G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge: 2011.

Paul Franco, ed.:  Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This is the third of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures, essays informed by transcripts of classes conducted by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in 1965.

 

In Part II of the Lectures Hegel considers ancient Greece, telling his students that “among the Greeks we feel ourselves immediately at home, for we are on the soil of spirit,” a soil modern Germans now occupy, a soil where they have flourished. Recalling that he’d compared the Greek world to “the period of adolescence,” he clarifies his metaphor, saying what he does and does not mean by that. He doesn’t mean it “in the sense that youth bears within it a serious, anticipative destiny”; he means that “youth does not yet present the activity of work, does not yet exert itself for a definite intelligent aim, but rather exhibits a concrete freshness of the soul’s life,” a life in which the senses and the spirit blend in “youthful freshness,” “spiritual vitality.” The youth aspires, newly self-conscious and aiming at self-cultivation, the enhancement of his individuality through the institutions of state, family, law, and religion. The adult, by contrast, “devotes his life to labor for an objective aim, which he pursues consistently, even at the cost of his individuality.” Hegel artfully selects Achilles, “the Homeric youth of the Trojan War,” and brilliant, brave Alexander, with his “beautiful humanity and individuality,” as the alpha and the omega of the Greek world—Achilles “the ideal youth of poetry,” world-conquering Alexander “the ideal youth of reality,” indeed, “the freest and finest individuality that the real world has ever produced.” [1]

Hegel divides Greek history into three periods: the first, often called the Heroic Age, “that of becoming of real individuality”; the second, Hellenic Age, “that of its independence and prosperity as conquest outward”; the third, Hellenistic Age, “the period of its decline and fall, and its encounter with” Rome, its successor in “world-history.” Greece as we know it began with a synthesis of the Greeks themselves with foreign migrants and invaders. These elements were united by an education which combined “its forces to produce its real and proper vigor.” Greece flourishes in military victory and commercial prosperity. But these very advances, in “direct[ing] its energies outward,” caused it to abandon “its purposes at home”; further, the defeat of its enemies opened Greece to “internal dissension,” bringing on its decline. Greece then faced ruin and conquest by Rome. “The same process, it may be stated once for all, will meet us in the life of every world-historical people.”

Accordingly, Hegel also divides his lectures on Greece into three parts: “The Elements of the Greek Spirit”; “The Shapes of Beautiful Individuality” (itself divided into three sections); and “The Fall of the Greek Spirit.” In Greece, “the condition of being submerged in nature is abrogated, and therefore the massiveness of geographical relations has also vanished,” as it could not have done in ancient Asia, and had not yet done in modern Asia by Hegel’s lifetime. The geography of Greece conduced to this abrogation because its “soil in manifold ways spread[s] across the sea”—a peninsula with innumerable inlets and offshore islands. Without a major river and thus without a major valley plain, the “divided and manifold character” of the land “perfectly corresponds with the varied life of Greek races and the flexibility of the Greek spirit.” Greeks were never “patriarchically united by a bond of nature, but realized a union first through another medium, in law and spiritual ethics”; “the Greek people became what it was,” especially because waves of foreigners settled there. “Only through such foreignness and through such supersession did the beautiful, free Greek spirit come into existence…. It is superficial folly to imagine that a beautiful and truly free life could arise from the simple development of a race remaining in its blood relationship and friendship.” Human beings advance with dialectic, with the clash of opposites.

What adaptation to foreigners does is what Greek geography does: shake a people out of settled customs, force them into the dialectic that drives history, as Hegel understands it. “Every world-historical people apart from the Asian empires, which stand outside the connection of world history, developed in this manner,” including the Romans. “Greece and its peoples were continuously on the move.” The Americans of Hegel’s time were quite different, having emigrated but not integrated with the aborigines; the Americans of subsequent decades, the Americans of the ‘melting pot,’ exemplified his teaching.

And then there was the sea. “The nature of their land brought them to this amphibious existence,” floating on the waves, then returning to port, “neither wandering about like the nomadic peoples nor stagnating like the peoples of the watercourses,” the riverfronts. Initially, the Greeks were pirates (“as we see from Homer”), but they later settled into a life of trade-voyaging. What settled them was the founding of small fortress-cities ruled by royal houses, “the nuclei of small towns.” These gave greater security to agriculture and “protected commercial intercourse against robbery.” Greece’s ‘Heroic Age’ saw no rule of law, as rulers derived authority from superiority “in riches, possessions, weaponry, and ancestry.” “Their subjects obeyed them” out of “the need, universally felt, of being held together, and of obeying a ruler accustomed to command, without envy and ill-will towards him.” Neither caste nor serfdom, neither patriarchy nor constitutional government prevailed. Authority derived from being “individually heroic, resting on personal merit”; such authority “does not continue long” but, it might be added, it formed the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey, substantial gifts to all subsequent generations of men.

The government of the royal council paralleled that of the Olympian Pantheon. There was mutual respect between the king and his courtiers, “but each one of them has his own will.” The Greeks united against their common enemy during the Trojan War, but only temporarily. Individuality was too strong for that. As for relations between the rulers and the people, there existed “no actual ethical bond connecting them.” As in the Greek tragedies, “the people is the chorus, passive, deedless; the heroes perform the deeds and incur the consequent responsibility. There is nothing in common between them; the people have no directing power, but only appeal to the gods.” Such regimes could not endure. Once royalty had done what needed to be done—primarily, securing their peoples from violence foreign and domestic—”it rendered itself superfluous.” “A calmer state of things,” with less immigration but no “united undertaking” prevailed under the conquering dynasty of the Heraclids. Eventually, the people rose to greater authority, and since industry in the modern sense didn’t exist and all wealth was landed wealth, only colonization could preserve “some degree of equality among the citizens.” Where colonization proved an inadequate remedy, tyrants took over.

By the time of Cyrus the Great “we see the various [Greek] states now displaying their particular character” and, simultaneously, we see “the formation of the distinct Greek spirit” pervading all the many states. With no overall despotism or indeed any other national regime, “men’s attention is more largely directed to themselves, and to the extension of their slight powers,” “thrown back on their inner spirit and cautiously circumspect.” They perceived nature acutely while “showing boldness and independent vigor in contending with it.” They wondered at nature, conjecturing about it; in this, Aristotle’s remark that philosophy begins with wonder means that Greece had proved hospitable to the initiation of the philosophic quest, even if it also felt threatened by it to the extent of killing philosophers. Greeks responded to nature as they had done to most foreigners—not as “something given” but as something “which is friendly to the human spirit, and to which it may sustain a positive relation,” something to which one might both adapt to and adapt to oneself. “The natural,” like the foreign, “holds its place in their minds only after undergoing some transformation by spirit, not immediately. Man regards nature only as an excitement to his faculties”—a dialectical excitement—”and only that which he makes spiritual from it can have any influence over him”; one thinks of Plato’s Ideas.

Strauss emphasizes Hegel’s interest in Greek religion. To those who reply that religion consists only of myths, “Hegel would say: Are not such myths much more revealing about human beings than chronicles about income, the revenues of kings, or maybe victories and defeats? That is not a bad point.” In religion, Hegel proposes, “the position of curious surmise, of attentive eagerness to catch the meaning of nature, is indicated to us in the comprehensive idea of Pan.” Pan “is the general shiver in the silence of the forests”—not representative of “an objective whole, but [of] that indefinite ground which likewise is connected with the element of the subjective.” You can hear him playing his pipe, but you only glimpse him in the shadows; you fear him just enough to want to imagine and explain him, or hear such an imagining and explanation from the Muses. “Nature answered the questions which the Greek put to her; this is true in the sense that he answered the questions of nature from his own spirit,” a “purely poetical” form of contemplation whereby “spirit supplies the signification which the natural image expresses.”

Hence also Pallas-Athene. When Achilles thinks of drawing his sword against King Agamemnon, it is the goddess of “wisdom or consideration” who restrains him. “Such an explanation denotes the perception of the inner meaning, the sense, the underlying truth; and the poets, especially Homer, were in this way the teachers of the Greeks,” adding “a richly intelligent perception” to their poetry, never letting imagination ‘run wild’ as the “capricious indulgence of fancy.” In this the Greek spirit lives “free from superstition, since it changes the sensuous into the sensible—the intellectual—so that [particular] decisions are derived from spirit.” Thus in Hegelian-historicist terms the Greeks “evolved the spiritual from the materials which they had received” (emphasis added). Hegel never supposes that the arts came down to the Greeks from the gods, as the Greeks themselves believed.

Fundamentally, the Greek spirit is a free spirit, “conditioned by,” and with “an essential relation to, some stimulus supplied by nature,” but transforming that stimulus, ‘making something out of it.’ “This phase of the spirit is the medium between the loss of individuality on the part of man (such as we observe in the Asiatic principle, in which the spiritual and divine exists only under a natural form), and infinite subjectivity as pure certainty of itself—the position that the ‘I’ is the ground of all that can lay claim to substantial existence.” Within the Greek’s individuality, the subject, “the same harmony is produced,” as “heart, disposition, passion, temperament” all develop “into free individuality.” “This stamps the Greek character as that of beautiful individuality, which is produced by spirit, transforming the merely natural into an expression of its own being”—”the spirit of the plastic artist, forming the stone into a work of art.” Greek art integrates forms into coherent wholes, unlike Egyptian art, which jams the head of a man onto the body of a lion. Greeks know themselves as free in their artistry, but also think of their art as an embodiment of the “innate essence” of the material with which they work—never as pure human creation. The Greek artist “feels calm in contemplating” the products of his spirit, whether they are statues, edifices, or the laws of the state. In this he is “not only free in himself, but possessing the consciousness of his freedom; thus the honor of the human is engulfed in the honor of the divine. Men honor the divine in and for itself, but at the same time as their deed, their production, their existence; thus the divine receives its honor through the respect paid to the human, and the human in virtue of the honor paid to the divine.”

Beautiful individuality “realizes itself” through the subjective work of art, “the culture of the man himself”; through the objective work of art, “the shaping of the world of divinities”; and through the political work of art, “the form of the constitution [regime], and the relations of the individuals who compose it.” For his part, Strauss remarks that “Hegel is perhaps more responsible than anyone else” for the claim that “aesthetics is concerned with the beautiful in art and not with the beautiful simply.” For the Greeks themselves, “a living horse is more beautiful than a beautifully sculptured horse which has no life,” but “for Hegel it is the opposite. The sculptured horse is higher in rank than the living horse.” “For Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas,” and human beings find their place within the all-encompassing beauty of the cosmos. But “for Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it”; the true consists of the Absolute Spirit, which encompasses the cosmos, produces the cosmos, and reshapes the cosmos through the spiritual agency of itself in man. “The difference truly is this: for Aristotle, the fundamental distinction which is underlying this discussion is that between nature and convention, and for Hegel it is that between nature and mind” or spirit (Geist).

Having identified and described the elements of the Greek spirit, Hegel has prepared the ground for his second and most elaborately articulated topic, “the shapes of beautiful individuality,” the forms that spirit made. There were three, as indicated: subjective, objective, and political.

In its subjective dimension spirit confronts objects. “Man with his necessities sustains a practice in relation to external nature, and because he makes it satisfy his desires and exhausts it, he has recourse to means…. In order to subdue [natural objects], man introduces other natural agents, and thus turns nature against itself, and invents instruments for that purpose.” Thus far, Bacon. The Hegelian dimension comes in only when he adds, “human inventions belong to spirit, and such an instrument is to be respected more than a mere natural object for that reason.” Although not vain, the Greeks did subdue nature to “gain special distinction and consequent enjoyment,” quite apart from their desire for security. “Free as a bird singing in the air, man only expresses what lies in his untrammeled human nature, in order through such expression to prove himself and gain recognition”—the struggle for which stands at the core of Hegelian morality. Such freedom and desire for recognition extended to sport, to the Olympic Games, a dialectic of bodies wherein “man shows his freedom, viz., that he has transformed his body into an organ of spirit.”

