Book epigraphs: (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), pp. 26–27; (Hegel 1975), p. 26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (Rousseau and Kendall 1985)
Note: In many places, I have taken the liberty of altering the cited English translations of Hegel’s works.
1. The origin of the general charge, although not against Hegel, is found in (Butterfield 1951).
2. On the uses and abuses of the “tree analogy” in Hegel, see (Alznauer 2015), pp. 29–36.
3. This view has some affinities to views developed in (Jaeggi 2014). She argues for a view of history as presenting the material for a critique of forms of life, where she understands a form of life as a “cluster of practices” that presents both ways of resolving problems that it both faces and which it also poses. To this end, she develops a view that draws its elements of Hegel’s conception of history as not having a goal but a principle behind it and links it to more contemporary thinkers such as MacIntyre and Dewey. As she puts it, for Hegel, “freedom is not the goal but rather the principle of history as that of a spiritual process … the principle of freedom must first unfold itself on the path of overcoming the ever new problems and crises that are displaying themselves.” p. 425
4. The concept of domination, as being ruled by or being vulnerable to the arbitrary powers of others, should here be taken in the sense of normative domination in which domination has to do with what turns out to be illegitimate authority over the what counts as the normative requirements given to others. On this idea, see (Richardson 2002), p. 34: “… these are all situations in which the dominators acted under a claim to authority.… The purported exercise of normative power—the power to modify the rights and duties of others—is, I suggest, essential to the idea of domination.”
5. Hegel described it in the following way in his dictations for his middle and high school classes on philosophy of religion in his time in Nuremberg: “§5 Substance is power and necessity. As reflection, it is the distinguishing of itself from itself and the durable existence of various things,—absolute goodness. However, the particular things are only transitory, every thing is differentiated, separated from the whole; but its durable existence is the whole, and therein it has as the same time its necessity; within its dissolution, it comes back—absolute justice.” (Hegel 1969c), pp. 280–281. This abstract idea of how the totality of things properly hangs together as a good is, he says, the root of a religious conception of the world: “According to these relationships, the state rests on an ethical cast of mind, and this ethical cast of mind rests on a religious cast of mind. With religion being the consciousness of absolute truth, that which is supposed to be able to have valid force as right and justice, as duty and law, i.e., as true in the world of the free will—that can only have valid force insofar as it shares in that justice, under which it is subsumed and from which it follows.” (Hegel 1969a), §552, p. 353, (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 283. It is noteworthy that Hegel says that “justice” has to do with a “necessity” that obtains not in the natural world per se but in the “world of free willing.”
6. Michael Rosen has argued, however, that “history for Hegel is neither the project of happiness nor the project of justice.” (Rosen 2011) p. 546. But if it is not about that, what is it? Rosen’s answer: “history is the coming-to-itself of Geist.” (Rosen 2011) p. 546. Kant’s religious views are, Rosen argues, at the heart of Kant’s project, however much the contemporary secular humanist advocates of Kant’s philosophy want to claim otherwise. Troubling to the secular humanist Kantians is Kant’s own assertion, as Rosen claims with numerous citations from Kant’s texts, that the real problem in history is not that bad things befall good people (since we are not entitled to be happy, that is actually not a problem) but that the wicked might go unpunished. Punishment is thus, at least for Kant, a good. However, that adds a new dimension to history: We can envisage a history in which injustice will be corrected, and this is attainable in this life. On Rosen’s account, Hegel picks up this theme from Kant but transfers it to an insupportable idea of “spirit” which realizes itself though the actions of individuals, not “against the rational agency of individuals or behind their backs but through that agency itself.” (Rosen 2011) p. 548. This implies the rather unbelievable (for Rosen) claim that “when we act under the influence of some value or ideal, we are, thereby, registering in some immediate but not yet reflective way the ultimate, rational structure of Geist.” (Rosen 2011), p. 549. My own position as laid out in this manuscript is that Hegel does indeed take justice to be a central concern of his philosophy of history and that the way in which spirit can be said to realize itself in history need not be given the monistic-metaphysical interpretation of which some commentators are so fond (and which the Heideggerians calls an ontotheological approach).
