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Hegel’s False Start

Non-Europeans as Failed Europeans

Reflective Distance as the Condition of Freedom

That Hegel is guilty of what we call “Orientalism” is nowadays a truism. He sees in “Orientals” the dangers to which a contemporary European shape of life might succumb. In part, it was this idea of such a “danger” that led him to see all “Oriental” shapes of life as essentially stalled and failed versions of the progress that the European shape of life had at the heart of its own development. His was, of course, not the first attempt at showing this. Adam Smith and Montesquieu had already argued for similar views about the role of the East in world history.¹ However, there was more to his dismissal of them than simply a psychological aversion on his part. He fused his deeper accounts of the nature of subjectivity with a distorted picture of the “East” to produce his account of the “Orientals.” His failed attempts at integrating the “Oriental” world into his philosophy of history nonetheless still sheds much light on what he was trying to accomplish and how, if he were to admit those failures, he could nonetheless rework his views to keep much of his outlook intact while at the same time shedding his Orientalism. This requires us to reinterpret Hegel by means of Hegel and to see where that takes us.

In his 1807 Phenomenology, Hegel had given an account of how it was that our collective sense of what counted in absolute terms for “Europeans” required a philosophical history of European life. This was because (or so the Phenomenology was supposed to show) no account of what counted as logical reasoning, as ethical reasoning and behavior, or even as art and religion could make do without an account of how it was that we had been driven to those conceptions by very specific failures of such accounts in the past, such that the failures themselves provoked the move to a new order and also provided the conditions and material by which the new order emerged out of failure.² The explanation of the place of subjectivity in their collective lives—that is, what it was that put them into the position of being able to make sense of things in general—could not do without an account of why it came to seem unavoidable to include such things. However, the Phenomenology had only given that account for Europe (albeit with some passing and very cursory references to Persian, Egyptian, and Judaic religions), and Hegel realized that, by his own principles, he had to make his full case in light of world history and not just the story of how the Eurasian peninsula developed from Hellenic Athens to nineteenth-century Europe.

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history begin with a discussion of what he takes to be the origins of world history in the East, and they take up the bulk of the collected text of the lectures on world history. Clearly, Hegel thought that he had an important point to drive home here. Yet it is in these discussions that Hegel’s account is most off the mark, and their rather uninformed dismissal of non-European ways of life undermines whatever validity they might have as genuine accounts of non-European peoples.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel’s references to non-European ways of life were almost entirely couched in terms of his discussion of the Egyptians and, to some extent, of the Persians. When it came to the Egyptians, he seems to have taken the greater bulk of his knowledge from his reading of Herodotus. He later tried to update his knowledge about ancient Egypt and India with more modern sources, but he stuck by the overall picture he had originally formed of them. When in his lectures on world history in the 1820s, he refers to Africa, China, India, and Persia, he displays a tendency to interpret everything about them in a limited and even hostile way. In the case of Africans, Hegel, like many people even today, seemed to have been blind to the variety of cultures alive there, such that he interpreted them as one homogeneous mass living in a geographically homogeneous area.³

Pointing out how just how far from reality are Hegel’s characterizations of Africans, Chinese, and other peoples is a bit too easy, a bit too much of an exercise of the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel.⁴ That neither excuses Hegel nor exonerates him, but once one has moved beyond the pros and cons of Hegel-apologetics, it is more fruitful to ask what the philosophical views were behind his dismissive and admittedly Eurocentric view of the world and to ask if those views inevitably lead to such a dismissive outlook.⁵

First on the list of why Hegel saw Africans and “Orientals” as failed Europeans is Hegel’s own deeply held classicism. It certainly informs his metaphysics of subjectivity, and it pervades his discussion of the arts. It also leads him to take Herodotus and Thucydides as among his great models for the writing of history. In doing so, he also took up Herodotus’ basic theme of Greek freedom triumphing over eastern (and therefore Asiatic) despotism and made that into one of the key themes of his own account. Thus, in good “orientalist” fashion, Hegel uses Herodotus’ idea of the Greek/Persian conflict and the Greek victory as the triumph of freedom over despotism, and equally as the triumph of hard won valor over the laxness and indolence brought on by Eastern luxury. Hegel generalizes Herodotus’ invention of that trope for his own understanding of European history since Herodotus’ time. On the basis of that classical view, the “East” thereby ends up standing for all the things that Hegel is arguing against in his own day. For him, it seemed crucial therefore that the Asiatic, despotic conception of life be understood as a defeated conception, as something which history has now passed by. Asiatic despotism can no longer be on the menu of rational choice, and any modern European despotism would have to be judged as going against the general progressive movement of modernity.