Respecting the objects produced by the spirit of the plastic artist, Hegel directs his students’ attention to the religious dimension of Greek art. Indian artists represent a god as “some power of nature for which the human shape supplies only an outward form.” Greek artists attempt to represent the divine itself; the “essence” of their art-works “is the spiritual itself.” True, “the divinity of the Greeks is not yet the absolute, free spirit, but spirit in a particular mode, fettered by the limitations of humanity—still dependent as a determinate individuality on external conditions.” In plain language, he means that the Greek gods were represented as individual human figures—the Venus de Milo. “Individualities, objectively beautiful, are the gods of the Greeks.” The spirit is “not yet regarded as itself spirit which is for itself, but which is there, still manifesting itself sensorially, but so that the sensorial is not its substance, but is only an element of its manifestation.” The advance on Asian art is that for the Greeks the natural is “merely the point of departure” in a line of thought that aims at matters of the spirit. “The Greek gods in themselves express what they are. The eternal repose and clear intelligence that dignifies the head of Apollo is not a symbol but the expression in which spirit manifests itself, and shows itself present.”

In terms of mythology, “the reduction of nature” to a place subordinate to the spirit was expressed “as the war of the gods, the overthrow of the Titans by the race of Zeus,” which Hegel understands as “the transition from the Oriental to the Occidental spirit.” Greeks thereby moved from the “merely natural, nature itself,” to the Olympian spirit of “the new divinities, who embody a spiritual import and themselves are spirit.” The Greeks continue to venerate nature, but as a thing subordinate to spirit. Their “new gods retain natural elements, and consequently a determinate relation to the powers of nature” (‘Zeus cloud-gatherer,’ as they call him). However, Zeus is also “the political god, the protector of the ethical and of hospitality,” a gatherer of human beings under the spirit of Greekness and indeed of humanity. Hegel esteems Apollo even more; he is “the prophesying and discerning god, light that makes everything clear,” the “healer and strengthener” and destroyer, too; “he himself is pure,” having “no wife” and careening into no “disgusting adventures, like Zeus.” He sings; he dances; he partakes in the arts. ‘On the distaff side,’ as the Greeks would say, Artemis replaces Cybele; this “chaste huntress and destroyer of wild beasts” effects another instance of the “change of the natural into the spiritual.” “This transformation of the natural into the spiritual is the Greek spirit itself.” Although “the abstract understanding cannot comprehend this blending of the natural with the spiritual,” Hegelian dialectic, founded upon immanence not creationism, encompasses it. [2]

And like Greece itself, the Olympian Pantheon cannot be understood as “a system.” Zeus “perhaps” rules the other gods, “but not with real force, so that they are left free in their peculiarity,” their individuality, just as the Greek city-states are both Greek and particular, identifiably themselves. Given “the scatteredness of the origin of Greek life,” Athens and Sparta are both recognizably Greek, but no one would confuse them. “That higher thing, the knowledge of unity as God, the One Spirit, was not yet known to the Greeks.” “The local gods stand alone,” “conditioned by the particular consciousness and circumstances of the areas in which they appear,” in this respect similar to the Indian gods and, looking forward, the Catholic saints.

But what (Nietzsche will demand) of Dionysus? Hegel knows. “A second source of origin of particularities is natural religion,” the “Mysteries.” “These mysteries of the Greeks present something which, as unknown, has attracted the curiosity of all times, under the supposition of profound wisdom.” Hegel doubts that there was much profundity in the Mysteries. “The mysteries were rather antique rituals”—”sensorial usages and exhibitions, consisting of symbols of the universal operations of nature,” such as eclipses. “It is as unhistorical as it is foolish to assume that profound philosophical truths are to be found there.” The mysteries amounted to the Greeks’ acknowledgment of “the universal vital force and its metamorphoses,” perceived with “shuddering awe” because they are “an element alien to the pure clear forms, and threaten them with destruction.” “On this account, the gods of art remain separated from the gods of the mysteries, and the two spheres must be strictly dissociated.” Hegel leaves no doubt as to ‘whose’ side he’s on. In his non-rationalist variety of vitalism, Nietzsche will seek more balance, always at the risk of overbalancing on the side of vital chaos.

Hegel applauds Greek anthropomorphism. “Man as the spiritual constitutes the element of truth in the Greek gods, which rendered them superior to all nature-gods and all abstractions of the one and highest being.” However, they “must not be regarded as more human than the Christian God.” In living, suffering, and dying, Jesus is “infinitely more human than the humanity of the Greek idea of the beautiful.” To put it in Burke’s terms, Jesus, and humanity, are not only beautiful but also sublime. What the Greeks did see, however, was that “if God is to manifest Himself, His naturalness must be that of spirit, which for sensorial conception is essentially man; for no other form can manifest itself as spiritual.” A ‘sacred cow’ makes no sense, because cows have neither speech nor reason. [3]

Hegel then asks, “Must God manifest Himself?” Yes, because “there is nothing essential that does not manifest himself.” (In this Hegel shows himself a child of the Enlightenment, although he proves in some way a rebellious child.) “The real defect of the Greek religion, as compared with the Christian, is, therefore, that in the former the manifestation constitutes the highest mode, in fact the entirety, of the divine being, while in the Christian religion, the manifestation is regarded only as a moment of the divine,” as Christ lives His life as human, dies, and then “elevates Himself to glory.” “The Greek god, by contrast, exists for his worshipers perennially in the manifestation—only in marble, in metal or wood, or as figured by the imagination.” This was so because in Greece “man was not duly estimated, did not obtain honor and dignity, till he had more fully elaborated and developed himself in the attainment of the freedom implicit in the aesthetic manifestation in question; the form and shaping of the divinity therefore continued to be the product of a particular subject.” The Greeks “did not yet realize spirit in its generality.” “Only the inward spirit, certain in itself, can bear to dispense with the aspect of appearance, and has the security to trust one of these, the divine nature” (emphasis added), rather than several of its many aspects, as Greek polytheism does. “Subjectivity was not comprehended in all its depth by the Greek spirit”; “the human spirit was not yet absolutely legitimized.” [4] This is why the Greeks believed that even their gods, spirit manifest, were ruled by fate, which could be known only by means of consulting oracles. They did not understand, as Hegel contends, that all is spirit, that spirit is absolute, not fate. Again, Nietzsche will deny this, and insist on a core of fatum within himself, as an individual. Nietzsche re-valorizes the Greek tragedians.

The final work of Greek art, its architectonic or masterwork, was political. “The state unites the two phases just considered,” namely, the subjective and objective work of art. Neither “a mere object, like the deities” of Greece, nor “merely subjectively developed to a beautiful physique,” the state is both “a living, universal spirit” and “the self-conscious spirit of the single individuals” who live within it as citizens. The East saw despotic regimes, as befits its naturalism, its unfreedom. The West, beginning with Greece, sees democracy, wherein “the freedom of the individual exists but has not yet advanced to the degree of abstraction whereby the subject depends simply upon the substantial, the state as such,” in the form of a modern, centralized bureaucracy or administration. By contrast, Rome, while not yet bureaucratic, will see “a harsh rule dominating” individuals—reestablishing centralization although not sliding back into Oriental despotism. Germany will see constitutional monarchy, “in which the individual participates and is co-active not only in the monarch but in the entire monarchical organization,” the administrative state.

To break from Asian political practice, however, Greeks needed to establish democracy, with its laws, with consciousness of “legal and ethical foundation,” with its genuinely political life, which Aristotle would describe as ruling and being ruled as distinguished from ‘one-way’ or ‘top-down despotic rule. The patriarchs of the Homeric Age gave way to the lawgivers—the Seven Sages, including Solon of Athens. The sagacity of the Seven Sages encompassed no real science; their wisdom was prudential; “they were practical politicians,” not philosopher-kings or scientific administrators. As always in Hegel, Greek ethics should not be confused with morality: “As in beauty, the natural element is present in its sensorialness, so also is it present” in the customary, objective nature of Greek law, custom presented “in the manner of natural necessity.” In this as in all things, “the Greeks remain in the midst of beauty and have not attained the higher standpoint of truth.” “No principle has as yet manifested itself, which can contravene such willing custom”—for the Greeks wholeheartedly, ‘subjectively,’ affirm their customs—”and hinder its realizing itself in action.” As with the gods, so with customs; for the Greeks they are real insofar as they are manifest, insofar as they appear, in both senses of the term. Hegel contrasts this with “modern conceptions of democracy,” which involve appeals to such foundational justifications as the common good, interests of state, and so on.

But in Greece, “that very subjective freedom”—the moral concept of the good will—”which is the principle and characteristic form of freedom in our world, which forms the absolute basis of our state and religious life, could not manifest itself in Greece otherwise than as ruination.” The Greeks “had no conscience” in our sense of the term; “with them was predominant the habit of living for their country without further reflection.” To reflect upon the goodness of custom was to undermine it. Hence the Athenians’ hostility to Socrates and also to the sophists, who preceded Socrates in their practice of reflecting upon custom, of suggesting reforms, of encouraging individuals to ‘think for themselves’ “even in defiance of the existing constitution” or regime. “Each has his principles, and as he so opines, so is he also convinced, that this is the best and must be fancied as reality.” For Greece, then, morality was corrupting. It diluted the authority of lawgiving sages and the laws they gave. “As soon as any of these great men had performed what was needed, envy intruded, which is to say, the feeling of equality with regard to special talent—and he was either imprisoned or exiled.”

There were, moreover, “three other circumstances” limiting Greek freedom, constraining its further development. First, the aforementioned consultation of oracles, the attempt to know what ‘fate’ decreed, prevailed in public and private. This practice eroded over time, but since no overarching or general spirit replaced it the people were left with “their individual convictions” as the basis for “forming their decisions,” leading to “corruption, disorder, and an ongoing process of change in the constitution.”

Then there was slavery, “a necessary condition” of what Hegel calls “aesthetic democracy,” meaning, a regime in which citizens must be freed from the lower, ‘vulgar’ “handicraft occupations” so as to participate in the free-spirit higher art of giving laws to themselves and setting policies for their city. “Slavery does not cease until the will is reflected infinitely in itself, until right is conceived as appertaining to every freeman, and the term freeman is regarded as a synonym for man in his generic nature as endowed with reason.” But the Greeks, as Hegel has already remarked, remained at the level of ethics, not yet at the level of morality.

Finally, “such democratic constitutions” as the Greeks fashioned “are possible only in small states,” city-states in which “the interests of all” can “be similar.” Large empires—the alternative to city-states in antiquity—always feature such “diverse and conflicting interests” as preclude a democratic regime. In antiquity, democracy meant citizens who were fully citizens, men who personally voted to frame laws and set policies, but more, men who “see each other daily,” making “a common culture” possible, “a living democracy.” [5] “In a large empire, a general canvas might be made, votes might be gathered in the several communities, and the results reckoned up—as was done by the French convention. But a political existence of this kind is destitute of life, and the world dissolves and departs into a paper-world,” into what we would call a ‘virtual reality,’ one none too virtuous in either the classical or even the Machiavellian sense. What goes for the ancient empire goes for the large modern state, as well. It is too big for true democracy. “In the French Revolution, therefore, the republican constitution never actually became a democracy; tyranny, despotism, raised its voice under the mask of freedom and equality.” Hegel might even have viewed the decidedly more sensible tenth Federalist doubtfully, had he read it. For modernity, he prefers the administrative state under a constitutional monarchy, and his disciples in America, the Progressives, in effect have also preferred that regime to the American one.

Because the Absolute Spirit evolves dialectically, Hegel scarcely will rest content with analysis. He historicizes, by which he means not only putting Greece ‘in its context’ but narrating the course of Greek events—albeit philosophically, that is, in light of that dialectic. The next phase of Greek political and cultural history was marked by a great change or kinēsis, the Persian Wars. In “the first period” of its development “the Greek spirit attain[ed] its aesthetic development and reach[ed] maturity,” its ‘being,’ in the second phase that spirit was “revealed,” “mak[ing] itself into a work for the world, assert[ing] its principle with an antagonistic force,” in which dialectical struggle for recognition it triumphed. In its conflict with Persia, with the East, with old Asia, Greece “exhibited itself,” revealed itself, “in its most glorious aspect.” In spite of their disunion, the Greek city-states united to defeat the Persians on the element the Greeks had mastered, the sea, wrecking the Persian fleet at Salamis. “Thus was Greece freed from the burden which threatened to overwhelm it. But not only Greece: “Greater battles, unquestionably, have been fought” than those Herodotus (the first historian) recounts. But the battles of the Persian War “live immortal, not in the historical records of nations only, but also of science and of art.” The Greek ships were superior instruments of war; Greek politics proved superior to Persian despotism. “These are world-historical victories; they were the salvation of culture and spiritual vigor, and they rendered the Asiatic principle powerless.” “Oriental despotism—a world united under one lord and sovereign—on the one side, and separate states—insignificant in extent and resources, but animnated by free individuality—on the other side, stood face to face. Never in history has the superiority of spiritual force over material bulk—and that of no contemptible amount—been made so gloriously manifest.” The West defeated the East, and continued to defeat it, up to Hegel’s day and to this, as (for example) such vast cultures as Japan, China and India have scrambled to ‘modernize’ themselves and even to assert hegemony in Asia and (in Japan and China’s case) throughout the world. Additionally and far from trivially, it would have been impossible for the young Germans listening to Hegel to overlook the analogy between ancient Greece and modern Germany, then divided into more than thirty small states. Hegel’s Prussia aspired to their unification, especially against neighboring France— long unified, but with political tendencies Hegel and his students alike considered unacceptable, incompatible with the conditions of the modern, centralized state.

