Hegel, building on Kant, produced his own system, which was an elusive marvel of abstraction and construction. His ideas had wide influence, not merely among philosophers. Academic philosophy, by the end of the nineteenth century, in England and America, would be dominated by Hegelian ideas.
His father was a civil servant when Hegel was born in Stuttgart, and his mother taught him Latin by the time he entered grammar school. Hegel himself led a focused academic life. His family had intended him for the ministry, but he early steered himself to the university. He was never active in politics, but wrote and pursued his interests in classics and philosophy, while making his living as a private tutor or on the faculty at Jena, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and finally at Berlin. Hegel became a patriotic Prussian and loyal civil servant. He was early attracted by the teachings of Kant, and by Kant’s defense of the rationality of the teachings of Jesus. And his faith in reason permeated all his works.
But Hegel soon became preoccupied with history—an interest that distinguished him from Kant, and was expressed in his approach to all subjects. Hegel, obsessed by the wholeness of experience, believed that the separateness of items in the world was illusory. This led him to doubt the reality of time and space—the modes of separation. Hegel expressed the wholeness, unity, and rationality of experience in his elusive idea of “the Absolute,” which was spiritual. And so Hegel’s philosophy, not easy to grasp, was based on his arcane idea that “The Absolute is Pure Being.” In history he saw the Absolute being fulfilled. His great influence was through his simple but abstract triadic scheme of the “dialectic.” This was the progression of “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” later best known for its influence on Karl Marx, who inverted the scheme into his own “dialectical materialism.” And interest in Hegel’s “dialectic” was kept alive in socialist thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a universal illustration of his belief that the real is rational and the rational is real. “Reason,” he observed, “is the conscious certainty of being all reality.”
Into his triadic scheme Hegel forced the whole of world history, which he expounded in his lectures on “The Philosophy of History,” the best popular exposition of his system. In these lectures, published posthumously, we can see Hegel’s genius at oversimplification—at forcing the most disparate and ancient facts into his ideal scheme. Unsympathetic readers like Bertrand Russell, while admiring his cosmic interests, charge that he made his theory (like other historical theories) plausible only by “some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance.” Still, there is no denying that if we can penetrate Hegel’s viscous style (even when translated into readable English), we can sense soaring grandeur in his ideas and an admirable cosmopolitanism in his spirit.
Hegel’s history, as he repeatedly notes, is meant to be “universal.” No part of the human experience on this planet is omitted—however, little may be known (or Hegel may know!) of the facts.
His subject, he explains at the outset, is “the Philosophical History of the World . . . not a collection of general observations . . . but Universal History itself.” The other approaches, which he will not pursue, he briefly explains as “Original History” (e.g., Herodotus and Thucydides) and “Reflective History,” which includes much of historical writing in modern times. But Hegel’s, he explains, is the third kind of history, “the Philosophical”:
The most general definition that can be given is that the Philosophy of History means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it. Thought is, indeed, essential to humanity. It is this that distinguishes us from brutes. In sensation, cognition and intellection, in our instincts and volitions, as far as they are truly human. Thought is an invariable element.
Even this brief passage gives us a clue to the vast and vague generality of Hegel’s doctrines of history, and their soaring suggestiveness. And he goes on with some hints of what he means by Thought, and how he makes it the theme of his Universal History.
The only Thought that Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple concept of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. . . . On the one hand, Reason is the substance of the Universe, viz., that by which and in which all of reality has its being and subsistence. On the other hand it is the Infinite Energy of the Universe; since Reason is not so powerless as to be incapable of producing anything but a mere ideal. . . . It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.
Advancing further and more grandly into the world of abstraction, Hegel gives his own definition of his subject for Universal History. He christens this “the World-Spirit—that Spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds this one nature in the phenomena of the World’s existence . . . the ultimate result of History.”
The vast generality of this “World-Spirit” does not prevent Hegel from dividing it into three phases: the Oriental; the Greek and Roman; and the Germanic. His world-history is divided into the states in which “the Spirit knows itself,” always moving toward an ever-fuller self-consciousness. And with a bold unconcern for troublesome facts, Hegel confidently explains that “the Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such—is free; and because they do not know this they are not free.”