However, if that were Hegel’s only motivation, then he would be dissembling about what he is doing. His misreading of the non-Europeans goes deeper than that and has to do with his most basic characterization of subjectivity itself, and it has to do with the relation between nature and mindedness itself.⁶ Nor can Hegel simply be let off the hook by invoking the lack of literature on the subject in his own day. His failure goes deeper and is not just a matter of there not being enough books on Africa, China, and India for him to have consulted.⁷

The first issue comes back to Hegel’s own complex form of “internalism” in ethics. Something can count as a reason for somebody only if he or she is in possession of the appropriate “psychology” to take it as a reason. For Hegel, the passions and the principles come, as it were, in a package. The general “shape” given to a way of life in terms of the way it combines appeal to principle with very specific practices brings together a kind of second-nature informed by its practices with the kinds of principles that make sense to itself. Although what will at ground level count as a reason for any person will be a function of his time (that is, of the shape of life of which he is a member), those shapes of life themselves develop and with them the space of reasons itself also develops.

Not unsurprisingly, Hegel thinks that in non-European ways of life, in effect, people will function as quasi-children. They can be taught right and wrong, good and bad, good and evil, and they can deliberate about those matters with some sophistication, but they can only reason about it by applying the existing rules. Hegel’s view is not that such people are irrational. It is that they are completely or almost completely absorbed in their natural and social worlds and have not yet worked their way of that immersion. Thus, although they may have developed many useful skills and even a level of high craftsmanship in the arts, their stance toward their own ethical life lacks the proper critical distance. That Hegel thinks he finds this confirmed in the ethnographic literature he cites both says a lot about what prior views he brought to the issue and a lot about the views of his own time. (For example, he relied a good bit on English accounts of India, which meant that his views were formed around the reports of those reporting on what they regarded as a backward and subjugated populace.)

If we keep in mind that such peoples in Hegel’s treatment of them (Africans, Chinese, Indians) are myths, it is worth asking what Hegel found deficient in them. First, what is characteristic of such people is, as noted, an absorption in the world. For spirit to be “immersed,” or “sunken,” into nature is for there to be a complete absorption on the part of self-conscious subjects in their world. Their reasoning has to operate against the background of an uncritical acceptance that there simply is a way things are to be done and that all inquiry has to stop there. They thus typically form themselves into traditional societies, where everything is to be done exactly as it has supposedly been done in the past. Even if this is in fact false, and they actually shift their existing norms for behavior over time, such a shift has to go unnoticed by them or to be regarded as merely contingent change. They have to think that what they are doing is what is natural and as such is the way things have always been done.

They are only “rule followers,” not fully engaged subjects. They do not, Hegel says, have genuine historical narratives because they either do not think the laws and principles they are following are worth writing down, or if they are writing them down, they are only recording existing practice, which, for them, has always been that way. This also meant that there would be no need to separate mythical time (the “once upon a time …” of all legends) from real historical time. Thus, for Hegel, these people stand “outside” of history not in the sense that spirit is not “manifesting” itself in their activities, nor that they lack self-consciousness, but in the sense that they contribute nothing to progress in history since they themselves can have no conception of progress—except perhaps in limited technical areas, where such progress may even go unnoticed (such as a move from Stone Age to Bronze Age techniques, which, shortly after they are introduced, immediately come to be seen as simply the way things have always been done).