7. Although it is not explicitly concerned with the thesis about the historical shapes of the metaphysics of subjectivity, Robert Pippin’s earlier work on “modernism” argued that the issues raised by those in the debate about modernity are at their root philosophical issues. He has since gone on to embrace more fully the “historicity” claims of Hegel’s views on subjectivity. (Pippin 1991)
8. Michael Thompson has recently distinguished between agents and persons. On Thompson’s account, agents act on reasons, and agents can be singular humans or collectivities. (You are an agent, but so is the World Bank.) A person, on the other hand, is a creature that can be wronged. (Some collectivities may be wronged, but it is possible to construct an agent—a collective—that can act but cannot be wronged. The informal Proust Appreciation Society might be an example.) (Thompson 2004) Likewise, “persons” can also be collectives (as in the definition of a limited liability corporation as a legal person in certain circumstances). For reasons such as those Thompson has laid out, I stay with Hegel’s terminology of “subjects,” which straddles both senses of agents and persons. For example, if put in Thompson’s terms, it is indeed the “subject” as both person and agent which is the focus, for example, in the Philosophy of Right (which is not about agency per se, but agents who embody “right” and are therefore persons). This is also helpful in distinguishing those parts of Hegel’s account where “agency” is at issue and those where being a “person” is at issue. (It is also the case that Hegel has a special use of the term, “Person,” in German that does not track English usage very well.) This approach is to be distinguished from those who wish to extract a conception of agency per se out of Hegel’s discussion of “subjects” in the Philosophy of Right. For the latter, see (Quante 2004) Hegel himself marks the distinction differently: “The person is essentially different from the subject, for the subject is only the possibility of personality, since any living thing whatever is a subject. A person is therefore a subject which is aware of this subjectivity, for as a person, I am completely for myself: the person is the individuality of freedom in pure being-for-itself.” (Hegel 1969b), p. 95; (Hegel 1991), §35 Zusatz, p. 68. A subject is that to which what it is does or typically does can be ascribed to the shape of life to which it belongs. The “subjects” in which Hegel is interested, however, are the subjects who are both agents and persons, and it is this sense of “subject” that I am using here, a sense which Hegel for the most part also shares.
9. For an exemplary account, see (Hodgson 2012). See also the excellent overview by Hodgson and Robert F. Brown in (Hegel et al. 2011). Their account of the various sources Hegel uses for some of his historical claims is also invaluable. See also the very helpful account by Myriam Bienenstock in her introduction to (Hegel, Bienenstock, and Waszek 2007).
10. See (Dale 2014) and (Bouton 2004).
11. (Moore 2012) Pippin’s and Moore’s idea of making sense of making sense do differ. Moore stresses formal logic as the paradigmatic mode of making sense of making sense, whereas Pippin stresses the way in which logic itself has to be reconceived if making sense of making sense is to be thought to its conclusion. (Pippin 2014b); (Pippin 2014a); (Pippin forthcoming)
1. (Hegel 1969a), p. 23; (Hegel 2010), ¶17.
2. Since the 1840s, the dominant reading of Hegel’s philosophy amounted to reading Hegel as a version of Schelling’s exuberant metaphysics of spirit with some sort of logic attached to it. This was the version propounded in H. M. Chalybäus’ influential book, Historische Entwicklung der spekulativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel of 1839—translated into English into 1853, with a laudatory preface by no less an authority than Sir William Hamilton—and it has stuck. (Chalybäus and Edersheim 1854)
3. (Hegel 1969c), §246, p. 9; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 10: “There is a metaphysics which is all the rage in our time, which holds that we cannot know things because they are completely closed off to us. One could put it this way: Not even the animals are as stupid as these metaphysicians, for they go directly to the things, seize them, grasp them and consume them.” Another version: “The free will is consequently the idealism which does not consider things as they are to be existing in and for themselves, whereas realism declares those things to be absolute, even if they are found only in the form of finitude. Even the animal does not subscribe to this realist philosophy, for it consumes things and thereby proves that they are not absolutely self-sufficient.” (Hegel 1969e), §44, p. 107; (Hegel 1991), p. 76. Yet another: (Hegel 1969a), p. 91; G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Terry Pinkard’, (2010), (¶109): “Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.”