“The consciousness of Freedom,” he writes, “first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans likewise, know only that some are free—not man as such.” And as we might have expected, Hegel defines the climax of man’s discovery of his freedom. “The German nations,” Hegel insists, “under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free: that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence.” Which leads Hegel to one of his more cryptic and arithmetically simple summaries. “The history of the world is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows, only that One is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German world knows that All are free.”
The more we read Hegel, the more we are impressed with the truth of Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism: “So convenient a thing it is to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” This insight helps us understand the unlikely climax of Hegel’s doctrine of Freedom in a Prussia struggling toward nationhood, recently (1806) humbled by Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena. For Hegel, a nation is a community in search of its meaning. And Freedom—self-realization—Hegel sees being achieved through the community organized as a state. So, in The Philosophy of History Hegel plausibly concluded that “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists in earth. . . . The State is the embodiment of rational freedom realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form. The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom.” For the individual, then, Freedom means the right to obey the law.
More surprising than Hegel’s idealization of the Prussian state is how he fits the New World into his ideal universal scheme. “America is . . . the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself,—perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. Napoleon is reported to have said Cette vieille Europe m’ennuie.’ ”
This was only one (and not the least plausible) of the extravagant speculations that Hegel drew from his view that the history of the world was a repetition of his triadic dialectic—with its inevitable progression from thesis to antithesis, to synthesis, and so on. As Time and Space would fragment experience, Hegel had conveniently found them unreal. For Hegel, only the whole—the World-Spirit—is real. Still Hegel offers us no convincing reason to believe that the later processes of history embody higher catego
ries than the earlier. For this lacuna in Hegel’s scheme, Bertrand Russell offers a Hegelian explanation—“the blasphemous supposition that the Universe was gradually learning Hegel’s philosophy.” Other heirs of the Enlightenment, as we shall see, were not so ready to believe that the world had to go through Hegel’s laborious triadic stages. In the world of experience all about them, European thinkers would find other, less abstract clues to the meaning of history.
BOOK THREE
PATHS TO THE FUTURE
Many discoveries are reserved for the ages still to be. . . . The world is a poor affair if it does not contain matter for investigation for the whole world in every age.
—SENECA, NATURAL QUESTIONS
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest.
—WILLIAM JAMES, PRAGMATISM
Just as Western Seekers discovered their power and duty to build civilization and so fulfill the common mission of humanity, they invented a new science of history. As the Age of Discoverers had found in America realms of experiment and self-government, so the Age of Science produced new views of historical forces that carried along men and societies. They invented historicism, a theory that events were determined by conditions beyond individual human control, and they snatched history away from God and from community, in a modern version of prophecy. Again, they sought solace in the future. Ideology, reinforced by the social sciences, gave people a new view of the extent and limits of their control. Dogmas of the way the world was destined to work overcame the liberal way of communal seeking. Religious faith retreated before the certitudes of science. And these stirred Seekers to find sanctuaries of doubt—on the way to make the seeking itself a source of meaning.
PART SIX
THE MOMENTUM OF HISTORY: WAYS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Seek, Seeker
The future is made of Seeking.
—ORTEGA Y GASSET
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A Gospel and a Science of Progress: Condorcet to Comte
The first modern ideology, the first “scientific” dogma of human history, was the idea of progress. It was heard in many voices in an era of dramatic changes in Western Europe, where the chorus of progress began to be sung in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. For this was an age of increasing wealth, growing cities, expanding empires, scientific advance, new technologies of communication and transportation, and political revolutions. “The confluence of French theory with American example,” Lord Acton explained, “caused the Revolution to break out” in France and across Europe. “The American Revolution,” as Condorcet would observe, “. . . was about to spread to Europe; and . . . there existed a country where the American cause had diffused more widely than elsewhere its writing and its principles, a country that was at once the most enlightened and the most enslaved of lands . . . that possessed at the same time the most enlightened philosophers and the most crassly and insolently ignorant government. . . . It was inevitable, then, that the revolution should begin in France.” Change was in the air. With their Enlightenment enthusiasm, French philosophes preached the infinite powers and infinite increase of knowledge—the fruit of endless seeking. But would the idea of progress itself be only a way station in the search? Dogmas of social science would, in their turn, eventually be embodied in institutions whose mission it was to enforce a frozen ideology. Which would again stir rebellious spirits to continue the search.