Second, because of the failure to develop such a basic reflective practice, such peoples therefore essentially lack the element of individual self-sufficiency. For Hegel, in the “African” and “Oriental” shapes of life, subjects are self-conscious but not so in a way that develops robust rules of criticism for its practices. (He is dead wrong about Africans and “Orientals,” but that is another matter.) It is only when there is a shape of life that has become especially reflective about itself and is therefore pushed to see that what it often takes as a given, as beyond deliberation, may in fact be subject to doubt, that it also looks for a history. Only then does it look to see if it is doing something more than just carrying on in the same way. On Hegel’s view of things, this truly reflective stance only first comes on the scene with the ancient Greeks. What distinguishes them from all earlier shapes of life is that the individual and his or her (mostly his) own subjectivity appears as having a force and validity all its own. It is this—and this alone, he says, at one point—which distinguishes Greeks and the European moderns from the “Africans” and “Orientals.”⁸

The overall distinction is clear enough: Prior to the Greeks, people were simply absorbed in both nature and in social life, and there was no place for individuality. After the Greeks, the distinction between absorption and reflective self-consciousness came to the foreground, and an entirely new set of metaphysical problems appeared in the lives of those peoples (or perhaps even appeared as genuinely “metaphysical” problems for the first time). Hegel’s additional belief that this overall conceptual distinction fits the actual distinction between modern Europeans and Africans and “Orientals” is not as happy a match.

China as the Embodiment of Political Atheism

Hegel has a particular problem on his very own terms fitting China into this picture. Whereas he seemed to take his more or less full ignorance about Africans to license him to dismiss them and move on, his limited knowledge of China showed him that the Chinese possessed a long and celebrated empire, that they had what certainly looked like grand cultural achievements, and that they had had, and still had, an equally long and great tradition of historical writing. In fact, increasingly in the eighteenth century, the Chinese were beginning to be highly regarded by some Europeans even as an alternative model of civilization, something from whom Europeans had to learn from rather than a matter in which the Chinese needed instructing by Europeans. After all, Europeans spent staggering sums to import Chinese luxury goods, whereas the Chinese could not find virtually anything in Europe that for them was worth importing. Famously, Voltaire even held the Chinese up as the great counterexample to all those who claimed that a great civilization could not exist without an established church.

Hegel’s response to this was to claim that Chinese history shows that China is in fact an unchanging civilization.⁹ (It was not an unchanging civilization, but that was a common view in Hegel’s day and, in the West, even until recently.) Moreover, on Hegel’s view, it was not only unchanging, it was essentially stalled within a version of unreflective self-consciousness (which, given the evidence, is an astonishing thing to say about China). The great importance of the Confucian virtue of filial piety in the little bit of Chinese thought with which he was acquainted convinced him that the Chinese regarded the state in the same terms that they regarded the family. (Hegel was not alone in holding that view, and it is part of classic Confucianism to regard the relation between prince and subject as bearing similarities to that between parent—particularly the father—and child.) For him, that meant that the Chinese could only think of ethical requirements as on a par with the kinds of familial requirements that, within the shape of life itself, feel natural.

Although Hegel himself did not think that familial requirements are in fact merely natural requirements, he did think that they were based in natural facts about human sexuality, aging, coming to maturity, and the like. They were ways of responding to, shaping, and coping with the problems that surface in those features of human life, much in the way Aristotle thought of the virtues as responding to basic human characteristics, such as fear, love of honor, or the desire for wealth. Nonetheless, in Hegel’s view, in modern European life, familial obligations are something distinct from other political and social relations.

Thus, echoing Kant’s charge against his fellow Europeans that, without enlightenment, they remain in a state of dependent tutelage, Hegel claims that the Chinese too are held in a permanent stage of tutelage since they conceive their relation to the state in the terms appropriate for a child’s relation to the parents.¹⁰ From that, it follows that all requirements for them have to function in their political psychology as mere social requirements with no deeper moral basis for them at hand. They simply have to be taken as required commands, a bit in the way a child has to take much of what her parents tell her to be simple commands to be obeyed. In a critique that prefigures in certain ways the manner in which later European mandarins accused their own cultures, Hegel warns that the Chinese population consists in what, after Hegel’s time, came to be called the “masses”—indifferent to politics, culturally mediocre, and not merely subject to despotic rule but actually welcoming to it. Thus, “in China,” Hegel says, “the distinction between slavery and freedom is not great, since all are equal before the emperor, that is, all are equally degraded. No honor being present, and no one having a particular right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates, which itself easily passes over into a consciousness of depravity.”¹¹