Triumphant, Greece remained fundamentally divided, most importantly between its two major ‘powers,’ Athens and Sparta, to which Hegel next turns. As “a sanctuary for the inhabitants of the other areas of Greece,” Athens had “a very mixed population,” and consequently “much dissension,” especially between the old, wealthy families and the new, poorer ones. “The polity of the state was wavering between aristocracy and democracy” until Solon’s regime balanced the few and the many by forming a popular assembly for “deliberation and decision on public affairs” while reserving the offices for the few. Soon a tyrant took over, as the “constitution” or regime had “not yet entered into the blood and life of the community,” not yet “become the habit of ethical and civil existence.” Fortunately (and as optimists now hope Mr. Putin is doing in Russia), Pisistratus and his sons “repress[ed] the power of great families and factions, to accustom them to order and peace, but to accustom the citizens generally to the Solonian legislation. This being accomplished, that rule was necessarily regarded as superfluous, and the laws of freedom enter[ed] into conflict with the power of the Pisistratidae,” who were exiled. The democratic and aristocratic factions then revived, but the democrats gradually gained ascendancy, an ascendancy marked by the rise of Pericles. This “light-minded but highly refined and cultivated people” could tolerate no ruler but a man who evinced the character of one “thoroughly noble” and “intent upon the weal of the state,” superior to his fellow-citizens “in native genius and acquired knowledge.” Characteristically, the Athenian Greeks respected well-developed individuality: “In terms of the power of individuality, no statesman can be compared with him.” [6]

“As a general principle, the democratic constitution affords the widest scope for the development of great political characters,” as it enables them not only “to assert their talent” and indeed “require[es] them to do so.” Athens saw “a vital freedom” combined with “a vital equality of manners and spiritual culture”; even property, necessarily unequal, wasn’t very unequal. “The predominant elements of Athenian existence were the independence of the individuals and a culture animated by the spirit of beauty,” seen in Pericles’ patronage of the arts and his orations, the great tragic and comic dramatists, the historian Thucydides, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato. Industry, excitability, and the development of individuality, all “within the sphere of a custom-oriented spirit,” animated Athenian flourishing. (“The blame with which we find them visited in Xenophon and Plato attaches rather to that later period when misfortune and the corruption of the democracy had already supervened.”) At its height, the great Pericles ruled as “the Zeus of the human Pantheon of Athens” in “a state whose existence was essentially directed to realizing the beautiful, which had a thoroughly cultivated consciousness respecting the serious side of public affairs and the interests of man’s spirit and life, and united with that consciousness hardy courage and practical ability”—as indeed Pericles himself said of his city in his Funeral Oration.

To the Athenian ‘thesis’ the Spartans posed an ‘antithesis’ of “rigid abstract virtue, a life devoted to the state but in which the activity and freedom of individuality are put in the background,” a state “whose object [was] a lifeless equality rather than free movement.” In Sparta, slavery was far more severe than in Athens, as the Athenians “had a family life” and many of their slaves were household servants, whereas the Spartans, who “disparaged family life” and dined in common messes, segregated the Helots, using them as training dummies for young soldiers and on occasion as soldiers when needed to fight especially formidable enemies. (“On their return” from such wars “they were butchered in the most cowardly and insidious way,” treated as enemies themselves, despite their forced service to Sparta.)

Although the lawgiver, Lycurgus, had divided the land equally among the citizens, this equality couldn’t be maintained, even though the land could not be sold. Daughters inherited, and shrewd families married strategically, amassing substantial tracts, “as if to show how foolish it is to attempt a forced equality, an attempt which, while ineffective in realizing its professed object, is also destructive of a most essential point of liberty, the free disposition of property.” (Thus does Hegel refute Marxism avant la lettre.)

Politically, Hegel classifies Sparta as democratic at its foundation but so modified as to make it “almost an aristocracy and oligarchy.” With two kings, a senate/court “chosen from the best men of the state,” a “council of the kings,” and finally the ephors, who enjoyed “full authority to convoke popular assemblies, to put resolutions to the vote, and to propose laws”—powers they came to deploy tyrannically, “like that which Robespierre and his party exercised for a time in France.” In “their intercourse at home, they were, on the whole, honorable,” but perfidious respecting foreigners. Their overall way of life “directed their entire attention to the state”; consequently, they “were not at home with intellectual culture, art and science.”

In the Peloponnesian War these regimes collided in an especially spectacular instance of Hegelian dialectic. “Greek ethics had made Hellas incapable of forming one common state; for the dissociation of small states from each other, and the concentration in cities, where the interest and the spiritual culture pervading the whole could be identical, was the necessary condition of this freedom.” Instead of union by consent, states struggled for hegemony. Hegel defines corruption as “inwardness become free for itself” in the form of thought, or what we now call ‘critical thought,” morality endangering custom or ethics. This corruption “lies in the principle of Greek freedom, because it is freedom that thought must become free for itself,” whether it be thought in the form of science, sophistry (which Hegel elides with rhetoric), or philosophy. The sophists were especially threatening. “For all questions they had an answer; for all interests of a political or religious order they had general points of view; and the further development of this consisted in the ability to prove everything and to find a justifying aspect in everything.” (In sum, the sophists anticipated Hegel.)

Unlike Hegel, however, the sophists taught that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ by which they meant not man as the embodiment of spirit, but “man simply as subjective,” making “mere liking the principle of rights” and “advantage to the individual” the “ground of final appeal.” In modernity, they’d be called ‘relativists,’ and then as now “the doors were thrown wide open to all human passions” in the breeze of their speeches. There were also rationalist individualists, Socrates most prominently, in whom “the principle of inwardness, the absolute independence of thought in itself, attained free expression, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war.” Hegel calls Socrates “the inventor of morality,” the first who not only “wills and does what is right” but “has the consciousness of what he is doing.” In effect, he made himself an oracle, but an oracle who reasoned. As Strauss puts it, “”without being known, morality is not proof. To that extent, one can speak of an invention.” Under Socrates’ influence and that of his student, Plato, “many citizens now seceded from practical life, from state activities, to live in the ideal world,” causing a revolution in the Athenian state. In condemning him to death, “the Athenian people condemn[ed] its deadliest foe,” but tragically because they soon understood “that what they reprobated in Socrates had already struck firm root among themselves,” making them “just as guilty” or, alternatively, “just as much to be acquitted.” Understandably, they acquitted him, post-mortem, furthering the ruin of their own ethos. “In Sparta the same corruption [was] introduced, with the subject seeking to assert himself,” but there “we have merely the isolated side of particular subjectivity—corruption in its undisguised form, naked immorality, vulgar selfishness, avarice, venality,” most ruinously among the vaunted Spartan generals.

Sparta won the war, finding itself “universally hated” in Greece while now lacking the ethical strength to sustain its way of life. When the Spartans and the Phocians were cited by the weak Amphyictyonic Council—Strauss calls it the United Nations of its day—for violations of what the Romans would come to call the law of nations, both refused to pay the fine. Thebes took it upon themselves to punish the Phocians, “but by an egregious piece of violence,” desecrating the Temple at Delphi.” “This deed completed the ruin of Greece” by an act of deicide; “the last support of unity was thereby annihilated” and “reverence for that which Greece had been as it were the final arbiter—its monarchical principle, whether in the form of Zeus or of Fate—was displaced, insulted, and trodden under foot.”

A real monarch moved in to replace the monarchy-in-principle as, in Strauss’s words, “the powerlessness of Apollo was revealed by the act of the Phocians.” Once again, a foreigner arrived. But Philip of Macedon “undertook to avenge the violation of the oracle” by taking its place, “making himself lord of Greece.”  Philip served as the harsh precursor to the rule of his son, Alexander, who inherited Philip’s military force without inheriting his reputation for crime. He had the extra advantage of having been educated by Aristotle, “the deepest, and also the most comprehensive, thinker of antiquity.” (“It is hard to say who he regards as possibly competing in modern times with Aristotle,” Strauss interjects. “”Possibly himself.”) Aristotle purged Alexander of his “former bonds of opinion, crudity, and empty imagination,” leaving “this grand nature untrammeled as it was before his instructions commenced” but forming Alexander’s “genius-filled spirit” by opening it to “a deep perception of what the true is.” “Thus educated, Alexander placed himself at the head of the Hellenes, in order to lead Greece over into Asia,” to “avenge Greece for all that Asia had inflicted upon it for so many years, and to fight out at last the ancient feud and contest between the East and the West.” “He also made a return for the rudiments of culture which had come from the East by there spreading the maturity and culmination of culture, and restamped subjugated Asia into a Hellenic land.” Hegel does not hesitate to remark that Alexander died at the age of thirty-three—traditionally considered the age of Jesus Christ at His crucifixion. [7] As the youth Achilles began the Greek world, the youth Alexander concluded it, both “supply[ing] a picture of the fairest kind in their own persons” and “a complete and perfect type of the Greek being,” beautiful and young. Dying without an heir, Alexander nonetheless ruled the world, as “the Greek kingdoms that arose in Asia after him are his dynasty.”

Strauss bases a critique of Hegel on this last flourish. Hegel’s “general thesis is that history is rational; but in order to maintain this, Hegel is compelled, just as the Marxists are, to make a distinction between the essential and the accidental.” Hegel admits that there are accidents in history, insisting rather that the laws of historical progress govern overall trends, which unfold dialectically. “But the question is, of course, how to draw the line…. If Hegel sees that all the characteristic Greek institutions—slavery, oracles, republics, manyness of cities, the Homeric gods—are all forming an essential unity, then he is admirable. One would have to check to see that in each case the item is really true, but his ingenuity in finding this necessity is not only unsurpassed but unrivaled.” But when he gets down to such specific matters as the early deaths of Achilles and Alexander, the procedure becomes dubious. “Now in the case of Achilles at the beginning it makes some sense, because Achilles is a poetic figure and is therefore the work of the Greek mind. But the fact that Alexander died… at age 32 or 33, and to link this up with the workings of the world mind borders on superstition.” Hegel might reply, of course, that regarding Achilles and Alexander he intends only an apt symbolism, not an expression of historical law, but the question of how to draw the line remains.

Hegel expends little time on the third, Hellenistic Age, which saw “the fall of the Greek spirit.” Athens retained its status as “the center of the higher art and sciences, especially of philosophy and rhetoric,” in the ancient world. With the divinity that had pervaded Greek consciousness destroyed, the political particularity of Greece remained, a “repulsive peculiarity which obstinately and waywardly asserts itself, and which on that very account assumes a position of absolute dependence and of conflict with others.” Great individuals still arose—Plutarch gives us their portraits—but even the Macedonian dynasty lacked the strength to defend Greece against the all-conquering Romans.

