The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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Nietzsche not only attributes to Hegel a fatalistic philosophy of history, he in addition defends the common criticism that Hegel assumes that world history ends with his own philosophy.31 With Christianity, the Hegelian philosophy preaches that the “end of the world is near” and that judgment day is soon upon us (§ 8). The Hegelian philosophy thus inherits Christianity’s hostility “toward all new planting, bold attempting, free desiring; it resists every flight into the unknown because it does not love there, does not hope there” (§ 8).
Nietzsche’s larger message in this text is not that we should wholly ignore or be contemptuous of history. The point is rather that human freedom and creativity require as a condition of their possibility a certain degree of forgetfulness, a certain capacity to resist what he calls the “tyranny of the actual” (§ 8). The great individual or “highest specimen” is not crippled by “retrospectivity”; he has faith in the future and greets the unknown with hope (§ 9). He is a leader, not a follower; he “swims against the historical waves” (§ 8). The great man of history concerns himself not just with the “so it is” but also with the “so it ought to be” (§ 8).
I very much doubt that, as Nietzsche suggests, Hegel is either crippled by restropectivity or hostile towards the future. Although I have not set out here to assess the merits of these charges, I will suggest in closing that in revealing himself to be a great champion of human freedom and creativity, as well as a fervent critic of pretensions to transcendent freedom and insight, Nietzsche demonstrates that he is perhaps more Hegelian than he thinks he is.
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Feuerbach, Ludwig (1975). Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft. Vol 3 in Werke in Sechs Bänden, ed. Erich Thies. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Feuerbach, Ludwig (1986). Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Grier, Philip T. (1996). “The End of History and the Return of History,” in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 183–98.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1970a). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Vol. 8 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Theorie Werkausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1970b). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Vol. 9 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Theorie Werkausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
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Hegel, G. W. F. (1974). Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson. New York: The Humanities Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1988). Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1991a). Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1991b). The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze): Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (with the Zusätze). Trans. T. F. Geraets, Suchting, W. A., and Harris, H. S. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
O’Brien, George Dennis (1975). Hegel on Reason and History: A Contemporary Interpretation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Pinkard, Terry (2000). Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Pinkard, Terry (1995). “Hegel on History, Self-Determination and the Absolute,” in A. Melzer, J. Weinberger, and M. Zinman (eds.), History and the Idea of Progress. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press: 30–58.
Marx, Karl (1994). Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich (1956–90). Werke. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
McCarney, Joseph (2000). Hegel on History. London: Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1980). On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1982). Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta. München: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Walsh, W. H. (2008). The Philosophy of History: An Introduction. New Delhi, Cosmo Publications.
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1 Hegel lectured on the philosophy of world history five times beginning in 1822. The first edition of the Lectures was prepared from Hegel’s lecture notes by his pupil Eduard Gans in 1837. Later editions are compilations that rely on Hegel’s notes and on student transcripts of his lectures. My in-text page references to the Lectures (“PH”) cite, first, the 1988 English translation by Leo Rauch (which I occasionally alter), and second, Volume 12 of the 1970 German Suhrkamp edition, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (so in this case, PH 3/11). For discussion of the various English and German editions of the Lectures, see in the Suhrkamp edition, pp. 561–8. See also Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 7–9; and George Dennis O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History: A Contemporary Interpretation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 3–6.
2 See also PH 16/26, where Hegel writes that world history is concerned with “individuals that are nations, with wholes that are states.”
3 At one point, Hegel remarks that history only properly begins with the “consciousness of personality” (PH 63/81). History in Hegel’s sense in other words begins only when individuals are in a position to recognize each other as “persons,” that is, as free agents entitled to rights. Although the idea of the value of persons has its roots in Christianity, on his account, Spirit only reaches the stage of “complete ripeness” in the modern period of Protestant northern Europe (hence, his claim that world history only properly begins with the “Germanic peoples” (PH 21/31, PH 97/140)). Although Hegel’s lectures on world history begin with a discussion of the ancient orient, he takes himself there to be considering a kind of pre-history, since it is his view that these cultures lack both the recognition of individuals as “persons” and institutions that reflect that elevated awareness. For a balanced discussion of these points as well as of Hegel’s alleged Eurocentrism, see McCarney, Hegel on History, pp. 142–51.