Whereas for Voltaire, China had looked like an alternative to the degeneracies of Western absolutism, for Hegel, it was instead almost a paradigm example of where Europe should not be headed. Hegel sided more with Montesquieu on the issue of China, namely, as an essentially despotic shape of life. That Hegel’s “China” is simply not China should not be confused with his argument about what would be deficient in a shape of life that might embody the constellation of psychology and principle that characterizes Hegel’s mythical “China.” Such a legalistic regime could only base itself in something approaching a positivist conception of law, more or less along the lines of the British jurisprudential thinker John Austin’s nineteenth-century conception of law as command issued by a sovereign followed by the credible threat of force to back it up. (Austin’s work appeared in English shortly after Hegel’s death.) In such a regime, the more modern, Kantian-inspired idea of respecting people as ends in themselves would not be possible. Genuine respect for people as ends in themselves can only come about when there is a both a consciousness of principles that go beyond mere commands of a superior or the dictates of de facto social rules.¹² Because the Chinese supposedly have no higher set of principles than those contained in their own practices, and the law ultimately rests on a sovereign command unmediated by any other higher principles, Chinese political life is thus really, as Hegel calls it, “political atheism.”¹³

Even if his treatment of China shows nothing deeply real about China, at least his treatment of China brings his own views into sharper relief. Against those who argued that Hegel’s own conception of institutionalized ethical life—Sittlichkeit—only amounted to an endorsement of whatever it was that a given time-slice of society held to be required, to be part of the “rules,” Hegel retorted that “there can be nothing more ethical (sittlicher) than the Chinese empire.”¹⁴ Obviously, on Hegel’s own understanding, institutionalized ethical life, Sittlichkeit, cannot be enough on its own.¹⁵ Without incorporating both idea of rights and the standpoint of “morality” into itself—both of which function so as to provide and abstract and independent stance on ethical life—ethical life (Sittlichkeit) degenerates into mere custom (Sitte). Likewise, to draw a contrast with those who argued that Hegel’s own portrayal of the modern European state was too all enveloping and suffocating, he countered with the contrast that “China is nothing but a state,” which has no room for difference within itself.¹⁶ That this is not China in any real sense is, of course, more than just a grave mark against Hegel’s portrayal, but the argument he makes is a deeper one against, first, a more assertive kind of legal positivism and absolutism; second, against an identification of morality with de facto social rules; and, third, expressing a deep hostility to any political regime attempting to regulate and control the inner life.¹⁷ If morality is identified with social rules, then such social rules dialectically turn out to be devoid of morality, and social rules devoid of morality turn out to be social rules that have no place for individual difference within themselves. A human habitat constituted entirely by de facto social rules is no fit habitat for rational subjects, nor is a regime that legislates what the subject is supposed to feel inwardly a fit habitat for self-respecting subjects.

In effect, Hegel charges that the Chinese shape of life has not allowed “negativity” to be at work there. That is, it has not promoted the way in which a given set of problems often requires the drawing of distinctions and separation of spheres if the problems are to be solved or tamed. In theory, that requires positing new concepts and constellations of concepts, but in practice, it means carving out new spheres of authority in social life. It was not that the Chinese and Chinese philosophy did not recognize contradictions and try to resolve them. It was that it only did that in a nonphilosophical manner. When “the Chinese” encounter contradictions, they do as we ordinarily do at the empirical level of discourse: They realize that they have to discard one of the contradictory commitments or reframe the commitments so as to make what looked like a contradiction into a set of compatible commitments. No deep epistemology or metaphysics is required for that kind of activity. Hegel thinks that this is as far as the Chinese got, which is why he tends to view philosophers such as Confucius as simple moralists trying to get the de facto social principles all in the right order rather than probing deeper for their truth.¹⁸

Hegel’s indictments against China can instead be posed as a kind of hypothetical: What would a social world that identified the moral with the de facto socially acceptable look like? One could identify morality with given social rules, but doing so would overlook an important difference which is not necessarily visible when seen from within a shape of life that operates in terms of identifying the two. What he finds particularly disturbing, so he thinks, about the Chinese example is that its incipiently positivist attitude to law and morality only goes in one direction: Those at the top of the commanding pyramid need pay no attention to any rights on the part of those down the scale who are being commanded since those at the bottom simply have no rights. Thus, so he argues, the system tends be that of irrational domination of many by some, or even of all by one.¹⁹