Of the many spokesmen for a new science of history, there were two high priests, both French—the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) and his follower, Auguste Comte (1798-1857). They impressed their scheme of progress on the compulsory currents of history. No longer mere “inquiry” nor only a narrative of past events, history now seemed a process that man dared not defy.
Ancient Greek mythology had begun with the Golden Age of Cronos, when men lived like gods, from which men and society had degenerated. The Hebrews, too, had begun with their own version of a Golden Age in the Garden of Eden, until man’s disobedience—the Fall, from which ever since he had been trying to recover. Christianity offered a Savior to redeem sinful man, which made history an effort to recover lost innocence. Ancient pessimism was sometimes tempered by a belief in cycles, a never-ending repetition of rise and fall. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Classical writers had their own way of describing the cycles. Our rational mind, observed the philosophical Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180), “stretches forth into the infinitude of Time, and comprehends the cyclical Regeneration of all things, and discerns that our children will see nothing fresh, just as our fathers too never saw anything more than we.” The idea of novelty in history, that man’s lot had improved from the beginning of time, had to await the experience of Europe in modern times.
The first classic statement of the modern idea of progress and the indefinite perfectibility of the human race was the work of the Marquis de Condorcet. Born to an old aristocratic family in the French provinces, after education in Jesuit schools he joined the community of philosophes in Paris. There he shared the lively salon of his beautiful and witty wife. He worked on the mathematical articles of the Encyclopédie, and on the Supplement, and came to be called “the last of the encyclopédistes.” During the turbulent days of the French Revolution he wrote a draft constitution that was never adopted, but his original scheme for universal state education did shape policy. He was one of the first to propose a republic, and he drafted the summoning of the National Convention in August 1792. But he opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and his moderation earned the enmity of Robespierre.
So Condorcet was outlawed, and under threat of the guillotine he went into hiding. There, within less than a year and without access to a library, he wrote his classic work on the progress of the human mind and the perfectibility of man. He called what he offered a mere Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). A larger work was to follow. But this Sketch would have an influence on modern thought quite out of proportion to its modest brevity. It bears marks of haste. Parts were written on the backs of proclamations and other sheets of used paper. The manuscript in Paris shows numerous mistakes of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Condorcet must have had an incorrigibly sanguine temperament—to write in the shadow of the guillotine so persuasive and passionate a paean to the progress of the human mind and to human perfectibility. Yet he did see the Revolution of which he was now a victim as a modern climax of human progress!
An admirer (and biographer) of Voltaire, Condorcet offers in his brief Sketch a cogent statement of the Enlightenment spirit that animated Voltaire’s hundred volumes. He sees the increase of knowledge, of science, and the liberty that comes with them as collaborating forces for human progress throughout history. Condorcet discovers nine epochs, beginning with men united in tribes, coming through the rise of agriculture and the invention of the alphabet, the progress of the sciences in Greece, the invention of printing and “the time when philosophy and the sciences shook off the yoke of authority”; the ninth stage begins with Descartes and climaxes in the founding of the French republic. The tenth stage, the future, he prophesies, will be marked by “the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind.” Following Locke’s method and Locke’s view of the limits of human knowledge, he saw philosophers finding, for the sciences of morals, politics, and economics, “a road almost as sure as that of the natural sciences.”
Condorcet’s antireligious passion prevents his valuing the achievements of the European Middle Ages.
During this disastrous stage we shall witness the rapid decline of the human mind from the heights that it had attained, and we shall see ignorance following in its wake. . . . Nothing could penetrate that profound darkness save a few shafts of talent, a few rays of kindness and magnanimity. Man’s only achievements were theological day-dreaming
and superstitious imposture, his only morality religious intolerance. In blood and tears, crushed between priestly tyranny and military despotism, Europe awaited the moment when a new enlightenment would allow her to be reborn free, heiress to humanity and virtue.
He sees printing as the agent of knowledge, and knowledge as the agent of freedom. Progress, then, is a coherent, inevitable process. Religion, the enemy of progress, was a system of hypocrisy in which priests “frighten their dupes by means of mysteries.”
Has not printing freed the education of the people from all political and religious shackles? It would be vain for any despotism to invade all the schools. . . . The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted. It is enough for there to exist one corner of free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves. How with the multitude of different books, with the innumerable copies of each book, of reprints that can be made available at a moment’s notice, how could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter?
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