 

Notes

1. Strauss observes that Hegel omits any discussion of Greek myths concerning the Underworld or “Netherworld.” He suggests that Hegel does so because many religions feature such a doctrine, whereas the Greeks were distinctive in having “the beautiful gods” in human shapes. (Strauss, p. 202) One might supplement this by remarking that the drab Greek Underworld of the dead weighed against Greek youthfulness and vitality, although one might argue that precisely because the Greeks felt life in this world to be sweet, no vale of tears, that their conception of the afterlife promised no charms.
2. For his part, Strauss emphasizes that the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians meant that “the good and the ancestral” could no longer be equated. To the earliest Greeks, the good and the natural meant genesis, origin. But nature could no longer be conceived so simply. Aristotle would elaborate nature in terms of four ’causes,’ not just the one, genesis. Hegel contends that the Greeks were getting away from the natural without knowing it, participating in the life of the spirit beyond physical/material genesis.
3. Strauss explains this in terms of “the true reconciliation between the divine and the human” seen in Christianity. The Greek gods “are living easily.” But “the ugly,” too, “belongs, in a way, to the truth,” just as much as the beautiful does. Without “pain, suffering, death” the Greek gods “are not truly involved” in the reality of life. This being so, there can be “no true reconciliation” between the gods and men. “If beauty were the highest consideration, the Greeks would be right.” “But the higher thought according to Hegel is that the one God has become man and died as man, truly God and truly man.” Strauss adds, “Whether Hegel understands that in the Christian orthodox manner is very doubtful.” (Strauss, p. 221)
4. Strauss connects the modern quest for, and confidence in, subjective certainty first to Christianity, with its emphasis on faith in God, and then to modern philosophy, especially Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, “which is for Hegel the fundamental principle.” “Only modern philosophy, as well as Hegel, gives the adequate interpretation of what Christianity means,” Hegel teaches. (Strauss, pp. 217-219) On the moral side, the Greeks lack the concept of conscience, what James Joyce renders as “in-wit.” Strauss distinguishes conscience from spiritedness or thumos, familiar to readers of Plato’s Republic as the part of the soul that gets angry, demands honor, and, if well-directed, can exhibit the virtue of courage. Nor is conscience consciousness per se. Christian conscience is the capacity to perceive the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to become conscious of sinfulness, especially one’s own sinfulness.
5. Strauss contrasts this with Christianity and the modern state. “In Christianity and modernity, we find the freedom of man as a subject who calls everything before the tribunal of his conscience or reason. That does not exist in Greece. Therefore, in Greece we have only the dignity of the citizen, not the dignity of man. And who is and who is not a citizen is determined practically by the nomos, by the law, but the law is here custom, something which is not known to be the work of reason…. This is the limitation of Greek rationality. There is not yet awareness of the right of subjectivity.” For the Greeks, “right means… simply the common good, and even the possibility of a conflict with the private good is not visualized. To be truly a human being means to be dedicated absolutely to the polis, to be a good citizen.”
6. Strauss remarks, “Pericles never laughed.” That is, “he was so deadly serious in his dedication to the city that he never laughed. And he went to no banquet after he had become a statesman.” This means that “from Hegel’s point of view” there can be no statesman like Pericles “in any later age,” as “this perfect harmony of the citizen and man belongs to the standpoint of beauty,” the Greek principle, “which has been destroyed by the opening up of the abyss of individuality, for good or for bad.” (Strauss, p. 243) By observing that Pericles never laughed, Strauss almost undoubtedly was thinking of Thomas More’s famous observation that Jesus never laughed. Jesus too was “deadly serious in his dedication” to a city, His city, the City of God. More also observed that Jesus wept two or three times. It isn’t clear that Pericles did, compassion or agapic love not having been the Greek way.
7. Establishing parallels between persons seen in the Old Testament and Christ—the claim that Moses is the ‘type’ of Christ, for example—has been a staple of Christian theology from the beginning. To suggest a typology between a pagan figure and Christ, as Hegel does here, is to take a radically different step. Strauss remarks that “the traditional view was that there is a difference between faith and reason”—faith being “suprarational.” Because “it is not rational in itself and in its object,” faith “needs” such “external credentials” as “tradition and miracles.” This leaves reason, the distinctively human characteristic, rather at sea, since “the suprarational cannot be evident” to it. “Now what Hegel claims to have done is to have shown that the substance of the faith of Christianity is rationality. This required considerable sacrifices. For example, the belief in miracles and in the sacredness or quasi-sacredness of the biblical text, the biblical stories: this was of course sacrificed. But we will see later”—that is, in later parts of Hegel’s Lectures —”what Hegel means by the Christianity which he believes to have been transformed into philosophic insight and in this way to have saved.” (Strauss, pp. 253-254)

G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge, 2011.

Leo Strauss on Hegel. Paul Franco, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

NOTE: This is the second of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, essays informed by the transcript of Leo Strauss’s 1965 course at the University of Chicago.

 

Unlike Africa, “we see states in it,” in Asia. Asian nations have produced histories as distinguished from poems. “History is prosaic, and myths”—the stuff of poetry—” contain no history.” Paying attention to the world beyond one’s imaginings, the world outside one’s own mind, will, and heart, requires the mind to abstract itself from itself. This intellectual act becomes much more likely once “a capacity for expressing laws is acquired”; law, too, is prosaic and requires those subjected to it to take heed of a thing beyond themselves. True, a reader may glean surmises and suppositions about “prehistory” from the poems handed down from those times, but “these do not amount to facts.”

In the “Oriental world” Hegel sees the beginning of history, the first “overpowering of arbitrary will,” the first appearance of the ethical, which he distinguished from the moral in his Introduction. “Ethical determinations are expressed as laws, but in such a manner that the subjective will is governed by these laws as by an external force, that nothing inward, disposition, conscience, formal freedom is present, and that in this respect laws are exercised only in an external manner and exist only as compulsory law.” What Hegel does not find in the Oriental world he does find in the West: “compulsory obligations” imposed ‘from outside’ oneself but supplemented, and obedience to them animated, by “the disposition of the subjects and in their empathy.” Asians haven’t (as we now say) ‘internalized’ the law. “Although the content of ethics is ordained entirely properly, the inward is yet made external. There is no want of a will to command it”—that’s what the emperor does—but there is want “of a will to perform it because commanded from within.” “In the law men have the view not of their own will but of an entirely alien one..” In Hegel’s terminology, “spirit has not yet attained inwardness” and therefore “it wears the appearance only of natural spirituality”—something of a contradiction in terms. As Strauss puts it, for Hegel “forgetting of himself in looking at the sun, that is the first stage. The unawareness of self, and only seeing the objective, the absolute, or whatever you call it, that is Asia. No awareness, no self-knowledge strictly speaking, no self-consciousness.”

The regime or “constitution” of Asian nations is theocracy, with the caveat that “what we call God has not yet in the East been realized  in consciousness, for our idea of God involves the elevation to the suprasensorial.” With a very few exceptions, most of the Asian gods are nature-gods. “History commences with China and the Mongols—the realm of theocratic despotism.” Chinese despotism “admit the development of secular state life”; Mongolian despotism ruled over “a spiritual, religious kingdom.” The Chinese despot was a patriarch, “chief of the inward law,” the one who imposes the laws in his own mind upon all the others. “All that we call subjectivity is concentrated in the supreme head of the state.” Further, these laws are “partly legal, partly moral,” resulting in his subjects’ taking his inwardness ‘outwardly.’ Without the distinction between the moral and the ethical, “the sphere of inwardness… does not attain to maturity here, since moral laws are treated as civil laws while the legal, for its part, receives the appearance of the moral.” The Mongols in this respect represented the opposite extreme, having developed a spiritual empire headed by the Lama, “who is honored as God.” Among them, “no secular state life can be developed.”

The Indian realm evinced the “second phase” of history’s unfolding, the antithesis to China. There was (and is, as of the early nineteenth century) no one state in India, as in China, no “civil machinery” or bureaucracy. India is “broken up” in two ways: it consists of many sovereign kingdoms; and society features castes. “The different castes are indeed fixed; but in view of the religious doctrine that established them, they wear the aspect of natural distinctions”—that is, of immobility. “Individuals are thereby rendered still further without self,” without inwardness, without spirituality. The Indian regimes differ from the Chinese, as well, being theocratic aristocracies, ruled by the few, not the one. Indians oscillate between the concept of a “purely abstract and simple God and… the general sensorial powers of nature.” This results in “a restless rambling from one extreme to the other, a wild inconsistent delirium, which must appear as madness to a regulated, intelligent consciousness.”

The Persian empire stood as the third phase or form, contrasting with “the inert unity of China” and the “wild and turbulent unrest of India.” In terms of the West, the analogue with India was Greece (with its warring factions within the city-states and the wars among them); the analogue with Persia was Rome, with its multicultural imperial stability. The regime of the Persian empire was a theocratic monarchy, not a despotism, as the regime consisted of a king who ruled by law and shared ruling power with his subjects. Unlike all but one of the Chinese, Persian imperial subjects had ‘agency.’ However, the religion of Zoroastrianism remained at the level of nature; “the notion which the spirit has of itself at this stage is an entirely natural one—light.” The ethical had been achieved, as all individuals within the empire lived under the same law, but since the law was natural, exhibiting “the mild power of generality,” it lacked the thesis-antithesis dynamism of the fully developed spirit. It was therefore quite tolerant; its polyglot mosaic of peoples enjoyed “a free growth for unrestrained expansion and ramification”: Cyrus happily sent the Jews back to Jerusalem, where they would govern themselves under their own God and His laws. It was in this, and not in its natural religion, that the empire “exhibits the antithesis in a lively active form, and is not shut up within itself, abstract and calm, as are China and India.” The Persian empire was thus the one that “makes a real transition in world history.”

Egypt also mediated a transition to Greece, to the Western form of life, but in a different way. The antithesis or confrontation among opposites seen in external form, in the many nations comprising the empire ruled by the Persian monarchs found an inward form in Egypt. Egypt invented the Sphinx, and the Sphinx posed riddles. Only a Greek would solve the riddle, however. For the Egyptians, the contradictions of the spirit—symbolized by a being with a human head and a lion’s body—remained at the level of contradiction.

The spiritual condition of these kingdoms played out in “their various fates”—in their historical results, so to speak. China stands still, “the only durable kingdom in the world.” Chaotic India endures in its chaos but “is in its very nature destined to be intermixed, conquered, and subjugated,” since it can produce no viable state to defend it. The Persian empire has dissolved, and much of Egypt “is present under the ground, in its mute dead, today transported to all quarters of the globe”—mummies in museum cases—”and in their majestic habitations”—great tombs on the desert sand.

(a) China

In a true Hegelian “synthesis,” elements of both the “thesis” and its “antithesis” remain. A synthesis isn’t a blob of undifferentiated elements. It has articulation, structure. China combines the will of the despot, acting according to the customs of China, with the unquestioning obedience of the people. China has “substance”; it is “ethical.” In that way, it resembles a modern state—centralized and bureaucratic. However, because the people obey without consent (because they lack a sense of their own will, their own “subjectivity”) China “yet lacks the antithesis between objective being and subjective purposeful movement”; it lacks dialectic. It is the will, located in the subject, that causes movement as it interacts with the objective world; it is self-consciousness that ‘pushes back’ against the objective. Without such individuality in any but the emperor, in China “any mutability is excluded,” as “the unity of substantiality and subjective freedom so entirely excludes the distinction and antithesis of the two elements, that by this very fact, substance cannot arrive at reflection on itself—at subjectivity.” “The fixedness of a character which recurs perpetually takes the place of what we should call the historical.” Chinese traditions trace back to 3000 BC; genuine histories appear in the 2300s. But history in the fullest sense, history as the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, has not occurred there. China has histories, but no real history. It moves, but only in cycles. It never goes anywhere. There is no progress.

Hegel briefly discusses the “ancient and canonical books” of China, “from which their history, constitution, and religion can be gathered.” These include a history of their “ancient kings” and their laws; a book containing the basic characters of the Chinese language, “also considered the groundwork of Chinese meditation”: a book of poems; a record of “customs and ceremonial observances pertaining to the imperial dignity and that of state functionaries”; and a chronicle of the kingdom Lu, “where Confucius appeared.” Chinese historians occupied “the highest office,” and so fit Hegel’s category of “original” historians, although even in their historical task they amalgamate instead of synthesizing, treating “the mythical and prehistorical” as “perfectly historical.”

Europeans “have always marveled at [China] as a country which, self-originated, appeared to have no connection with the outside world”—with changes but no real dialectic either internally or externally. Europeans have been “astonished” at its huge population and “thoroughly organized state administration,” the architect of which is said to be Fu Xi (ca. 2900 BC), traditionally considered “the original civilizer of China.” Fu Xi “taught that reason came from heaven,” along with marriage, engineering, and the techniques for domesticating animals and raising silkworms. This again suggests amalgamation of all things great and small. This civilizational tradition did in fact find an antithesis of sorts, seen first in the emperor Qin Shi Huang, builder of the Great Wall of China and “especially remarkable” for his “attacks on the old literature,” burning the books embodying it. (Confucian literati saved the “strictly canonical” ones, fleeing to mountain hideouts with them.) This emperor may be said to have acted on the precepts of the anti-Confucian doctrine later scholars would call ‘Legalism,’ something of a misnomer since Legalists justify hard-nosed realism against Confucian li, which means sensibility combined with custom. But again, there was no real dialectic, and therefore no comprehensive synthesis of the two stances, given the lack of “subjectivity” in all Chinese except the emperor. A Chinese emperor might be a Confucian or a Legalist; combining the two doctrines never occurred to any of them. Chinese culture lacked the capacity for such fluidity of mind and heart.