It seems that a good bit of his evidence for Chinese servility and political malfunction came largely from French and British commentary on the contemporary decrepitude of what turned out in some areas of China to be the initial stages of a crisis and eventual breakdown of the Qing dynasty (although the full breakdown occurred much after Hegel’s death). Hegel seems to have confused some evidence of the weakening state of a particular period in Chinese history (the late period of the Qing dynasty) with Chinese civilization in general. He seemed to be making an inference to the effect that since everyone he knew agreed that China is an unchanging civilization, the particular, historical difficulties having to do with the Qing dynasty in the early nineteenth century must therefore be manifestations of a deeper defect in Chinese civilization itself. There is little acknowledgement on his part of how during, for example, the Song dynasty (960–1279) China managed to create a vibrant, market society long before the Europeans had dreamed of such a thing.²⁰ Hegel also seemed to have identified the Qing’s official statements about the nature of its rule with the realities of rule in Chinese life. The Qing emperors liked to present their rulership as centralized, with the emperor issuing commands that were then seamlessly carried out by all the prefects below. In reality, it was far from seamless and involved much give and take—“politics” in the ordinary sense—among officials, citizens, and peasants up and down the local and social hierarchies.²¹

Putting it that way might seem too easily to exonerate Hegel, in effect, dismissing his disregard for the Chinese by arguing that, after all, since it is not China that he is describing but only “China,” that is, his own fantasy about it, we can simply ignore his descriptions of the “Chinese” as having anything to do with the Chinese. However, dismissive attitudes cannot themselves be simply dismissed just because they are mistaken. Hegel’s not so implicit claim to the Chinese was: Until you cease being Chinese and become European-style moderns, you will go nowhere.

Nonetheless, the argument about what kind of political psychology goes with what concatenation of principles is important, and it also shows how, on Hegel’s own terms, one might demand a reconsideration of large parts of his own canonical philosophy of history once one has dismissed his descriptions of China. Part of what he took to be the force of his account was that China (and India, et al., with Africa being fully excluded) was not a counter-model for the problems facing European modernity. China, and the other non-European ways of life of which he speaks, were not alternatives to European modernity essentially because they had stalled in their development, and his explanation for the stall had to do with the way he took them to not have developed a kind of collective reflective self-consciousness about what ultimately mattered to them. Hegel’s view was that in European culture, the tension in the way that Europeans use those concepts had become explicit and available to self-reflection. Within the non-European civilizations, so Hegel thought, there was no real possibility of bringing those reflective tensions to the surface.

It was thus important to Hegel to argue that the much-vaunted Chinese philosophy was not in fact really philosophy at all but something more along the lines of unsystematic thoughts on religion and life. If the Chinese really had a philosophy, they would have developed a reflective stance to their shape of life, a mode of standing outside of the social rules and critiquing them. Chinese philosophers did in fact do that, but Hegel did not see it in the texts he consulted, and it does seem that he did not consult many of those texts very deeply, if at all.²² He overlooks the obvious counterexamples, such as the Neo-Confucian movement with its development of the “principle of heaven” as a reflective standard to govern all regimes in China, independently of the particular sovereign.²³ Now, perhaps he can be partially excused for ignoring other various schools of Chinese thought since, after all, there were not that many texts available for him, but he also overlooked the rather obvious way in which, for example, Confucian teaching stressed that the man of virtue has to be self-sufficient and that he acquires this self-sufficiency by way of a focus on the “higher” elements of living well, as well as having overlooked the Confucian insistence that “harmony” in a society requires difference and dissonance within itself (for which Confucius used the metaphor of musical harmony). He does, however, at least give some credit to Chinese moralists, comparing them to some philosophical positions taken in Western antiquity, since “the idea of an abstract subject, the wise man, is the high point of such doctrines with both the Chinese and the Stoic moralists.”²⁴ However, that is only a muted acknowledgement on his part since this “high point” was in his view not really so very high at all. Roman stoicism was itself only another product of a “legalistic” shape of life. The negativity that comes with European philosophy and science, with its drawing out the distinctions necessary to a shape of life taking freedom as its watchword, was supposedly absent.²⁵ On his account, “Chinese” life could only develop the concept of a “monadic” subject for whom duties and requirements come only from the legal system and are addressed to individuals who fulfill their duties in obedience to those laws, but without any sense of individualism to provide an element of “negativity” to that obedience to social and familial duty. To the extent that one could show Hegel that classical Chinese thought and political practice had more in them than such monadic conceptions, then on his own terms, Hegel would have to rethink that part of his philosophy of history.