4. This language of “showing up” in experience was suggested to me by Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla. See also (Kukla and Lance 2009) (It seems that the original use of the term in this way comes from John Haugeland.)
5. This is one way of taking Robert Pippin’s gloss on Hegel’s claim that “self-consciousness is desire itself,” namely, as a way of having certain things show up in experience. (Pippin 2010) It could be that Hegel draws this idea from Fichte: “But I also grasp those things through need, desire and enjoyment. Something comes to be food and drink for me not through concepts but through hunger, thirst, and satisfaction.” (Fichte and Preuss 1987), p. 77. (Fichte and Fichte 1965), Vol. II, p. 260
6. To put it more cautiously, one should say: Although the point of view defended here requires an interpretation of Hegel that does not make him into such an exuberant spiritualized-Spinozistic monistic metaphysician, the jury is still out on that claim. For the most recent, robust and deep defense of the alternative monistic interpretation, see (Bowman 2013). For another metaphysical interpretation of Hegel that takes the core of Hegel’s metaphysics as a matter of the implications of the kinds of reflexivity involved in self-conscious thought, see (Tinland 2013)
7. On the overall view of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, see (Rand 2016). The topic is also discussed in (Pinkard 2012).
8. See (Kreines 2008); (Kreines 2006) This is given a fuller statement in (Kreines 2015). Similar to Kreines, Susan Songsuk Susan Hahn argues that there are contradictions in nature, specifically in life itself. However, in Hahn’s view, Hegel’s dialectic should be seen as naturalizing contradiction, such that the dialectic traces out the kind of contradictions at work in organisms and anything else having an organic structure (such as agency and thought). See (Hahn 2007). I have tried to give a fuller account of where Hegel takes these ideas in (Pinkard 2012). The point of difference has to do with assessing the importance of the dialectical two-in-one of self-consciousness in Hegel’s Logic and his system as a whole. For Hahn, it mirrors and develops the tensions of life itself, and thus, she is driven to hold that Hegel is seeking something like an “intuitive” grasp of the unity of opposed elements. This makes her view very different from that represented by Kreines or by myself, and I find it difficult to square with Hegel’s statements in the Logic. It seems more Schellingian in its aspirations than it does Hegelian.
9. Hegel notes, “The basic determination of the living being grasped by Aristotle, that it must conceived as setting itself to work purposively, has in modern times been almost forgotten until Kant, in his own way, revived this concept in his doctrine of inner teleology, in which living being is to be treated as its end (Selbstzweck). The difficulty here comes mainly from representing the teleological relationship as external, and from the prevalent opinion that an end exists only in consciousness (nur auf bewußte Weise existiere).” (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 389; (Hegel 1969c), §360, p. 473
10. (Hegel 1969c), §371, p. 521; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 429: “The stone cannot become diseased, because it comes to an end in the negative of itself, is chemically dissolved, does not endure in its form, and is not the negative of itself which expands over its opposite (as in illness and self-feeling). Desire, the feeling of lack, is also, to itself, the negative. Desire relates itself to itself as the negative—it is itself and is, to itself, that which is lacking.”
11. I take Hegel to speaking of self-conscious life here (Hegel 1969c), §359, p. 472; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 387.
12. The characterization of nature’s impotence occurs in various places. Here is one such occurrence: “The infinite wealth and variety of forms and, what is most irrational, the contingency which enters into the external arrangement of natural things, have been extolled as the sublime freedom of Nature, even as the divinity of Nature, or at least the divinity present in it. This confusion of contingency, caprice, and disorder, with freedom and rationality is characteristic of sensuous and unphilosophical thinking. This impotence of Nature sets limits to philosophy and it is quite improper to expect the Notion to comprehend—or as it is said, construe or deduce—these contingent products of Nature. It is even imagined that the more trivial and isolated the object, the easier is the task of deducing it.” (Hegel 1969c), §25, pp. 34–35; (Hegel and Miller 2004), §250, pp. 23–24.