“The spirit of the ever-unchanging constitution” of China inheres first of all in the family. Since “in China, the general will”—embodied in the tradition as expressed in the canonical books—”immediately commands what the individual is to do, and the latter complies and obeys with like absence of reflection and self,” those who do step out of line are punished physically. More, such punishment does not affect the malefactor’s “inwardness”; having no convictions of his own, he merely submits to the superior force with neither awe nor resentment. Family piety consists of the opinion that individuals belong jointly to their family and the state, both of them patriarchal. “The duties of the family are absolutely binding, and established and regulated by law,” and they include ancestor worship. The Chinese reverse the Western understanding of the family, and even of the patriarchal families that existed for centuries in the West. In China, the merits of the son are ascribed to his father; logically enough, one’s ancestors “obtain honor through their posterity” and not, as in the West, the other way around. The statesmanlike heroism of a Chinese Winston Churchill would have done honor to the Duke of Marlborough. For this reason the Chinese want children who “give them the due honors of burial, pay respects to their memory after death, and decorate their grave.” Every home has “a hall of ancestors where all the members annually assemble” to pay their obsequies.

The father-emperor “claims the deepest reverence.” The entire administrative system, from the emperor to the lowest official, never governs ‘impersonally’ or ‘scientifically,’ as do modern bureaucracies seen in the West. The emperor is obliged personally to govern and must himself be acquainted with, and direct, the laws and business of the empire, although assisted by the tribunals.” He is subject to criticism (but not of course command) by the imperial censor, who also exercises “strict surveillance over everything that concerns the government.” Although the emperor does exert his will, that will has “little room for the exercise of his mere choice,” ruled as it is by the maxims learned in the Confucian classics (or, in grimmer times, by those of the Legalists). “Princes are therefore educated on the strictest plan,” with annual examinations overseen by the emperor himself. “China has therefore succeeded in getting the greatest and best governors, to whom the expression ‘Solomonian wisdom’ might be applied.” (“In Europe there can be no Solomons.”) There are, in China, and there must be: “the prosperity, the security of all depend on the one impulse of the first link in the entire chain of this hierarchy.” In this way China truly maintains the rule of the one, having no aristocracy but “only the princes of the imperial house” and other subordinates whose actions are monitored by the emperor. Beyond the administrators, “all are equal, and only those have a share in the administration of affairs who have ability for it.” Hegel notes that this rather appeals to Western scholars, who typically enjoy less exalted positions in their societies.

Strictly speaking, China has no real constitution at all; that “would imply that individuals and corporations have independent rights.” Centralized administration isn’t political in the Aristotelian (or the Hegelian) sense of ruling and being ruled. There is no reciprocity. “Since equality prevails in China, but not freedom, despotism is necessarily the mode of government.” No “special interests” receive “consideration on their own account.” Within the administrative hierarchy the learned, the “mandarins,” occupy the higher rank over the military, as “the civilian estate takes precedence.” (Under Legalist rule, the opposite occurs.) Pervaded by li, mandarins “are said to have a talent for piety of the most refined order” in addition to their mastery of Confucian canon. Mandarins are also subject to the censors. “The whole of the administration is thus covered by a network of officials” who arrange everything “with the greatest minuteness.”

“From all this it is clear that the emperor is the center, around which everything turns, and to which everything returns; consequently the well-being of the country and people depends on him,” and “the whole hierarchy of the administration works more or less according to a settled routine,” “uniform and regular, like the course of nature”—that is, cyclical. Only “the emperor is required to be the moving, ever wakeful, spontaneously active soul,” though never capricious, well-schooled as has been in the canon. “There is no other legal power or institution extant”; “it is not their own conscience their own honor, which keeps the officials to account, but an external command and the severe sanctions by which it is supported.” This means that even Confucian emperors must be tough. The current (for Hegel) Manchu Dynasty came to power thanks to an “amiable and honorable” but overly mild emperor; under Mr. Nice Guy’s slackness, “disturbances naturally”—note “naturally,” not as expressions of freely willed opposition—and “the rebels called the Manchus into the country” as allies. The Manchus stayed, after the emperor, his mandarin attendant, the empress and her attendants all committed suicide, lamenting the injustice of the emperor’s (un-subjective but rebellious) subjects.

The Chinese legal system takes all the ruled as children of the patriarch. “All legal relations are definitely settled by rules; free sentiment—the moral standpoint generally—is thereby thoroughly obliterated.” Even within family relations, conditions of slavery prevail, as the father may sell himself and his children, having purchased his wife (the only “free woman” in the household, honored for her advice to her children if not obeyed) and the subordinate concubines. The corporal punishments meted out in the legal system cause no shame because “the Chinese do not recognize a subjectivity in honor.” With no subjectivity, no one except the emperor can be blamed. [1] “The deterring principle is only the fear of punishment, not the inwardness of justice.” It follows that Chinese courts recognizes no distinction between intention and accident. An unintended crime brings down the same punishment as one committed with “malice aforethought.” Add this to the powerful family bond, and you see that the offender’s “near kinsmen are tortured to death,” as well. Cases of suicide receive the mirror-image treatment; in that case, the suicide’s enemies are arrested and tortured and, if anyone confesses, his kinsmen are executed along with him. Therefore, if you want revenge on an offender, kill or injure yourself to ruin your adversary.

Somewhat surprisingly, emperors didn’t get around to asserting ownership of the Chinese land until 213 B.C., when the aforementioned Legalist emperor Quin Shi Huang so asserted, backing his edict with force. Although those who dwelt on the land thereby became serfs, many of them didn’t much notice, inasmuch as “all are alike degraded” in effectual slavery, with or without serfdom. “As no honor exists, and no one has an individual right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates, and this easily passes into that of utter depravity.” This results in much fraud, often carefully contrived. “Their frauds are most astutely and craftily performed, so that Europeans have to be painfully cautious in dealing with them.” (Plus ça change….) Piety doesn’t necessarily bridle such scheming: “Their consciousness of moral abandonment shows itself also in the fact that the religion of Fo is so widely diffused, a religion which regards nothingness as the highest and absolute, as God, and which sets up contempt for the individual as the highest perfection” and “all claims of the subjective heart are absent.” Chinese morality centers on human patriarchy, not spirituality—”a merely human reference.” The emperor is not only the supreme head of state but also of religion. Indeed, this state-religion so lacks inwardness or spirituality that it “cannot be what we call religion” at all.

“With this deficiency of genuine subjectivity is connected… the cultivation of Chinese science.” The sciences are esteemed and supported by the state. “On the other hand there is wanting to them that free ground of inwardness, and that properly scientific interest, which make them a theoretical occupation.” As a result, “what may be called scientific” in China “is of a merely empirical nature, and is made absolutely subservient to that which is useful for the state, and for its, and individual’s needs.” And because the Chinese written language consists of thousands of signs or ideograms, effectively directing minds away from the generalizing thought that generates theory. A Chinese might invent many uses for gravity, but he will never formulate the Law of Gravity.

As with science, so with history, law, and morality. History “comprehends the bare and definite facts, without any opinion or reasoning upon them”; legal knowledge consists of memorizing “fixed laws,” with nothing like jurisprudence behind them; and morality imposes “only definite duties, without raising the question of a subjective foundation for them.” As noted, Chinese philosophy does appeal to the Tao, which Hegel identifies with reason—”that essence lying at the basis of the whole, which effectuates everything.” “Yet this has no connection with the educational pursuits which more nearly concern the state,” as Taoism, unlike Confucianism, isolates itself from civil life. Indeed, a Taoist believes that “he who is acquainted with reason possesses an instrument of universal power, which may be regarded as all-powerful, and which communicates a supernatural might” which overcomes death itself. If so, why would one need to become a bureaucrat? The politically relevant sciences are not theoretical, but serve only as “branches of knowledge for practical ends.” This is why “the Chinese are far behind in mathematics, physics, and astronomy, notwithstanding their former reputation in regard to them.” They know about the use of the magnet and practice the art of printing, but never improve on them because their culture lacks the capacity to abstract from the particular to the general, the concrete to the ideal, and then turn back to apply theory to practice in new ways. The Chinese exhibit “a remarkable skill in imitation” but invent little. And they are “too proud to learn anything from Europeans,” whom they regard as barbarians. And rightly so, by their standards—but the standards can stand only if they maintain their isolation, now an impossible strategy to enforce given the European superiority in technology that its theorizing approach to science has given it.

Hegel summarizes: “This is the character of the Chinese people in its various aspects. Its distinguishing feature is, that everything which belongs to spirit—free ethicalness, morality, heart, inward religion, science, and art properly so called—is alien to it.” The one person entitled to exert personality, the emperor, often exhibits “paternal kindness and tenderness to the people,” but the people themselves “believe that they are born only to pull the car of imperial power,” evincing “lack of respect” for themselves and for “humanity in general.” They are indeed equal, as a commoner can rise into the bureaucracy on his merit, yet “this very equality testifies to no triumphant assertion of the worth of the inner man. In China, self-esteem is “servile.”

(b) India

India stands as the antithesis of China. Chinese culture is “ethical,” but without the inwardness of morality. “It is in the interest of spirit that the externally set determination”—in China’s case, this would be the “the regulating law and the moral oversight of the emperor”—”should become inward, that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence.” This “process” unifies subjectivity and objectivity, mind and being. China remains unhistorical because this synthesis never happens; everyone remains at the level of the objective, and even the emperor acts by the rules, with a minimum of independent judgment.

By contrast, India “has received the most complete development inwardly.” Whereas “the Chinese state… presents only the most prosaic understanding, India is the region of fantasy and feeling,” a sort of idealism but, crucially, “only as a conceptless idealism of imagination,” and idealism without ideas or real-world limits. Indian idealism “does indeed take its beginning and material from existence, but changes everything into the merely imagined.” It is as if God were a dreamer, not pure thought thinking itself but “the dreaming of the unlimited spirit itself.”

There is a beauty in this “fairy region,” India, this “enchanted world.” Hegel compares it to the beauty of woman after she has given birth, “an almost unearthly beauty… when freedom from the burden of pregnancy and the pains of travail is added to the joy of soul that welcomes the gift of a beloved infant.” India, too, shows this “beauty of enervation in which all that is rough, rigid, and contradictory is dissolved, and we have only the soul in a state of emotion.” It is charming to see. But “this flower-life” is “the death of the free spirit.” “If we examine it in the light of human dignity and freedom the more attractive the first sight of it had been, so much the more unworthy shall we ultimately find it in every respect.”

Why? Consider “the character of dreaming spirit.” “In a dream the individual ceases to be conscious of self as concrete individual, exclusive over against objects. When awake, I exist for myself, and the other is something external, firm over against myself, as I myself am for it.” Awake, I seek to understand the other. In a dream I merely drift in an ethereal wonderland, whether of horror or delight. Without the conscious opposition of self and other, inner and outer, no dialectic can begin. The Absolute Spirit freezes. “The Indian view of things is entirely a general pantheism, an a pantheism of imagination, not of thought,” unlike Hegel’s rationalist and dialectical ‘pantheism,” according to which all consists of the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, its historical progress toward the end or telos of its history. In India, however, “sensorial matter and content are taken up and carried raw into the sphere of the general and immeasurable,” never “liberated by the free power of spirit into a beautiful form, and idealized in the spirit, so that the sensorial might be a merely subservient and compliant expression of the spiritual.” Consequently there can be no reasoning, no sense of the contradictions of dialectic, and thus nothing to be synthesized into a higher form. “The divine is thereby made bizarre, confused, and ridiculous.”

This non-rational pantheism takes the things before it as “its lords and gods. Everything, therefore—sun, moon, stars the Ganges, the Indus, beasts, flowers—everything is a god to it.” In such a fantasy-land, anything is possible. Meanwhile, the divine, “regarded as essentially mutable and unsettled, is also by the base form which it assumes, defiled and made absurd.” (If “the parrot, the cow, the ape, etc., are likewise incarnations of God,” and yet are “therefore not elevated above their nature,” where does that leave Christian Incarnation?) Without reason in its most basic form, understanding, with the mind only seeing reality as something “without finite cohering existence of cause and effect,” and moreover, with man lacking “the steadfastness of free being for itself, of personality and freedom,” there can be no philosophy and so no Hegelian sage—the secularized Christ-sage who incarnates the Absolute Spirit at the end of history.

