Will Morrisey Reviews

In the introduction to The Philosophy of History Hegel takes up the Aristotelian distinction between philosophy and history. Aristotle ranks history below philosophy (and below poetry) because history lacks generality. Hegel replies that the events of history reveal a rational process, that reason is not only prescriptive but productive. To speak theologically, Hegel resolves Aristotle’s history-philosophy distinction, and vindicates history, by claiming that god is not an unmoved mover but a self-moving mover. Hegel’s God is neither Anaxagorean nous nor the Biblical disposer of Providence. ‘God’ or the Absolute Spirit is immanent, moving not only over the waters but within the waters; the waters themselves are congealed or self-alienated, concretized, Absolute Spirit. In Platonic terms, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit amounts to a synthesis of logos and thumos, reason and spiritedness, emerging from the apparently material desires. It is this melding of reason and spiritedness that gives Hegel’s thought its characteristically ‘modern’ (Machiavellian-Cartesian-Baconian) air, that telltale whiff of grapeshot. The mastery of fortune and the conquest of nature remain, redefined as aspects of the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit as it moves toward the end, the purpose of ‘History.’

The Absolute Spirit is free (the Rousseauian theme) because self-determined; unlike matter, it is not determined by gravity or anything else. History consists of the working-out of Absolute Spirit. With no false modesty, Hegel claims that the Germans discovered that man as such is free—in contrast with the Greeks, who supposed that only some men are, and in even sharper contrast with the Asians, Africans, and native Americans, who have yet to ascend to even that small degree of self-conscious spiritedness. (For example, the native Americans are said not merely to lack reason but to lack spiritedness, to be merely passive, a mere quantitative mass, like nature itself—and unhistorical therefore.)

Seeing is not the same as achieving, Hegel sees. Real history, even in Germany, has been a slaughter-bench. Passionate self-seeking coexists in a matrix with eruptions of Absolute Spirit; sometimes, as seen in great men or world-historical individuals, the passion and the eruption coincide. Lesser men follow great men, feeling “the irresistible power of their own Spirit thus embodied”; the life-force philosophy of Nietzsche is here, but still in rationalist form. (Nietzsche is the Rousseau of the Hegelian Enlightenment.) Apparently chaotic historical concatenations are all part of “the cunning [which literally means ‘knowing’] of history,” as the passions of men are gratified but simultaneously and often unwittingly build up the edifice of rationality: the State. Right comes out of this concordia discors of selfish wills, superintended by the Absolute Spirit, which struggles out of matter in the manner of never-finished Michelangelos.

True freedom is therefore collective, within the State, not ‘bourgeois-individual.’ All individual worth is possessed through the State, as shaped by great men, in the conflictual-thumotic and rational self-development of the national spirits or Volkgeists, themselves particular expressions of the Absolute Spirit. Rousseauian perfectibility comes not according to nature but in contradiction to it, even as nature itself exists only via the Absolute Spirit’s self-alienation. The ascent from the Cave of mere opinion—the most noteworthy achievement of Plato’s philosopher—has been illusory, inasmuch as religion, art, and even philosophy and science are subsumed under the larger category of ‘culture.’ The ‘Idea’ or final manifestation of Absolute Spirit is no mere ‘ideal,’ never to be actualized, but something to be struggled for, achieved conceptually in the thought of G. W. F. Hegel (again, no false modesty), and achieved in politics by the realization of a stable constitutional monarchy buttressed by a bureaucracy whose members will have been culled from the very bourgeoisie that is now merely commercial-selfish. Thus shall logos and thumos triumph together (as they could only do in speech, hitherto) in what might be called an attempted synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem, theory and practice, rationality and providence. That is to say, if Absolute Spirit/ideas are productive, and find their consummation in discourse, then the dreams of sophists and rhetoricians shall be realized, and speech will complete reality; in theological language, words shall become flesh or, more precisely, flesh words.

The metaphysical connection between man’s freedom/conscious human will and Freedom/Absolute Spirit/historically inevitable dialectical progress may be seen in Hegel’s Logic, to which he refers more than once in his Introduction. To make a long story short, Hegelian logic attempts to account for change; it proceeds dialectically not analytically. Deeper than contradiction is thinking the thing contradicted. To think ‘X,’ and then to think ‘not-X,’ is not to annihilate ‘X’ but to retain both ‘X’ and ‘not-X’ in one’s mind; contradiction simultaneously is and is not ‘X’; we posit as we negate. Hegel avoids subjectivism by saying that this sagacious knowing, and not merely wisdom-loving or philosophic, thinking is the mind of a particular sage. One function of contradiction is to show the impossibility of apartness; everything is part of a Whole. This logic of Becoming contains both Being and Nothing; nothing, or negating, is what keeps Being from inertia. The Absolute Spirit is neither a thing (as is nature for some Greeks) nor a subject (as is the God of the Bible); it is the formation-process of subjects and objects; wisdom is the knowledge of the formation process. This obviates the problems associated with epistemological foundationalism. Hegel is a sage or so-phist, not a philo-sopher, because the whole is itself Proteus-like (and therefore Protagoras-like!), a changeling. Sagacity or wisdom sees the slaughter-bench of history with equanimity, knowing itself to be the final result of the slaughter, physical and intellectual/dialectical. Sagacity satisfies, because the sage embodies the unity of what humans want and need, the grand assimilation of every ‘X’ and ‘not-X.’