13. See the helpful discussion of how Hegel moves from the idea of drawing conclusions from premises to the structure of “life” itself in (Redding 2014).
14. (Hegel 1969e) §35, Zusatz: “… since any living thing whatever is a subject.” (Hegel 1991), p. 68.
15. “Since the impulse can only be fulfilled through wholly determinate actions, this appears as instinct, since it seems to be a choice in accordance with a determination of an end. However, because the impulse is not a known purpose, the animal does not yet know its purpose as a purpose. Aristotle calls this unconscious acting in terms of purposes φυσις”; (Hegel 1969c), §360; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 389.
16. This way of explicating Hegel’s conception of subjectivity draws on some views expressed by (Rödl 2007). See pp. 106–109; and (Thompson 2004). In what I now think to be a very confused way, I discussed this several years ago as the self-subsuming and self-explaining aspect of conceptual thought in (Pinkard 1988). Nonetheless, however clumsy and ultimately unsatisfactory my original treatment of the idea was, the basic idea behind it had more or less something approaching the right target in view (even if, while in flight, the arrow fell far away from the goal): A subject is a subject by being the kind of substance that does not sense itself as a substance and then apply a category to itself, but is rather a thinking substance that knows it is a thinking substance by being the substance that brings itself under that concept of thinking substance. Subsequent reading of several authors helped me to see the inadequacy of my earlier way of putting things. One of the other major failings of Hegel’s Dialectic is its Adorno-ian infused suspicion of the absolute. This led me—in what I now think was a rather unfortunate way—to think that the question Hegel was posing in the philosophy of history was a kind of Kantian “what are the conditions of the possibility of history at all.” This is not Hegel’s primary question (or, if to the extent that it is a question at all for him, it is only one of the lesser worries he raises along the way for the purpose of explicating his real concerns).
17. (Hegel 1969f), p. 112; (Hegel 1988) p. 88: “Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions he does not remain within the in-itself as the animal does, but becomes conscious of the in-itself, recognizes it, and raises it (for example, like the process of digestion) into self-conscious science. It is through these means that man dissolves the boundary of his immediate consciousness existing-in-itself, and thus precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and gives himself the knowledge of himself as Geist [spirit, mind].”
18. Here are a couple of relevant citations: “it is the concept alone … that has actuality, and in such a way that it gives actuality to itself.” (Hegel 1969e), §1, p. 29; (Hegel 1991), p. 25: “On the contrary, it is by nature active, and activity is its essence; it is its own product, and is therefore its own beginning and its own end.… The business of spirit is to produce itself, to make itself its own object, and to gain knowledge of itself; in this way, it exists for itself.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 55; (Hegel 1975), p. 48.
19. (Hegel 1969f), pp. 80–81; (Hegel 1988), pp. 53–54.
20. I discuss the centrality of the metaphor of amphibians and how Hegel extends its use in (Pinkard 2012). See also the discussion about how this “amphibian” character relates to the status of modern art in Hegelian theory in (Pippin 2014).
21. See the discussion in (Boyle forthcoming): Boyle argues that the basic distinction between rational and nonrational animals should not be conceived as that of an “additive” property that is grafted onto an existing stock of animal powers, but rather that the distinction should be that between rational animals that realize animal powers in one way and nonrational animals that realize animal powers in another way. In particular, rational animals are self-conscious animals, not merely animals that have a kind of self-consciousness sitting on top, as it were, of all their other animal properties. This is also the reason why Hegel uses the term Geist to indicate the species of humans about which he is talking: Not just animals who also “have” rationality as an extra power but who “are” rational animals. The concept of the “thinking animal” as Geist is at first in thought the concept “in itself.” As the concept is publically developed—“posited” in Hegel’s terms—it, as it were, divides itself into two in a recognitive struggle. This point is also taken up in a different key by Christopher Yeomans. For Yeomans, the “spiritual animals” to which Hegel makes reference in one of the chapters of the Phenomenology are “those creatures who are just starting to take reflective responsibility for their own individuation, and this is why the notion of the interest-guided development of talents, which is the primary mechanism for such individuation and has its most intense location in the human lifespan in later childhood and adolescence, is the focal point of the moral psychology of this self-understanding of agency in the Phenomenology.” (Yeomans 2015), p. 27.