This begins to explain why Hegel has turned from politics to culture as the central explanatory concept of ‘social science.’ India has no politics, only culture. Hegel could not explain India (as he conceives it) if he stayed within the realm of the political (as he conceives it).

With its beauty, India has been “the sought-after land,” toward which “all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels.” Dreamy Indians “have achieved no foreign conquests, but have been on every occasion vanquished themselves,” succumbing to wave after wave of immigration.

India contrasts politically with Chinese despotic centralism, where “individual members [of the state] could not attain to independence and subjective freedom.” To develop dialectically, “the next advance of this unity is for distinction to come to the fore,  and in its particularity to become independent against the all-ruling unity.” One soul must ‘differentiate itself,’ produce distinctive parts or members “which in their particularity develop themselves into a complete system, yet in such a way that their activity reconstitutes one soul.” In politics, this means moving from what we call, in a term Hegel himself might approve, the ‘nuclear family’ through various developmental stages to the modern state. “This freedom of particularization is lacking in China.”

Particularization has occurred in India. Its “independent members” have “ramif[ied] from the unity of despotic power.” “Yet these distinctions revert into nature. Instead of stimulating the activity of a soul as their center of union, and spontaneously realizing that soul—as is the case in organic life—they petrify and become rigid, and by their stereotyped character condemn the Indian people to the most degrading spiritual serfdom” inasmuch as “the distinctions in question are the castes.” Objects in inorganic nature, like mountains, they do not move; castes feature no ‘social mobility.’

This matters because “in every rational state there are distinctions which must manifest themselves,” as individuals, having “arrive[d] at subjective freedom,” establish them. Without subjective freedom, without making the ethical or objective law “inward,” Indians classify themselves by the group into which they were born, and so born, conceive of their membership in that group as fixed, natural in Hegel’s sense. India stays in the same immobile condition as China, despite the existence of no state in the one, a centralized state in the other.

Hegel digresses briefly to answer those who claim that some persons “in modern times” argue in favor of a state should recognize no estates or professional classes at all. “But equality in civil life is something absolutely impossible; for individual distinctions of sex and age will always assert themselves, and even if an equal share in the government is accorded to all citizens, women and children are immediately passed by, and remain excluded. The distinction between poverty and riches, the influence of skill and talent, can be as little ignored—utterly refuting those abstract assertions.” But estates are one thing, castes another. You belong to a caste by birth, and you’re “bound to it for life.” “Thereby does all the concrete vitality, which we see arise, sink back into death”; the existence of social divisions promises dialectic, but the rigidity of caste precludes it. “The appearance of the realization of freedom in these distinctions is therewith completely annihilated.” “Internal subjectivity ought to be entitled to choose its occupation,” but in the East “internal subjectivity is not yet recognized as independent, as the Chinese depend upon “the laws and moral decision of the emperor, consequently on a human will” and Indians depend upon nature in the form of birth —birth into one’s caste. Further, if the divine is ‘in’ everything, if pantheism is true, then placement into one’s caste is supposed sacred, rightly irrevocable and unchangeable; “all are invested with absolute value by religion.”

To those who might object that the European Middle Ages saw feudalism, with its stable and sharp class distinctions, therefore was no better than India, Hegel replies that all Europeans in those times had “the right of person and of property” in the form of “equality before the law.” [2] Such “ethical dignity,” constitutes what “man must possess in and through himself” as an individual. Not so in India, where Hinduism teaches that caste distinctions “extend not only to the objectivity of spirit, but also to its absolute inwardness.” Putting it in plainer language, Hegel means that in India “duties and rights… are not recognized as pertaining to mankind generally, but as those of a particular caste.” We say, “Bravery is a virtue”; they say, “Bravery is the virtue of the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste.” “Everything is petrified into these distinctions”—the opposite of Hegel’s esteemed rational movement and vitality. “Over this petrification a capricious desire holds sway,” under which “ethics and human dignity are unknown; evil passions have their full swing; the spirit roams in the dream-world, and the highest state is annihilation” of self via meditation.

Meditation suggests religion, and India’s main religion reinforces the caste system. Hinduism’s highest god is Brahma, and it’s not for nothing that members of the highest caste are called Brahmins. Behind the gods and humanity is the “substantial unity” of all, Brahm. “If a Brahmin is asked what Brahm is, he answers: when I fall back within myself, and close all external senses, and say Ôm within myself, that is Brahm.” To reach it, one thus ‘annihilates’ self and all other human beings from one’s consciousness in an act of abstracting oneself from humanity. One is tempted to recall that God in the Gospels does exactly the opposite, incarnating Himself as human and commanding all men to love their neighbors. But “the morality which is involved in respect for human life is not found among the Indians.” The only way to escape a lower caste is by self-annihilation consisting not merely of meditation but of asceticism, suffering. “The perfect deadening of consciousness” establishes “a point from which the transition to physical death is no great step.” Meanwhile, members of all other castes must worship the Brahmins as gods and thoughts of political revolution seem irrelevant; if a princeling usurps the prince, “the common Indian” finds “his life… unchanged.”

If Brahm sounds a bit vague, as purported underlying realities go, you are not alone in thinking so. “It is difficult to discover what the Indians understand by Brahm,” although the English, exercising due diligence respecting their imperial possessions, “have taken a good deal of trouble to find out.” Hegel offers to translate Brahm “into our way of thinking”: “We should call Brahm the pure unity of thought in itself—God simple in Himself,” without temples or worshippers.” “This pure unity…lies at the foundation of all—the root of all definite existence. In the knowledge of this unity, all objectivity falls away; for the purely abstract is knowledge itself in its most extreme emptiness,” a “death of life during life itself” which “requir[es] the disappearance of all activity and volition, and of all knowledge too.” Counterbalancing Brahm we find the other pole of Hinduism, which consists of its “concrete content” of pantheism or universal polytheism. The deities here are “things of sense: mountains, streams, beasts, the sun, the moon, the Ganges.” “This duality—abstract unity [Brahm] and abstract sensorial particularity—exactly corresponds to the duality of worship” in Hinduism. On one side, there is meditation aiming at “the abstraction of pure cancellation, the destruction of real self-consciousness,” on the other “a wild tumult of excess,” an effort to lose self-consciousness “by immersion in the natural, with which individuality thus makes itself identical, destroying its consciousness of being distinct from nature.” “Paramours and dancing girls” prance in, permitting the devotee to immerse himself in “a voluptuous intoxication in the merely natural and leaving “a doctrine of the relation of religion to ethics… altogether out of the question,” as Hegel soberly puts it.

Whereas “to us [Europeans or more precisely Hegelians] religion is the knowledge of that essence which is actually our essence, and therefore the substance of knowledge and will,” “this cannot be found among the Indians,” who “have not the spiritual as the content of their consciousness.” As in China, morals suffer—in much the same way, if for the opposite reason. “Deceit and cunning are the fundamental characteristics of the Indian; swindling, stealing, robbing, murdering are part of his manners.” “The Indians will not tread upon ants, but they are perfectly indifferent when poor wanderers pine away with hunger.” In China, the lack of a sense of personal honor issues in this; in India, it is the lack of any objective standard of conduct.

Since the state “is a realization of spirit, such that in it the self-conscious being of spirit—the freedom of the will—is realized as law,” and inasmuch as “the Indian principle” tends toward imagination, self-abnegation or (alternatively) indiscipline and indifference to those outside of one’s caste, India lacks “the proper basis of the state.” “Freedom both as will existing for itself and as subjective freedom is absent.” China is “nothing else but a state”; India “is only a people, not a state.” China features “moral despotism”; India features “a despotism without any sort of principle, without any rule of ethics and religiosity.” “there is no sense of self with which tyranny could be compared, and which would cause revolt in the soul.” India has poetry, geometry, astronomy, algebra, philosophy, and an intricate language. But it has no history. “For history requires understanding—the power of letting an object be free for itself, and to comprehend it in its rational connection.” In the Indian soul, all is indeterminate, making it “incapable of writing history. All that happens is dissipated in their minds into confused dreams.” And without history there can be “no development into a veritable political condition.” To understand Indian history, consult the Greeks and Muslims who have written it. But as for the Indians themselves, they have culture, “a common character pervading the whole of India,” but no real politics because they conceive of no real freedom. “Their whole life and ideas are one unbroken superstition, because among them all is reverie and consequent enslavement.”

None of this means that India is inferior to China. On the contrary, Strauss observes. In positing Nothingness—not a void but No-thing-ness, a pervasive spirit—India surpasses China, represents an advance in the progress of history. “To China the highest is a visible heaven. The Hindus go beyond that and peer through heaven, as it were, and discover a spiritual principle… and this is an act of liberation.” In its infinitude, Nothingness has as yet no defined character, manifesting itself as anything. Nonetheless, it is “the beginning” of a move away from merely empirical perception.

Strauss remarks that Hegel “doesn’t deny that there are very fine and great things in China and India, but he says somehow the soul is missing, the core is missing, because the awareness of the rights of man is missing.” He goes further, suggesting that Hegel may be mistaken to ascribe to either culture a real notion of nature. The Chinese term translated as “Heaven,” which Hegel considers to mean nature, may not mean that at all, especially since Chinese and Indian writers tend to ascribe rightness to following a way of life, a path, and not to natural right or natural law.

(c) Buddhism

The Buddha came to China from India, so it might be said that Buddhism consists of a synthesis of the two cultures. Hegel contrasts Buddhism with Hinduism. Buddhism diverges from Hinduism’s “inebriate dream-life,” framed by a “rigid” caste system. Buddhism offers not “self-abandoned, helpless slavery” but an “unconstrained dream life”; Buddhism “keeps itself more free, more independently fixed in itself.” A Buddhist master meditates; he does not impose, except on disciples who consent to his discipline. Hegel reaches for quasi-Kantian terms to describe it; Buddhism “may be generally regarded as the religion of being in itself.” Behind all finite things resides an infinite No-thing-ness, “the principle of all things, that proceeds from and returns to nothingness.” “The differences in the world are only modifications of this procession”; “everything is but a change of form.” The essence of No-thing-ness us “eternal repose,” “the absence of activity and volition.” “Nothingness is abstract unity with itself.” For man, “true blessedness is union with nothingness,” a condition he can achieve in this life, not in the life hereafter.

At “the point of history” in which the Buddha taught, “the form of the [absolute] spirit is yet that of immediacy,” by which Hegel means that “God is conceived in an immediate form, not objectively in the form of thought.” However, “this immediate form is the human figure”—the Buddha, not the sun or the stars. While “the abstract understanding generally objects to this idea of a God-man, alleging as a defect that the form here assigned to spirit is an immediate one, in fact man,” Hegel of course regards immanence as an advance. Undoubtedly glancing at Jesus as well as the Buddha, he admits that “the idea of a man—especially a living man—being worshiped as a God has in it something paradoxical and revolting.” To conceive of the Absolute Spirit is to conceive “something general in itself.” But this generality “must be emphasized, and it must be shown in the view of peoples that they have this generality in view.” One might add that this is especially important respecting a generality to a people to whom the teacher is foreign. Be this as it may, “it is not the singularity of the subject that is revered, but that which is general in him.” The Dalai Lama, for example, “is nothing but the figure in which spirit manifests itself, and who does not hold this spirituality as his peculiar property, but is regarded as partaking of it in order to exhibit it to others, that they may attain a view of spirituality and be led to piety and blessedness.” And no more than that: a lama has no power over nature, practices no sorcery. In Tibet Buddhism in fact displaced the local shamans

Given its radical inwardness and its consequent eschewal of any but the simplest and most lenient ruling institutions, Buddhism has exerted little influence on the course of history. A lama will advise the ruler but not take political authority for himself.

(d) Persia

“With the Persian empire we enter into the connection of history for the first time. The Persians are the first historical people; Persia was the first empire to have passed away,” thus exemplifying the res gestae in contrast with “stationary” China and India, with their “natural vegetative existence.”

Persia’s religion, Zoroastrianism rejects undifferentiated No-thing-ness, positing instead a world divided between the light and darkness. “Zoroaster’s light is the first which belongs to the world of consciousness, to spirit as a relation to something distinct from itself.” The light permits human self-consciousness as free from it; it “only manifests what bodies are in themselves, a unity which governs individuals only to excite them to become powerful for themselves, to develop and assist their particularity.” Light is also egalitarian, shining on righteous and unrighteous alike. And (crucially for Hegel) “light is vitalizing,” nourishing life and not aspiring to ‘deaden’ it as the religions of the Far East tend to do. Because life has an antithesis, darkness, “this antithetical relation opens out to us the principle of activity and life,” dialectical movement. Thus “the principle of development begins with the history of Persia,” which “constitutes the beginning of world history strictly speaking; for the grand interest of spirit in history is to attain an unlimited being-in-itself or subjectivity, to attain reconciliation through absolute antithesis.”