4 For more passages along these lines, see, for example, PH 42/57, where Hegel claims he will demonstrate that the state is the “the divine idea, as it exists on earth.” He characterizes world history as the “march of God in the world” at PH 16/26, 23/33, 39/53, and also in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (“PR”), ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), § 258A.
5 Further passages: The world is not a “mad or foolish happening” (PH 39/53). World history is “not the abstract and non-rational necessity of a blind fate” (PR § 343).
6 As I mentioned in note 3, by “Germanic peoples” Hegel has in mind Protestant Europe (Germany, Scandinavia, and England). What unites these cultures is neither race nor language, but a certain kind of self-awareness—a self-awareness which he believes is objectified in Reformation Europe.
7 It is clear from these pages that Hegel is critical of Leibniz and Kant for the same reason. They, too, deny that we can know the ways of providence.
8 Hegel insists here that his view is consistent with the Christian doctrine of revelation: God has “allowed human beings to understand what
He is, so that He is no longer hidden and secret. With this possibility of our knowing God, the obligation to know Him is placed upon us. God wants no…empty heads for His children” (PH 17/27).
9 “Let us leave all such a priori constructions to the clever professionals, for whom (in Germany) such constructions are not uncommon” (PH 13f./22f.). Hegel is explicit in a note at PH 61/79 that he has Schlegel’s 1829 Philosophy of History in mind as someone who practices this kind of approach.
10 We differ from other animals in this respect, in Hegel’s view. As he writes elsewhere, the human animal, in contrast to other animals, “is a thinking being, a born metaphysician.” The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze): Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (with the Zusätze), trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), § 98 A; see also Encyclopaedia Logic § 24 A1. Hereafter cited as “EL”.
11 Philosophy of Nature, trans. Michael John Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1970), § 280. Hereafter cited as “PN”. This is Part II of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In an earlier section of this discussion, Hegel writes that Kepler “discovered his laws empirically, by working inductively with the observations of Tycho Brahe” (PN §270 A). At the same time, it was Kepler’s “unshakeable belief in the inherent rationality of the facts that led him to his discovery” (PN § 270 A). Hegel clearly values Kepler’s approach over that of Newton who espoused a strict “materialism” (EL § 136 A2) and thus supposed that God was inaccessible to cognition. Newton “expressly warned physics to beware of metaphysics”; “but to his credit…he did not conduct himself with his warning at all” (EL § A1).
12 Hegel asserts his commitment to this thesis in the Preface of his Philosophy of Right as well: “As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is…a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time” (PR 21/26).
13 Hence, what Hegel refers to as Kant’s “supreme inconsistency.” On the one hand, Kant acknowledges that, “the understanding knows only appearances.” On the other, he asserts that this cognition [Erkennen] is itself “something absolute,” in that he insists that “cognition can go no further—this is the natural, absolute limit of human knowledge [Wissen]” (EL § 60).
14 For Hegel, Plato is a good example of a philosopher who assumes that human reason is capable of lofty flights of pure intuition or reflection. Plato assumed that the origin of his idea of the model republic was a form of insight or intuition that allowed him to wholly escape his time. For Hegel, however, this Platonic ideal is not in fact the product of special insight into an extra-mundane reality. As he writes in his Philosophy of Right, Plato’s model republic is instead, “the embodiment of nothing other than the nature of Greek ethics” (PR 20/24). Likewise, Kant’s insight into the supreme principle of practical obligation is not the outcome of a form of reflection that successfully abstracts away all merely contingent presuppositions. Underlying Kant’s conception of the conditions of practical obligation are historically contingent assumptions (for example, about the nature of the human will). This is what Hegel has in mind when he charges in §135 of the Philosophy of Right that Kant’s derivations of particular duties from his categorical imperative invariably “presuppose content.” Kant relies for his derivations not just on the formal requirement that our maxims avoid self-contradiction, but also on various contingent background assumptions.