22. (Hegel 1969a), p. 145; (Hegel 2010)¶177: “What will later come to be for consciousness will be the experience of what spirit is, that is, this absolute substance which constitutes the unity of its oppositions in their complete freedom and self-sufficiency, namely, in the oppositions of the various self-consciousnesses existing for themselves: The I that is we and the we that is I.” The way this sounds prima facie paradoxical has been noted by other philosophers than Hegel. Wilfrid Sellars remarks, “… I want to highlight from the very beginning what might be called the paradox of man’s encounter with himself, the paradox consisting of the fact that man couldn’t be man until he encountered himself.” “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in (Sellars 1963). See also the very helpful piece: (Longuenesse 2012).
23. “The nonspiritual and inanimate, on the contrary, are the concrete concept only as real possibility; cause is the highest stage in which the concrete concept has, as the beginning in the sphere of necessity, an immediate existence; but it is not yet a subject that maintains itself as such in the course of its effective realization (wirklichen Realisierung).” (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 740; (Hegel 1969j), p. 556.
24. (Hegel 1969b), §214, p. 370; (Hegel et al. 1991), p. 288: “The Idea may be grasped as reason; (and this is the genuine philosophical meaning of reason), further as subject-object … as the possibility that has its actuality in itself because the Idea contains all the relations of the intellect, but contains them in their infinite self-return and identity-within-themselves.”
25. “Reason as the Idea appears here in the determination that the opposition of concept and reality itself, whose unity it is, here has the more precise form of the concept existing for itself, of consciousness and the present object externally standing over and against it.” (Hegel 1969d), §437, p. 227; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 177.
26. The obvious terminological distinction is between Ideas as Ideen and ideas (or representations) as Vorstellungen. It would have been better had the original translations of Kant and Hegel used different terms, but the usage seems to have stuck.
27. In arguing that reason understands its own limits, Kant is implicitly committing himself to a view of reason which is, in relation to itself, unlimited. The “space of reasons,” as today’s terminology has it, is unbounded, or, rather, bounded only by itself. Hegel notes: “Even if the topic is that of finite thought, it only shows that such finite reason is infinite precisely in determining itself as finite; for the negation is finitude, a lack which only exists for that for which it is the sublatedness, the infinite relation to itself.” (Hegel 1969c), p. 469; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 385. As Hegel puts it even more succinctly: “Where there is a limit, it is a negation only for a third [perspective], for an external comparison.” (Hegel 1969c)”§359, p. 469; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 385. See also (Wittgenstein 1963) p. 3, where Wittgenstein noted that “to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e., we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.”
28. “But since the result now is that the idea is the unity of the concept and objectivity, the true, we must not regard it as just a goal which is to be approximated but itself remains always a kind of beyond; we must rather regard everything as being actual only to the extent that it has the idea in it and expresses it. It is not just that the subject matter, the objective and the subjective world, ought to be in principle congruent with the idea; the two are themselves rather the congruence of concept and reality; a reality that does not correspond to the concept is mere appearance, something subjective, accidental, arbitrary, something which is not the truth.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 464; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 671.
29. A sharp critique of this way of interpreting Hegel’s system with a specific focus on the concept of infinity is to be found in (Horstmann 2006). I hope that I have managed to respond to Horstmann’s fine-grained criticism that in the last analysis, the interpretation at work here is a neo-pragmatist interpretation that, whatever its other virtues may be, is not true to the genuine novelty and therefore strangeness of Hegel’s philosophy.
30. There is more, obviously, to the noumenal-phenomenal distinction, and even the use of “noumenal” (which Hegel himself avoids) can suggest that one is speaking of something “merely” posited, or of something that “cannot appear.” Hegel’s own proposal is to locate the philosophical worries about matters such as “merely posited” and “cannot appear” in his Logic on “Essence” (where the basic issue is the relation between appearance and its substructure). In “Concept,” this becomes a duality that is not really a duality in the “Idea” of a phenomenal subject who, by bringing itself under the concept of apperceptive life, is the noumenal subject.
