person who achieves it, making him more inhuman than before, it is not even self-interest, rightly understood.

This is the kind of thing C. E. M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot have in mind when they assert that moral terms have factual content, that a ‘value’ can partake of facticity. They founded “a school of ethics, based on Aristotle’s ethics, called virtue ethics,” which emphasizes “moral character rather than moral oughts and goodness” in the utilitarian and also in the Kantian sense. Schwartz somewhat puzzlingly goes on to laud John Rawls, a neo-Kantian, as a veritable “Philosopher King,” although this does at least bring political philosophy back into the ethical universe, as Aristotle had seen it to be.

Looking at the trajectory of analytic philosophy as described by Schwartz, one finds it a remarkable enterprise indeed. What started out as a philosophic method that eschewed metaphysics and morality as sub-philosophical realms devoid of rational content has slowly uncovered doctrines with affinities to Aristotelianism. That is, ultra-‘modern’ analytic philosophy has begun to turn modernity away from itself and back toward the ‘ancients.’ Will postmodernists take a similar turn? As the old saying goes, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears’—God having now been reintroduced to polite philosophic conversation.

 

Notes

1. Jacob Klein: Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origins of Algebra. Eva Brann translation. New York: Dover Publications, 1992.
2. V. I. Lenin: Collected Works. Volume 14, pp. 17-362. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.
3. Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.
4. An acquaintance of mine once lived next door to a famous behavioral psychologist. The great man had gone so far as to place his infant son for in what was called a ‘Skinner box’ for substantial periods of time. A Skinner box was a controlled environment in which an animal (very often a rat or a pigeon) would be rewarded for performing a certain action, not rewarded or even punished for failing to perform it. The last time my acquaintance saw him, the lad was chasing the family cat around the back yard, a syringe in hand. This suggests that errors in epistemological theory may have startling actual-world consequences, although admittedly it doesn’t rigorously prove that they do, or must do.