Whereas Brahm is entirely non-objective, encouraging his devotees to self-annihilation, the light of the Zoroastrians, being objective, is a means by which the spirit “acquires an affirmative nature: man becomes free, and appears over against that which is supreme, which to him is objective,” not the all-pervading pantheist deity residing in humans and parrots alike. In Persia, the individual “distinguishes himself from the general and likewise mak[es] himself identical with the general” by spiritual exercises. “In the Chinese and Indian principle, this distinction is not made.” Instead of unifying the spiritual and the natural, Zoroastrianism advances the spirit in “the task of freeing itself from nature.”

The light also has a moral dimension; it isn’t only “the most universal physical element, but at the same time also purity of spirit—the good.” This means that man can overcome nature—which is, as his students have seen in his account of Africa, bestial. “Light, in a physical and spiritual sense, imports, therefore elevation—freedom from the merely natural.” “All are equally able to approach” this “abstract good,” and in it “all equally may be hallowed.” There are no castes. “Everyone has a share in that principle, secures to him a value for himself.” Hegel goes so far as to say the Persia’s geography supports this, as its mountains rise up sharply from the plains, unlike the gentler topographies of China and India. The land of Persia is physically ‘dualistic.’

Hegel divides his discussion of Persia into three: first, a discussion of the original Zend people; then an account of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Mede and Persian nations—the peoples comprising the empire; and finally an account of the empire and its parts considered as regimes. The regime section features discussions of Persia, the ruling element, Syria, Judea, and Egypt, followed by a brief section in which Hegel shows how Persia as it were carried the torch of history to Greece.

The Zend people descended from the fire-worshiping Parsees, and “as a whole they were destroyed by the Muslims.” The Zend language “is connected with the Sanskrit, as the language of the Persians, Medes, and Bactrians.” Zend laws and institutions “bear an evident stamp of extreme simplicity,” ordaining four classes: priests, warriors, farmers, and craftsmen. These were estates, not castes, with no restrictions on inter-class marriages. There was no Brahmin caste for whom alone full consciousness has been attained. Zoroastrian light “is not a Lama, a Brahmin, a mountain, a brute—this or that sensorial existence—but sensorial generality itself, the simple manifestation.” Light is the sensible thing that makes clear the outlines of all other sensible things. Light enables man to ‘see what he is doing,’ putting him “in a position to be able to exercise choice,” inasmuch as “he can only choose when he has emerged from that which had absorbed him.” And given the dichotomy of light and darkness, Zoroastrianism posits a stark choice, indeed: good or evil. Hegel approves of this dialectic: “As man could not appreciate good if evil were not there, and as he can be really good only when he knows evil, so the light does not exist without darkness.” Nor can it know itself without it; “spirit, in order to comprehend itself, must essentially place the general positive over against the particular negative”; in overcoming its antithesis the spirit is “twice-born.” Hegel thereby offers a comment on the Book of Genesis, and perhaps of Christian baptism, without mentioning them.

There is a “deficiency in the Persian principle.” Zoroastrianism does not give the devil his due. That is, the god of light simply conquers the god of darkness. There is no true synthesis of the two principles. The light “does not return the distinction” of light versus darkness “back into itself,” fails to integrate elements of its antithesis into a new, more comprehensive being. That would be the work of the Germans.

The morality of the Zend people is mild. “It is implied that man should be virtuous: his own will, his subjective freedom, is presupposed.” Religious practices were aligned with life, not death. “It was made especially obligatory upon the Persians to maintain the living, to plant trees, to dig wells, to fertilize deserts, in order that life, the positive, the pure, might be furthered, and the dominion of Ormuzd [the god of light] be universally extended.” We are only two generations away from Nietzsche and his Zarathustra. [3]

If Zend race was the highest spiritual element of the Persian empire, so in Assyria and Babylon we have the element of external wealth, luxury, and commerce.” In Assyrians, these riches required fortified cities. Having relinquished “the nomad life and pursuing agriculture, handicrafts and trade in a fixed abode,” they needed to protect themselves and their property from “the roving mountain peoples and the predatory Arabs.” (“Even at this day the country round Baghdad is thus infested by roving nomads.”) Babylon enjoyed life in the Fertile Crescent, and its people lived “peaceably and neighborly with each other.” For the most part, “immorality invaded Babylon only at a later period, when the people became poorer,” but for much of its existence the community practiced “provident care for all” and a sense of “common cause.”

The Medes were a mountain people—fierce, barbaric, warlike. The Persians were found “in extremely close and early connection” with them; when the Persians came to dominate, it made “no essential difference” in spirit. “The names of Persia and Media melt into one.”

This formed the nucleus of the Persian empire. Hegel considers it “an empire in the modern sense,” one “consisting of a number of states which are indeed dependent but which have retained their own individuality, their manners, and laws.” “As light illuminates everything, imparting to each object a peculiar vitality, so the Persian empire extends over a multitude of nations, and leaves to each one its particular character.” Geographically, too, the empire united “the three natural principles”: the uplands of Persia and Media; the valley plain of the Nile; and, in Syria and Phoenicia, the seacoast, where nations “encounter the perils of the sea.” “We find here neither that consolidated totality which China presents, nor that Indian life in which an anarchy of caprice is prevalent everywhere.” The empire put a stop “to that barbarism and ferocity with which the nations had been wont to carry on their destructive feuds, of which the Book of Kings and the Book of Samuel sufficiently attest.” The Israelite prophets lamented this condition; Cyrus the Great changed it, diffusing “happiness” over “the region of the Near East.” To be sure, “it was not given to the Asians to unite self-reliance, freedom, and substantial vigor of mind with culture, an interest in diverse pursuits, and an acquaintance with the conveniences of life.” Military valor among them comported “only with barbarity of manners,” leaving “the calm courage of order” unachieved. “And when their mind opens to a sympathy with various interests, it immediately passes into effeminacy, allows its energies to sink, and makes men the slaves of an enervated sensuality.” Readers of Machiavelli will recall his accusations against Christianity.

Moving to the national constituents of the empire, Hegel begins with the Persians themselves, originally “a free mountain and nomad people” who now “stood with one foot on their ancestral territory, with the other on their foreign conquests.” They could raise vast armies from the empire, but the men thus conscripted were “so unequally disciplined, so diverse in strength and bravery, it is easy to understand how the small but well-trained armies of the Greeks, animated by the same spirit, and under matchless leadership, could withstand those innumerable but disorderly hosts of the Persians.”

Their government of the empire “was by no means oppressive,” although the regional rulers, the satraps, were often arbitrary and jealous of one another, “a source of much evil.” But at least the Persian kings left to the nation of each province “the enjoyment of the country.” Famously, Cyrus let the Jews return to Jerusalem. In this, the regime of Persia acts like the light of Zoroastrianism, shining on all equally, nourishing individuality even under imperial rule. And like the Jews, the Persians “had no idols and in fact ridiculed anthropomorphic representations of the gods”; “they tolerated every religion, although there may be found expressions of wrath against idolatry.” In this, Persian life resembled that envisioned by the prophet Micah, a life wherein each man sits under his own vine and fig tree, with none to make him afraid—unless it might be the provincial satrap.

Syria had two populations. The western, landlocked people shared with the Babylonians a way of life consisting of idolatry, nature worship, luxury and pleasure integrated into their worship—in all, “a merely sense-oriented life” ruled cruelly “because nature itself is the highest, so that man has no value, or only the most trifling.” Hegel wastes little time on them. The seafaring Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast are altogether a different kind. Commercial, cosmopolitan, early the possessors of a written language, their ships ranged as far as Britain.

“This opens us to an entirely new principle. Inactivity ceases, as also mere rude valor; in their place appears the activity of industry, and that considerate courage which, while it dares the perils of the deep, rationally bethinks itself of the means of safety.” The life of commercial seafaring requires “human will and activity,” courage, intelligence, all at the service of “the interest of man,” not some vaguely imagined god or gods, nor some one man or few men. “The sailor relies on himself, amid the fluctuations of the waves, and eye and heart must always be open”; in this, the sailor is Hegelian man, conscious of the waves of history and riding them. His industry opposes “what is received from nature”; “in industry, man is an object to himself, and treats nature as something subject to him, on which he impresses the seal of his activity.” Here, in Phoenicia at this time, “we see nations freed from their fear of nature and its slavish bondage.” (“You see how little reactionary Hegel is,” Strauss quips.)

Accordingly, the Phoenicians worshiped two divine persons. Hercules (who may or may not have been the same as the familiar figure in Greek myth) “is that scion of the gods who, by his virtue and exertion, made himself a god by human spirit and valor; and who, instead of passing his life in idleness, spends it in hardship and toil” with “courage and daring” and (although Hegel doesn’t mention it) wiliness. Their other god is Adonis, who suffers, dies, and is then reborn. While in India “lamentation is suppressed in the heroism of insensibility,” as women, “uncomplaining,” throw themselves into the Ganges and men “impose upon themselves the direst tortures,” “giv[ing] themselves up to lifelessness in order to destroy consciousness in empty abstract contemplation,” with Adonis life “regains its value,” as “human pain becomes an element of worship” as the experience in which “man realizes his subjectivity,” sees himself in dialectic with nature, now rightly seen as not-human and indeed inhuman. “A universality of pain is established; for death becomes immanent in the divine, and the deity dies. Among the Persians we saw light and darkness struggling with each other, but here both principles are united in one—the absolute,” the synthesis that encompasses the warring elements without destroying either one. The return of Adonis to life is celebrated with joy. Without the suffering what would that be?

Hegel may have surprised his students by spending so little time on Judea. He ‘puts Judaism in its place’ within his philosophic system, which radically revises the Bible. “While among the Phoenician people the spiritual was still limited by nature, in the case of the Jews we find it entirely purified; the pure product of thought, self-thought, comes to consciousness, and the spiritual develops in sharp contrast to nature and to union with it.” In Hinduism, Brahm “is not himself an object of consciousness; in Zoroastrianism, the light was an object of consciousness but of “sensorial contemplation.” With Judaism, “light is henceforth Jehovah—the purely One.” “This is the break between East and West; spirit descends into the depths of its own being, and recognizes the abstract fundamental principle as the spiritual Nature—which in the East is the primary, the foundation—is now pushed down to the condition of a mere creature; and spirit now occupies first place.” (This of course is not quite right. The Book of Genesis teaches not that God is the light but that He created it. It would be more accurate, although inconsistent with Hegel’s neo-pantheistic Absolute Spirit, to say that Jehovah replaces the status of the light in Zoroastrianism, but even that formulation doesn’t capture the holiness of the Creator-God.)

As always, Hegel then articulates an antithesis, a critique. The one God chooses one people as his own. He is “the God only of Abraham and of his seed,” and “before Him all other gods are false.” Hegel demurs. “Every form of spiritual activity, and the more so every religion, is of such a nature, that whatever be its peculiar character, an affirmative element is necessarily contained in it,” as he has painstakingly related in his discussions of China, India, and Persia. “In every religion there is a divine presence, a divine relation; and a philosopher of history has to seek out the spiritual element even in the most imperfect forms” even if, admittedly, “it does not follow that because it is a religion, it is therefore good”—a “lax conception,” indeed.

The merit of Judaism is that it reduces nature “to something merely external and ungodly,” which is “actually the truth about nature, for only later can the idea attain reconciliation in this its externality.” “The whole of nature is only His robe of glory, and is applied to his service.” Further, Jews honor God by walking in His way, obeying His law, which way leads to more abundant life—Hegel’s esteemed vitalism found its expression in Jerusalem. “Here too we have the possibility of a historical view; for the understanding has become prosaic,” not poetic-mythological, “putting the limited and circumscribed”—God’s creation or what Hegel calls nature—”in its proper place.” “Men are regarded as individuals, not as incarnations of God; sun as sun mountains as mountains, not as if possessing spirit and will.” In Judaism, human individuals do “hard service as relation to pure thought.” [4]

All this is good, but Judaism binds individuals too closely to ceremonies and the law. They cannot live freely for themselves, as the Phoenicians did. God has freedom, as the Chinese emperor did; Judaism is superior to Confucianism because it is no mere human who exercises freedom over his fellow-men, but a transcendent and providential Creator-God. But “the subject never comes to the consciousness of his independence,” never (for example) believes in the soul’s immortality, “for the subject does not exist in and for itself.” “However spiritual may be the conception of God as objective,” in Judaism, “the subjective side—the honor rendered to Him—is still very limited and unspiritual in character,” too ritualistic.