31. See §247, where Hegel discusses his claim that “externality constitutes the determination in which nature exists as nature.” (Hegel 1969c), p. 24; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 15.
32. “For the cognition already contained in the simple logical Idea is only that of the concept of cognition thought by us, not the cognition present at hand for itself, not actual spirit, but only its possibility.” (Hegel 1969d), §381, p. 18; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 8. He also notes: “absolute spirit, however, is the absolute unity of actuality and the concept, or, of the possibility of spirit.” (Hegel 1969d), §383, p. 29; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 18.
33. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 85; (Hegel 1975), p. 72.
34. This image of the “absolute” articulating itself appears in characteristic passages such as: “The task is indeed to demonstrate (dargestellt) what the absolute is. But this demonstration cannot be either a determining or an external reflection by virtue of which determinations of the absolute would result, but is rather the exposition (Auslegung) of the absolute, more precisely the absolute’s own exposition, and only a displaying (Zeigen) of what it is.” (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 466; (Hegel 1969j), p. 187.
35. (Hegel 1969d), §383, p. 27; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 16: “As existing for itself the universal is self-particularizing and therein it is identity with itself. The determinateness of spirit is thus that of manifestation. It is not any old determinateness or content, whose expression, or, externality would be only that of form differentiated from it. It is not that that does not reveal something but that rather its determinateness is itself this act of revealing. Its possibility is thus immediate, infinite actuality.”
36. This has, I think, several points of contact with the views laid out in (Thompson 2008). Provisionally, Thompson has taken his view to imply the following: “I admit I don’t know how the enquiry would proceed if this possibility is granted. But why not just grant that it’s possible as far as anyone knows and say that you know it doesn’t stand so in your own case, and thus in the case of the kind of thing you are, viz. a human being. You don’t know this empirically, but rather as a Faktum of reason in self-conscious exercise of concepts, in realizing them—that is, in action. It is not a cognition you gain ‘from outside.’” (Thompson 2013), p. 732. This differs from Hegel’s version in at least one crucial way: The knowledge of the “Idea” for Hegel is not supposed to be a “Faktum of reason.” This is why he goes to such lengths in the Science of Logic to worry about the issue, as he calls it, of “with what must the science begin?,” and the answer is that one must go to the ground-level zero of intelligibility to get the argument started in a way that does not beg a lot of other questions. That ground-level zero is the thought of “being,” which is, without further inference, identical with the thought that if nothing else, “being” is not the same as “nothing” and that this is the most abstract and indeterminate of all shapes of intelligibility. To the extent that he can show that it breaks down in intelligibility and requires a very distinct form of supplementation so that he can logically march from there to the absolute “Idea,” then he has carried out his program for rejecting the idea that our knowledge of ourselves as human rational animals is a “Faktum” of reason. To demonstrate that with the detail that dyed-in-the-wool Hegelians think is required would require departing from the “looser” version of the Logic which I have adopted here for the purposes of the exposition of Hegel’s thoughts on history, but it is behind what Hegel says when he remarks in the Logic: “To bring to consciousness this logical nature that animates the spirit, that moves and works within it, this is the task.” (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 17; (Hegel 1969i), p. 27. It is also the case that Thompson’s project aims to show that we get all the ethical considerations we need from an appropriate concept of “first nature,” that is, ourselves as rational animals. I am not clear about how much or even whether this differs from Hegel’s concept—which would be that our first nature is exactly to develop a second nature—or whether this is merely a trivially semantic distinction between Thompsonians and the Hegelians. So, it seems, the big difference between the Aristotelian-Thompsonians and the Aristotelian-Hegelians lies in the deep level of historicity that Hegel thinks is characteristic of the genus “self-conscious rational animals.”
37. See the discussion of how the impulse to develop our “talents” necessitates the development of ourselves as “spiritual animals” in (Yeomans 2015).
38. As Hegel puts it, the first two books of his Logic, which he calls the “objective logic” are “therefore the true critique of such determinations—a critique that considers them, not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in themselves according to their particular content” (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 42; (Hegel 1969i), p. 62.