15 As Hegel notes in EL, the “agreement between is and ought is not rigid and unmoving” (§ 234 A).
16 Following a discussion of the “old age” of history, that is, of the “Germanic world” in which Spirit achieves its “complete ripeness,” Hegel looks back on the road Spirit has traveled and notes that whereas the “length of time is something entirely relative,…Spirit belongs to the dimension of eternity and has no actual length” (PH 98/141).
As should be obvious from my remarks here, I do not endorse the view that, for Hegel, world history terminates with his philosophy. Although I cannot sufficiently defend this claim here, the preponderance of evidence seems to favor the thesis that, by the “end” of history, he means something like “end of an era.” Hegel is indeed convinced that Spirit in his time has overcome a certain set of problems that have long plagued philosophers. In his own time, Spirit has thus reached an apex or culminating point (hence Hegel’s remarks about how freedom and necessity in his time have been “reconciled”). But this thesis that a resolution to a certain set of philosophical problems has been achieved is consistent with the claims that “Spirit belongs to the dimension of eternity” and that world history is “still on the march.” For a careful consideration of these difficult issues, see McCarney in chapter 11 of his Hegel on History. See also Philip T. Grier’s essay, “The End of History and the Return of History,” in Stewart, Jon, ed., The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 183–98.
17 Hegel makes similar remarks at PH 77/104: the “essence” of Spirit, he writes, is to “act…, to be its own deed, and its own work.”
18 See the discussion from the Introduction that begins at PH 43/58.
19 “The process of development…is for Spirit a hard and endless struggle against itself” (PH 59/76).
20 As Marx writes in his 1844 “Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General,” “the great thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology…is simply that Hegel grasps the self-development of man as a process…, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation;…he thus grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work.” This is from the third manuscript of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Lawrence H. Simon, ed. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994), p. 84. German edition: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), p. 574.
21 See Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1843) Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1986), §29. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, in Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Erich Thies, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), pp. 247–322.
Marx mentions this text and attributes to Feuerbach the insight that Hegel “found only the abstract, logical, speculative expression of the movement of history, not the actual history of man” (Simon, p. 80; Dietz, Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 570).
22 The German Ideology (Simon, p. 112; Dietz, Vol. 3, p. 27).
23 “With Hegel’s identification of man and self-consciousness, the alienated object or alienated essence of man is nothing but consciousness, merely the thought of alienation, its abstract and hence empty and unreal expression, negation. The transcendence of externalization is thus also nothing but an abstract, empty transcendence of that empty abstraction, the negation of the negation.” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Simon, p. 93; Dietz, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, pp. 584f.).
24 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Simon, p. 87; Dietz, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 578).
25 “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural one…is not objective.” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Simon, p. 88; Dietz, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, p. 578).
26 Compare, for example, a society that relies on slave labor with one that does not.
27 The German Ideology (Simon, p. 107; Dietz, Vol. 3, p. 20). “In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here one ascends from earth to heaven” (Simon, p. 111; Dietz, Vol. 3, p. 26). Marx was not interested in offering, from a reflective distance, a mere philosophy or interpretation of world history. Rather, his aim was to defend what G. A. Cohen refers to as a “theory” of history. That is, he
sought a solution to present crises by means of a close up and practically efficacious account of the “inner dynamic” of history. See Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 27.
28 In his 1844 essay, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Marx writes: “Thus it is the task of history, once the otherworldly truth has disappeared, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy which is in the service of history is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy forms now that it has been unmasked in its holy form. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics” (Simon, p. 28f.; Dietz, Vol. 2, p. 379).
29 On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980). Most of Nietzsche’s remarks on Hegel appear in sections 8—10 of this work. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” part two of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, in Vol. 1 of Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1982).
30 “[T]here has been no dangerous change or turn in the German education of this century which has not become more dangerous through the enormous influence, continuing to the present moment, of this philosophy, the Hegelian” (§ 8).
31 “[F]or Hegel the apex and terminus of the world process coincided with his own Berlin existence” (§ 8). See my remarks on this issue in note 16.
CHAPTER 23
EDUCATION
LINA STEINER