In keeping with the relative weakness of individual spirits, families are the fundamental ruling units, not individuals and not the state, which “is an institution which is not consistent with the Judaistic principle,” one “alien to the legislation of Moses.” Not only are the Jews excessively exclusive and intolerant, too prideful in “their peculiar nationality,” but they also believe in miracles, “a disturbing feature in this history as history,” inasmuch as real history doesn’t explain things by appealing to divine intervention. “Nature is de-divinized but not yet understood.” On the level of practice, a state lacking the firm, spiritual commitment of its people, dominated instead by family life, may divide on that fault line. This, Hegel observes, is exactly what happened, as the Levites and the Judah-ites divided the land. But according to Judaic principles themselves, “the one God could not be honored in different temples, and there could not be two kingdoms attached to one religion.” So weakened, Jews were “subjected to the Assyrians and the Babylonians,” released from captivity not by God but by Cyrus.

Egypt is the final Asian regime Hegel considers, the one with the closest and longest dealings with both Greece and Rome. Like the other Near Eastern regimes, Egyptians have lost their empire; it survives, but as “the ultimate Land of Ruins,” a monument to death. But Egypt served an indispensable historical function by uniting or synthesizing the many “contradictory elements” of Persia, Babylon, Syria, and Judea. Egyptians combined the Persian sense of a “universal natural existence,” Babylonian and west-Syrian sensuousness, the Phoenicians’ “incipient consciousness of the concrete spirit” seen in Adonis-worship, and the “pure and abstract thought” of Judaism.

How could this task possibly be done? Hegel point to the figure of the sphinx, “the symbol of the Egyptian spirit.” “The human head looking out from the brute body, exhibits spirit as it begins to emerge from the merely natural, to tear itself loose therefrom and already to look more freely around it,without, however, entirely freeing itself from the fetters nature had imposed.” Similarly, the landscape itself, with its half-buried ruins, figures forth the idea of natural beings rising into the air. “The whole land is divided into a kingdom of life and a kingdom of death.” Located geographically “alongside African stupidity,” Egyptian exhibit “reflective intelligence, a thoroughly rational organization characterizing all institutions, and most astonishing works of art.” They lacked, however, and adequate written language and self-consciousness; with these out of their reach, they could not write their own history, and one must consult foreigners for that. Among them, Hegel prefers Herodotus, with his naturalistic explanations of events, eschewing the miraculous.

The rational organization of Egyptian institutions may be seen in their way of life, which establishes “a condition of settled peace” by such laws as the requirement of each Egyptian to report “from what resources he obtained his livelihood.” (“If he could not refer to any, he was punished with death,” a lawful if draconian way to give men an incentive to work.) One source of such employment was the construction of a carefully designed systems of canals and dikes, moderating the fluctuations of the Nile.

As for their reflective intelligence, Hegel recalls that “Egypt was regarded as the pattern of an ethically regulated condition of things,” as depicted in the writings of Pythagoras and Plato. Hegel cautions, however, that “such ideals” take “no account of passion,” and therefore stand as “altogether opposed to the nature of spirit, which makes contemporary life into its objects and whose infinite impulse of activity is to change that life.” Strauss explicates: “Passion claims freedom, the mind claims freedom, and there is a certain connection between them according to Hegel. This freedom both of passion and of the mind is provided for in the reasonable state as Hegel understands it.” [5] Hegel tells his students that the real Egyptians saw the dilemma but ultimately could not resolve the tension between “that African imprisonment of ideas” and “the infinite impulse of the spirit to realize itself objectively.”

The dominance of the Nile and the sun presented Egyptians with a “naturally-determined world in which [to] live, a cyclical world of flooding and receding, sunrise and sunset.” The good aspect of this is that both river and sun are prodigious life-givers; the Egyptians partook of Hegelian vitalism within the very natural confinement that usually keeps men in barbarism. Accordingly, Egyptian religion “the Nile and the sun constitute the divinities, conceived under human forms; and the course of nature and the divine history is the same.” Adonis-like disappearance and rebirth find another other forms. And the god Osirus suffers, is killed and mourned by his sister, Isis; “pain is regarded as something divine, and the same honor is assigned to it here as among the Phoenicians.” The “leading ideas”—Osirus, the sun, and the Nile—constitute a “triplicity of being… united in one knot”—obviously an anticipation of the Christian Trinity, although Hegel is here too discreet to say so. This three-in-one “vitality” is unified, but still “quite abstract” in the sense that it isn’t clear what connects the three ideas. There was no sense of history among the people who could not write their own history, despite the world-historical importance of their culture.

Egyptians also worshiped animals, a practice Hegel compares favorably to the worship of sun and stars. Animals have instinct, “restlessness, excitability, and liveliness.” “We cannot make out what is in these creatures, and cannot rely on them. A black tom-cat, with its glowing eyes and its now gliding, now quick and darting movement, has been deemed the presence of a malignant being, a mysterious reserved specter: the dog, the canary, on the contrary appear friendly and sympathizing.” “The animals are truly incomprehensible,” unlike the sun and the stars, which merely revolve in regular patterns, readily mapped by man. Animals are ‘higher’ than the heavens. The problem with worshiping them is that they are natural beings. “In truth it is only in nature that we encounter the incomprehensible; for spirit is just this, to be revealed to itself; spirit understands and comprehends spirit.” Mere vitality is not enough. “Among the Egyptians this worship of beasts was carried to excess under the forms of a most stupid and non-human superstition.”

This brings Hegel back to the sphinx. The combination of man and beast is for the Egyptians an enigma, a riddle. To Egypt’s credit, the riddle is clearly stated by the creature that embodies it. “We thus see Egypt intellectually confined by a narrow, involved, close view of nature, but breaking through this; impelling it to self-contradiction, and proposing to itself the problem which that contradiction implies.” Hegel credits the Egyptians for posing the riddle, for enabling us “to behold the antithesis of nature and spirit,” but it will take ‘Greece,’ in the particular figure of Oedipus, to solve the riddle, to resolve the paradox of identity that changes, to synthesize thesis and antithesis.

Hegel ends his account of Egypt with praise. Unlike the Jews, the Egyptians regarded the soul as immortal. “The notion that spirit is immortal involves this, that the human individual inherently possesses infinite value.” True, “the soul initially was known to the Egyptians only as an atom, that is, something concrete and particular” which could move from a human body to the body of an animal, then back again. Hegel concurs with Aristotle’s judgment on metempsychosis—that it ignores the fact that bodies have structures, that the bodies of human and animal species differ radically, and that as a consequence it makes no sense to believe that souls free-float among them. Still, “with the Egyptians the soul—the spirit—is, at any rate, an affirmative being, although only abstractedly affirmative,” migratory in an implausible way. Once again Egypt raised the right questions, even if its answers did not suffice.

“What must now be done is for the particularity,” the individual, “which in itself is already ideal to posit itself as ideal”—to become conscious of itself—”and for the general, which in itself is already free, to comprehend itself. It is the free, joyful spirit of Greece that accomplishes this, and makes this its starting-point.” If the Egyptians are “vigorous boys, eager for self-comprehension, who require nothing but clear understanding of themselves in an ideal form in order to become young men,” the Greeks are those young men, following the aphorism of Apollonian Greece, “man, know thyself.” “Humanity in general is summoned to self-knowledge; in replying to the sphinx’s riddle with the correct answer to its question, Oedipus “overthrew the sphinx from the rock, liberating “that Oriental spirit” by saying in effect “the inwardness of nature is the thought that has its existence only in human consciousness.” Hegel therefore both is and is not an atheist. In calling the Absolute Spirit “God,” and in considering all religions effort at understanding God, he is a theist. In calling the Absolute Spirit “God” and in claiming that the human consciousness alone comprehends it, he is an atheist in the eyes of any particular religion that preceded his own philosophic doctrine. [6]

Such is the “inward” transition from Asia to Greece. The historical transition occurred when the Greeks defeated the Persians at Thermopylae, sending the Persian empire into decline. But in this failure, Persia showed itself part of history, part of the great birthing and passing away, as China and India are not. “The Persians could erect no empire possessing complete organization; they could not impart their principle into the conquered lands, and were unable to make them into a harmonious whole, but were obliged to be content with an aggregate of the most diverse individualities.” It was not the alleged “effeminacy” of the Persians that did them in but “the unwieldy, unorganized character of their host, as matched against Greek organization,” that brought on their ruin. This claim illustrates the difference between Machiavelli and Hegel. Machiavelli writes of virtù, a sort of virtue, albeit neither classical nor Christian. Hegel writes of rational organization, the latest, better articulation of the Absolute Spirit. Characteristically, Hegel finds a necessity in Persia’s fatal disorganization. Without it, the principle of freedom could not have manifested itself at that time. In the Greeks, freedom and order achieve a synthesis, although not yet an adequate synthesis, not yet the ‘end of history.’ China and India, in Strauss’s words, were “dead-end developments in cultures,” but “Persia itself points beyond itself” and is therefore “historical in a way in which China is not historical.”

 

 

Notes

1. Strauss expands on this point. Corporeal punishment might be resented by individuals, but “what Hegel has in mind is the sense that corporeal punishment is incompatible with the dignity of man…. The mere ego—it is not I who am insulted if I am publicly spanked by some executioner, but the dignity of man.” Chinese culture doesn’t feature a sense of that dignity, inasmuch as no struggle for recognition with ‘the other’ can occur if there’s no moral sense, no sentiment of self-worth that demands recognition. (Strauss, p. 130).
2. Strauss gives an example of liberty under feudalism: “A serf’s son could enter a monastery and then, in other words, he could belong to the highest estates” or professions,” whereas in India no one can become a Brahmin under any conditions.” (Strauss, p. 150).
3. Strauss elaborates helpfully: “There are two principles, the good and the evil principle. In Western language we would say god and devil. But whereas according to the Christian or Jewish view the devil is the creature of God who has sinned and thus fallen, here these two forces are of equal status, not regarding goodness but regarding being. They are independent of each other.” The Persians “were aware of the difficulty” of contending, as they did, that eventually good will vanquish evil: On what basis? “There is as it were an neutral ground beyond the opposition of good and evil, something like the nothingness of the Hindus…. Out of that emerged good and evil.” (Strauss, p. 177). Still, is this “ground” truly neutral, or does it ‘skew’ the conflict, ‘load’ the dice, in favor of the good?
4. Strauss demurs. Just as “there is no Old Testament expression for nature,” so “there is not Old Testament word for history…. There is one old Hebrew word which could lead to the notion of nature on the one hand, and history on the other.” Literally translated, it is “generation,” as in “these are the generations” of a given Israelite patriarch. Generation is both a ‘natural’ and a ‘historical’ event, to use contemporary terms.  (Strauss, p. 187). More startlingly, Strauss notices that “from Hegel’s point of view, the Old Testament prepares the new Testament to no higher degree than Phoenicia does, in a very different way.” Such is the cunning of history, that is to say of the Absolute Spirit as it works itself out.
5. Strauss goes on to say that “the reasonable state in Hegel’s understanding includes the relative freedom of what he calls bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which i the translation both of civil society and of bourgeois society. He means the economic sphere in the sense of Adam Smith.” (Strauss, pp. 190-191). “In this sense, Hegel is a liberal.” (p. 192). This clarifies Strauss’s quotation of a Nazi-sympathizing German who called the election of Adolf Hitler the death of German liberalism.
6. Highlighting Hegel’s status as a philosopher, Strauss tells his students that “Hegel retains the supremacy of theory” over practice, even as he synthesizes them. “What is the object of theory? In Aristotle, the highest object of theory is the cosmos and the mind governing the cosmos.
   But for Hegel, the highest object of theory is, one can say, what man has done in the whole course of history. So that practice and its products are the state. From Aristotle’s point of view it would be absurd to say that the state has a higher philosophic status as an object than the cosmos. For Hegel it is elemental that all are art. For Aristotle these are subordinate subjects; for Hegel these are the highest subjects of theory. So we can say that theory for Hegel deals with the products of practice, the product of human actions much more than with the natural. This is entirely contrary to the original Aristotelian scheme.” (Strauss, p. 194)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.