39. “Just as the simple determinations of the life of the soul have their severed counterpart in the universal life of nature, so that which in the individual man has the form of what is subjective, which has a particular impulse, unfold itself. it is within him as a being, without awareness, and it unfolds itself within the state into a system of differentiated spheres of freedom—into a world fashioned by self-conscious human reason.” (Hegel 1969d), §391, p. 52; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 36. This is also expressed in characteristic passages such as “If the doctrine of virtues is not merely a theory of duties and thus includes the particular aspects of character which are grounded in natural determinations, it will therefore be a natural history of spirit.” (Hegel 1991), p. 194; (Hegel 1969e) §150, p. 299.
40. On this point, see the helpful introduction and essays in (Khurana 2013).
41. “The determinateness of spirit is consequently that of manifestation … its possibility is consequently immediately infinite, absolute actuality.” (Hegel 1969d), §383, p. 27; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 16.
42. I have tried to make a separate case for that in (Pinkard 2012). See also (Testa 2013). Another related version of reading Hegel in nondialectical but nonetheless loosely naturalistic terms is the classic work (Wood 1990).
43. Hegel notes: “It is on these grounds that the child is still in the grip of natural life. The child has only natural impulses and is not yet the actuality of being a spiritual person (geistiger Mensch) but only the possibility of being such a person in terms of its concept.… The concept progresses necessarily towards the development of its reality, for the form of immediacy, of the indeterminateness which its reality at first possesses, is something contradictory to it; what seems to be immediately present in spirit is not what is genuinely immediate but rather what is, in itself, something posited, something mediated.… To be sure, spirit exists already in its beginnings, but spirit does not know it as yet, does not as yet know that it is this spirit. It is not it itself which at the beginning has grasped its concept but only we who observe it. Only we know its concept. That spirit comes to know what it is is what constitutes its realization.” (Hegel 1969d), §385, p. 33; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 21.
44. This is slightly complicated by the various and numerous passages in which Hegel speaks of the “human spirit.” That might seem redundant, but the contrast is always with the “divine spirit” as a way of conceiving of a human-like spirit that was nonetheless not a member of our species yet sharing in our species’ interests.
45. Hegel speaks of a “shape of life” in his earlier, unpublished works, and the phrase reappears in the famous sentence in the Philosophy of Right about the owl of Minerva: “When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins flight only with the onset of dusk.” (Hegel 1969e), p. 28; (Hegel 1991), p. 23. The metaphor of the owl is perhaps unfortunate since the owl of which Hegel spoke most likely only flew in the daytime. See (Knowles and Carpenter 2010/2011).
46. Thus Hegel notes that “in short, life must be grasped as an end in itself (Selbstzweck), as an end which possesses its means within itself, as a totality in which each distinct moment is alike end and means. It is, therefore, in the consciousness of this dialectical, this living unity of distinct moments that self-consciousness is ignited, the consciousness of the simple, ideal existence that is its own object and therefore differentiated within itself, in other words, the knowledge of the truth of natural existence, of the ‘I’.” (Hegel 1969d), ¶423 Zusatz, p. 212; (Hegel et al. 1971), pp. 163–164.
47. “To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute cultural education and discipline of consciousness. It drives itself therein to what is remote from the intuitions and the goals of the senses, remote from feelings and from the world of merely fancied representation. Considered from its negative side, this task consists in holding off the contingency of merely clever thought (räsonierenden Denkens) and the arbitrariness in the choice to accept one ground as valid rather than its opposite./But above all, thought thereby gains self-subsistence and independence.” (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 37; (Hegel 1969i), p. 55.
48. (Hegel 1969a), p. 139; (Hegel 2010),¶167.
49. (Rousseau 1968), p. 87.