India as Europe’s Self-Created Mirror of European Dreaminess

When Hegel turns to India, he remarks that like China, it is unchanging, essentially stalled in its development, but he also notes that it has for centuries been an object of longing by Europeans. What he says about it reveals his whole program for interpreting Indian life: “It has always been the land for which people long, and it still appears to us as a realm of wonder, as an enchanted world.”²⁶ That it is seen as an “enchanted world” is central to his view that India also provides no counter-model for enlightened—and thus disenchanted—Europeans.²⁷

Amartya Sen has noted that European treatments of India have tended to embody three ideal types: magisterial (as was the attitude of the British ruling their colony), curatorial (classifying its differences more or less in the way a traditional butterfly collector might describe his collection), and exoticist (which, as Sen says, looks for the wondrous in Indian life). Although Hegel himself would have almost certainly have put himself in the “curatorial” camp if he had been forced to choose among those three categories, he actually belongs, as Sen thinks he does, more in the exoticist camp, except that for Hegel, India’s wonders are not to be extolled.²⁸ His sources for Indian thought also are, for the most part, British sources, which tend to reinforce both his “curatorial” and “exorcist” impulses.²⁹ What Hegel wanted to argue about India was that it embodied the all-too-wistful focus for so many Europeans who were projecting their own dreaminess onto it as a counterweight to their own prosaic life. The loss of an “enchanted” world in European life was, for Hegel, a mark of progress, even it was also a loss. Although such a disenchanted view might from one point of view be emotionally unsatisfying, coming to terms with a “disenchanted” nature was part of the cost of a modern life. In effect, Hegel wanted to argue that India was basically a “dreamy” way of life onto which Europeans easily projected their own nostalgic and melancholic dreaminess.³⁰ However, his view was not that Europeans were merely projecting their own dissatisfactions onto Indian reality. It was that Indian reality was a fertile ground for Europeans to engage in such a dreaminess about their own dissatisfactions.

Thus, so Hegel claimed, what at first seems “enchanted,” even as a “garden of love”—which is exactly what one would expect from a life that seeks to return to the “enchanted” world—turns out to be, when measured against modern conceptions of human dignity and freedom, entirely deficient.³¹ For Hegel, if the exoticist-seeking Europeans looked to India for a mirror of what they have lost, then the mirror only reflected back to them how deficient their own dreamy state was. For Hegel, Romantic, nostalgic Europeans were only looking at their own emptiness reflected back to them in the form of Indian emptiness and taking it, oddly enough, as a confirmation of their own potential fullness.

Whereas the Chinese are absorbed in the world and therefore are “prosaic” (unimaginative and incapable of thinking outside of what is given to them), the Indians, on the other hand, are unfocussed and dreamy and, because they are not absorbed enough, are therefore “poetic.” Whereas China is unimaginative, India is all imagination. China cannot develop the necessary set of theoretical and practical distinctions to be free and modern, whereas India develops all the distinctions arbitrarily and simply spins in the void. The Chinese have no real conception of divinity and thus no way to distinguish the “is” (the given social world) from the “ought” (which only the higher status of divinity can at first impart to people). The Indians, on the other hand, do indeed have a “higher” conception of divinity, but their conception of the “higher” element is essentially empty. It is the “one” of all things and nothing more. Moreover, since they see everything as divine and see everything as in constant change, there can be no conception of progress for them. Once seen in that light, the practical difference between Chinese and Indian despotism collapses, and, in practice, China and India therefore work out to the same thing: Tyranny. (Or so goes Hegel’s view.)