Politically, this means that ‘otherness’ is relational, not destructive, but one must be very cautious here. Hegel is no college administrator, playing a more sophisticated version of ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ by commending the love of ‘diversity.’ Hegel’s idea of a great man in political history is Napoleon, whose assimilations involved real spilt blood.

Having jettisoned the Biblical God and undermined its own conception of natural right by making nature unteleological (which founders on the ‘is-ought’ problem, as Hume sees), modern thinkers first tried to found morality on natural freedom (Rousseau), then on rationality divorced from nature (Kant). The latter scheme of reason-as-lawmaker runs afoul of the nihilist implications of the universalization principle of the categorical imperative, which, as Hegel remarks, could as well result in the command, ‘Thou shalt steal’ as ‘Thou shalt not….’ ‘History’ is the next way-station, wherein Absolute Spirit replaces the General Will and the Categorical Imperative. The historical ‘struggle for recognition’ replaces the Hobbesian state of nature, but now struggle itself is rationalized, albeit ‘cunningly’ or concealedly.

The plausibility of Hegel’s magnificent scheme depends on accepting the link between logic and phenomenology: Does Hegel’s point about the logic of contradiction ‘transplant’ to any correct observation about phenomena? It is clear that his process of Spirit alienating itself into matter (its apparent opposite) bears some resemblance to Einstein’s famous equation of matter and energy. But Einstein also accepted the inevitability of entropy, not ‘progress.’ Nor is it entirely clear that the Absolute Spirit is finally any less mysterious, less cloud-shrouded, than the Creator-God of the Bible. How does any thing come to be? If Einstein is right, this process does not need mind. On the level of logic: If the actual is brought into being by the discursive revelation that occurs only after the actual presents itself, how do you avoid linguistic constructivism, and the deconstructivisms that follow in its wake? On the level of theology: If the sage is a sort of mortal God, a mighty Leviathan of the intellect who settles the intellectual war of all against all, is not divinity something you need before you experience totality, not after? If the answer is, ‘We have met God, and he is us,’ this may be an intoxicating or a disappointing revelation, depending upon one’s estimate of men who claim to be gods. Politically, the parallel question is: How much like a (Hegelian) syllogism is political society ever likely to be?

Rousseau is the first great modern political philosopher discontented with modernity who nonetheless remains a ‘modern.’ He is not Pascal, criticizing modernity in the name of Christianity, or Swift, enlisting in the battle of the books under the banner of the ‘ancients.’

Rousseau rejects the ‘bourgeois’ or post-Machiavellian turn of modern thought. Machiavelli (with Descartes to follow) despised what he called the effeminacy of ‘modern’—he meant Christian—life. The synthesis of ancient ‘idealism’ and Christianity had led (he charged) to an unworldly, castles-in-the-air irresoluteness among the very classes of men who should stand firm and act severely: the princes in principalities, the citizens in republics. The Prince of Peace had unmanned them, and the philosophers hadn’t been much better. As a result, petty ‘city-states’ squabbled at the very center of what had been a world empire. The Augustinian empire of the papacy, neither fully in nor fully out of the world, had corrupted and replaced the real empire of the original Romans. The Prince of Peace must be replaced by the Prince of War and battle-ready citizens.

For Montaigne, Hobbes, and Locke, the practical problem looked quite different. Their Europe was wracked by civil wars. The spirit of Machiavelli had joined with the spirit of Christianity to produce militant fanaticism that was frustrating the very spirit of acquisitiveness Machiavelli had intended to foster. These modern philosophers wanted peace; if not effeminacy, then surely a touch of moderation would be a relief. They emphasized the principle of self-preservation in a world all too inclined to Christian jihadism. For this purpose, the practical, vigorous but unwarlike spirit of the commercial classes seemed a welcome touch of sanity in a world of ambitions inflated by the conflation of manliness and religiosity.

Rousseau understands this. But his heart rebels against it. He is too spirited, too ‘thumotic’ to stomach the halfway-house rule of the commercial classes. Unlike several of the ‘bourgeois’ moderns, he resolutely defends human free will, even if he eventually replaces it with ‘perfectibility.’ Rousseau returns to the manly/spirited origins of modernity, to the Machiavellian polemic against effeminacy and the Cartesian stance of resoluteness. He does so in his own way, however, with an attack on the ‘Enlightenment’ claim that progress in human knowledge will yield, or at least comport with, progress in morality and politics. Although very far from being anti-science, Rousseau does oppose public science, science as a part of public life.