Although he thought the “Chinese” failed utterly to develop a conception of reason as apart from given social practice, the Indians (on Hegel’s mature account of them) had indeed worked out a version of reflective thought that can be properly called “philosophical,” even though the only philosophical results they could reach were essentially empty. Hegel more or less stuck to this view, although he had to revise it as more came to be known about Indian philosophy in the last ten or so years of his life and greater claims were made for its originality.³² In 1827, he published a review of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s recent work on Indian philosophy, but he there reiterated, although in greater detail, his basic and long held view that in the last analysis, Indian philosophy could not really advance to the level of genuine “philosophy” (that is, not to the level of ancient Greek and post-Greek philosophy) since the contradictions that Indian philosophy turns up do not lead to any real resolution but only to an empty, formal thought of the “one,” for the reason that “what is highest in Indian consciousness, the abstract essence, Brahman, is in itself void of determination, for which consequently there can be only a determination external to the unity, merely an external, natural determination. In this breakdown of the universal and the concrete, both are devoid of spirit—the former being empty unity, the latter being the unfree multiplicity; the person, deteriorating into this state, is bound only to a natural law of life.”³³ Indeed, Humboldt’s stress on “absorption”—Vertiefung, Humboldt’s translation of “yoga”—as the basic principle of Indian thought and life only reinforced Hegel’s overall view.³⁴ Indian emptiness cannot lead to progress but only to unending tyranny, the rule of those who have the power to impose their wills and find no ethical reason hindering them that they have to explain away.³⁵

What is driving Hegel to see things this way is thus a concatenation of his basic philosophical views—in particular, about how the ability to critically distance ourselves from all forms of givenness, whether it be social or natural, rests on a capacity that must be developed and which has a very specific history—and his own early nineteenth-century, European-influenced interpretations of both shapes of life. The charge of “political atheism” is particularly potent for him, since if it were true that Chinese philosophy and practice had in fact developed all those modes of critical reflection, then the necessity of religion—in particular, the necessity of Protestant Christianity—for the development of a free, modern state would not seem to be so necessary. He realized what was at stake was an adequate conception of what it would mean both theoretically and practically for individuals and collectivities to be in a position to be free and how coming to be in that position was a matter of history and development, not something written in the stars or in Platonic heaven. He thought that China and India, because of the most basic commitments of their shape of life, were unable to progress further and still retain any of the things that made them the shapes of life they were.

What the “Indians” and more particularly the “Chinese” show is that the picture of the dialectic as inexorably moving from breakdown to breakdown itself breaks down. Part of the problem he sees in “China” is what some of his contemporaries praised in it: It is an ancient, unchanging civilization. It thus does not break down under its own weight. From that, Hegel concluded that its path to progress must therefore come from a confrontation with something outside of itself. To put it in Hegel’s own preferred jargon, “China” cannot generate its own negativity, so its negation must come from something both external to it and indifferent to it (in the sense that there is no deeper connection of meaning between the confrontation between China and its supposed “other”). This confrontation, of course, is taken by Hegel to be that between China (along with India) and the West (specifically, northern Europe).³⁶ Hegel did not entertain the idea, mostly because his knowledge of non-European history was so limited, that Chinese civilization was in fact responding to internal pressures of the modern world in its own way, and the Qing empire of Hegel’s day was dealing with many of the same tensions that the others nations in that period were dealing. Nor did he understand the forces at work in India that were confronting it as it too was trying to find its way in what was a period of global and not just European transformation and that, for example, Indian cotton textile production was one of the provocations of the English industrial revolution in textiles.³⁷ If he had realized that, it would also have forced him to alter his narrative in a rather dramatic way. He also did not see that the confrontation with European modernity would propel both a revived and a new sense of national identity for Chinese, Japanese, Indians, et al., which would be formed out of the same kinds of pressures that were driving Europeans.

Nonetheless, in Hegel’s own narrative, not merely Chinese and Indians are condemned to be failed Europeans. Persians and Egyptians are likewise condemned, but in a subtly different way.

Persians and Egyptians as Failed Greeks

Setting up his agenda in that way provided Hegel the means to resuscitate the classical Greek conception of Persia as Greece’s opponent while also seeing Persia as both more progressive than China or India and still as a rightly defeated and vanished empire. Since both China and India had remained as identifiable countries in Hegel’s time and were potentially on offer as alternatives to European modernity—or at least as having some unique contribution to make to its further development—he thought he had provided an argument that showed why neither of them could really be taken that way. That argument depends, as we have seen, on whether his descriptions of them are correct, since if they are not the way he took them to be, he cannot be said to have much of an argument that they cannot develop in their own way to a condition of freedom, nor that they have nothing to offer European modernity.

His arguments about the “Orientals” thus were intended to show that, within their own terms, they not only could not think their way out of the problems, they also could not even see them as problems, as something requiring a solution.³⁸ For him, the classical category of “oriental despotism” even had to be taken by the “Orientals” themselves not as something wrongful but as a necessary, although perhaps woeful, fact about the world.