Rousseau begins the second Discourse with a paean to the republicans of Geneva; he appears to harken back to the virtues of antiquity: severe morals, proud courage, martial spirit, all in a country scaled to human governance. (In this he imitates Machiavelli, who appears to appeal to the example of ancient Rome). But Rousseau soon shows a different hand. The human consists, fundamentally, of two principles: the desire for self-preservation and the sentiment of pity. Enlightenment rationalism is too complex to serve as a constituent of any real society; in this it resembles Machiavelli’s ridiculed builders of castles in the air. Mere sentience is the indispensable foundation for peaceful human life. Rationality, which usually serves vanity or amour-propre instead of natural amour de soi, has thus far only impeded decent human life. A thinking man is a depraved animal. What all men—ancient and modern—have called progress is only an elaborate and dangerous reification of vanity. Rousseau rejects ‘histories’ or books (most notably the Book, the Bible) as unreliable guides—vain in both senses of the word—and instead has recourse to nature, which turns out to mean unassisted human reason.

Rousseau (in my opinion unwarrantedly) argues that the original human beings were by nature asocial. He needs this claim in order to integrate spiritedness/thumos in a harmless form as free will, and independence (therefore not the libido dominandi) into his concept of human nature. A social being would not be independent. This rhetorical need results in the contorted discussion of how language arose. Paradoxically, this rhetorical need also results in a possibly self-defeating need to say that much of human nature is mere latency—a set of potential characteristics that emerge by the force of chance events channeling human beings into civilized life. Rousseau’s ‘back to nature’ leads to what we later denizens of modernity might call a historicized nature, a nature that is changeable, manipulable. Of course, what is manipulable is also tyrannizable, unfree. Rousseau himself regards natural freedom as irreversibly destroyed. His life’s work is dedicated not to ‘reaction’ or returning to an recoverable past, but to pushing phony progress into real progress, into the reconstitution of freedom in modern society. He too is thus a ‘progressive,’ a man in need of a future. Like all progressives, he finally must sing, thumotically, ‘Tomorrow belongs to me.’ The very tyranny that results from civilization begins to force men to be equal, again, because (as in Hobbes) under tyranny all men but one are equal, even if (unlike Hobbes) Rousseau wants popular not state sovereignty. Moreover, the reason that led us astray also enables at least one philosopher to think his way back into the natural, and thereby prepare to set a path to ‘progress.’

Such a conception of human nature yields its own monstrosities. In subsequent centuries, we have seen some of them. The Machiavellian, Cartesian, and Rousseauian inspiriting of men to use political means to manipulate course of events in order to reconstitute manliness in some new form, hitherto only latent, has proven overly ambitious, even from a strictly political standpoint. Scientifically, it is by now too late to pretend that human nature is a vague and politically manipulable thing; we know too much about genetics, for example, to suppose that language results exclusively from some train of historical accidents. (Genetics also solves the knotty problem of how to classify orangutans and mandrills, discussed in Rousseau’s Note J.) When it comes to manipulation, it is the scientistic modernity envisioned by Bacon and not that envisioned by the more purely political writers that may prove most formidable.

Kant’s ‘progressivism’ is more straightforward than Rousseau’s because Kant believes he sees a way towards peace that does not jettison Enlightenment rationalism. The crucial difference is that Kant maintains freedom of will and happiness to be dependent upon the capacity to reason; whereas in Rousseau reason attaches to nature, and thus to the realm of determinism, for Kant reason undergirds the realm of freedom. Reason can and must be a crucial public element in a peaceful social order, although not primarily and immediately. Kant can then claim that human “unsocial sociality” is finally good, part of nature’s ‘plan’ to compel human beings to rise above their own laziness and sleepy or unenlightened peaceableness, through centuries of strife, culminating in an awakened or enlightened ‘perpetual peace.’ This historicized nature teaches the recalcitrant schoolboy, man, “that which reason could have told [him] at the beginning and with far less sad experience.” Kant admits that if he is mistaken, and there is no such historical teleology in nature, then nature is “not far wrong in  preferring the state of savages.”

To help prevent that dystopian conclusion, Kant advocated what today’s ‘international relations’ specialists call idealism: the formulation of a republican “international government” of “world citizenship.” This a priori creation of the human mind will function as the goal of enlightened statesmen, the Woodrow Wilsons of the future. (It is therefore quite unlike a Platonic eidos, which is hardly a blueprint for future action.) Again unlike Rousseau, Kant optimistically claims or hopes that rational enlightenment will go with “a certain commitment of heart which the enlightened man cannot fail to make to the good he clearly understands.” In this Kant conflates, as Rousseau does not, goodness and morality. Toward this end, a new kind of philosophical historiography is needed, a historiography that will replace previous histories (including the Bible, as seen in his The Conjectural Beginning of Human History) with a narrative of judiciously selected events highlighting the latently ‘enlightened’ features of all previous epochs.

In my view, Kantian idealism is less practicable, and quite possibly less desirable, than he supposes. The contention that commercial republics—as distinguished from such military republics as ancient Sparta and Rome—do not fight with other commercial republics is sound enough. But the prospect of world government or even “international government” (by which he seems to mean a worldwide federalism) does not portend a civitas of self-governing citizens. Commercial, federal republics have proven their capacity to extend over large territories without losing their republicanism, but a worldwide republic of five or six billion souls strikes me as a chimera. The 300-million-soul version has discontents enough.