In effect, he took that as underwriting the correctness of the classical Greek conception of their enemies, the Persians. On the one hand, the element of “negativity” makes its appearance with the Persians, although in a thoroughly inadequate way. (The religion of “light” allows the contrast with its “determinate negative,” that of “darkness,” and this an abstract, although readily inadequate and unsatisfying way to begin to think through the difference between the normative and the natural.) On the other hand, the Persians, like all the “Orientals,” are prone to take their success as an excuse to wallow in luxury and become effeminate. They could exhibit great valor as fighters (which, so Hegel notes, is true of all barbarians), but they could not ultimately construct an empire that could last nor could they produce any philosophy of great note. Their philosophy was at best just their religion restated.

Likewise, the ancient Egyptians could build on the “negativity” worked out so insufficiently by the Persians, but they could only build it up to the level of an enigma. Hegel accepts Herodotus’ idea that it was the Egyptians who first considered the idea that the soul might be different from the body and was immortal.³⁹ However, for the Egyptians, spirit and nature, along with the normative and the natural, were both united yet still at odds with each other, and since they could not get beyond that statement of it (made in their art, since they had no real philosophy, on Hegel’s account), their shape of life rested on an acknowledged basic unintelligibility. For them, nature was identical with spirit, and yet spirit was different from and at odds with nature, and, left at that, such a comprehension of the world makes all within it unintelligible. It meant that their art always seemed to be expressing a great mystery that could not be unraveled, and once one stops inquiry at the unintelligibility of the world, there is no further progress to be made. The form of subjectivity that takes itself to be fully natural, to be simply that of “rule-following” (where the normative is equated with social rules), to be all imaginative wandering in empty thoughts, and so on—all the features of the “African” and “Oriental” worlds—culminates in this dead-end. At best, there can be change but no progress, no deep sense of “change for the better.” It is a form of subjectivity that ultimately is unsatisfactory since in its final “Egyptian” form, it ultimately drives itself into an unintelligibility about itself.

Here was Hegel’s verdict: The Persians and Egyptians, while going beyond the political atheism of the Chinese and the ineffective dreaminess of the Indians, had to stop short at the unintelligibility of their world. They developed their own comprehension of subjectivity such that they got an inkling of the metaphysical antinomies at work in thinking about “the unconditioned” that were the result of their own development, but they did not go beyond that thought. The concept of subjectivity under which they brought themselves was thus doomed to unintelligibility, and, in the long run, they could make no sense to themselves.

Ultimately, so Hegel argued, the European shape of life built itself out of the ruins of the “East,” and in gathering up the rubble from the “East’s” ruins, it developed a different self-comprehension of subjectivity. For Hegel, with his limited sense of the non-European world, the “East” therefore does not necessarily vanish but remains only as a self-perpetuating ruin, unable to make progress on its own terms.⁴⁰ However, by developing the sense of contradiction at work in the initial thoughts about reason and nature, the Persians and Egyptians introduced an element of reflection within themselves, and this, so Hegel thought, played a not-insignificant role in their subsequent breakdown.

Sometimes Hegel is partially excused for holding these views about non-Europeans as if it was all a matter of misreading empirical data, or as if, given the biased literature of his day, he cannot be blamed for drawing false conclusions from such bad sources. It is said that, after all, in his time, there simply was not that much available to him about these other ways of life, other than a few already slanted travelers’ reports and the like (even though, if that were the case, he should have had the good sense to take such reports with a larger grain of salt).⁴¹ Yet on his own terms, Hegel’s mistake is not per se with his conception of subjectivity nor with his conception of freedom, but rather with his idea that entire civilizations in effect never move on to the right type of reflective subjectivity.

In the last analysis, Hegel’s rather negative characterization of non-European shapes of life turns out to be less about them (despite what Hegel himself actually thought it was about) and more about the problems inherent in any collective enterprise that either takes something like the “moral” to be equivalent to “actually existing social rules” or which takes its own collective project to be simply unintelligible and thus available only the mystical. Even though that may be a fundamental mischaracterization of the non-European shapes of life Hegel discusses, both options were live in Hegel’s time for European life itself. In effect, Hegel was saying: See where this leads you?