50. Speaking of “manifestation” (which is Hegel’s term of choice) could perhaps be a little misleading in light of recent literature on self-knowledge that prefers to distinguish manifestation as a noncognitive expression of a mental state with representation of some mental state or expression of a meaning. Matthew Boyle distinguishes, for example, between crying as manifesting pain and a linguistic representation that one is pain, which is part of his longer argument to the conclusion that “a person who can represent her own mental states must understand that the subject to whom she ascribes those states is one who has the power to make up her mind.” Boyle’s point turns on the idea that even in “passive” self-knowledge (knowledge of our sensations), we are still ascribing such states to a subject, and this capacity for self-ascription is thus fundamental to claims to knowledge about such passive states. We do not merely “have” these mental states (for example, of sensation or brute desire), we also represent them as ours. (Boyle 2009).
51. See the discussion of “self-ownership” and the instability of separating deed from action in (Deligiorgi 2010). Deligiorgi takes these considerations to be indicative that Hegel holds something like an “error” theory of agency. However, on the view advanced here, Hegel does not hold such an error theory, but he also does not think that agency is a mere “thing” (with which Deligiorgi agrees). It is a “subject,” a peculiarly self-relating organism, but it is not nothing, and it is not just “substance.” It is an apperceptive life and not merely an animal life that has rational powers grafted onto itself. The unity of action I ascribe to Hegel is more similar to what Michael Thompson calls his “naïve action theory” in (Thompson 2008), pp. 85–148.
52. How to draw out the elements of the distinction between action and deed in Hegel’s theory is the focus of (Pippin 2008).
53. In addition to Pippin’s discussion of the “action/deed” distinction in (Pippin 2008), see also the discussion of doing something “intentionally” and doing something “anscombely” in (Thompson 2013). Mark Alznauer takes up Pippin’s account of the action only really being expressed in the deed, but takes it in a different direction. Alznauer claims that Pippin’s account has the implication that we can only really be agents in modern institutions (in which basic rights, moral obligations and modern ethical life are recognized), whereas Alznauer argues that Hegel has a much weaker condition for agency, namely, that people have a “shared membership in a state.” (Alznauer 2015), p. 63. It is, however, not clear that there is much daylight between Alznauer’s and Pippin’s positions, except that Pippin might claim that we can only “fully” be agents in such modern institutions in a way that Alznauer would also affirm. The position I am defending here attributes to Hegel a much weaker condition for agency, which has to do with self-consciousness per se, and claims that agency is fully realized when it comes to a more complete understanding of what it is to be a geistig, “minded” being at all. The position being articulated here is of a piece with Pippin’s and Alznauer’s positions in that all three express versions of a metaphysical thesis about the “sociality” of agency.
54. See also (Boyle 2009). See also the discussion about how this is essentially Kant’s point in speaking of representing something in consciousness “as combined” in (Yeomans 2015, Rödl 2007).
55. See the discussion in (Boyle 2009).
56. For example, in (Hegel 1969a), p. 181; (Hegel 2010), ¶235, “Now, this category, that is, the simple unity of self-consciousness and being, has the distinction in itself, for its essence is precisely this, that it is immediately selfsame in otherness, that is, immediately selfsame in the absolute distinction. Thus, the distinction exists, but it exists as a completely transparent distinction which is at the same time therefore no distinction at all.”
57. (Hegel 2010), ¶494.
58. (Kukla and Lance 2009) argue that such pointing out is also part of a social practice of hailing somebody, of pulling them into one’s social space. Hegel would no doubt agree with that, but it is not the focus of his discussion of sense-certainty. It is to show the presence of an apperceptive life in such activities, and then later, to argue that an apperceptive life can only be intelligibly conceived as participating in a social space.
59. (Hegel 1969a), p. 145; (Hegel 2010), ¶177. In explicating Hegel’s discussion, I have especially drawn on the points raised in (Rödl 2007) and in (Lavin 2004). There is nothing, however, in Rödl’s rather Kantian discussion that would lead to anything like a dialectic of mastery and servitude.
60. (Hegel 1969e), §7, p. 57; (Hegel 1991), p. 42. This responds to a criticism voiced in (Sparby 2014).
61. Hegel speaks of this other who succumbs as a “Knecht,” which could mean a “vassal,” a “servant,” and even a “slave.” The general point is about “servitude.” Hegel also thought that something like this idealized struggle occurred deeply in the prehistoric human past.
62. The phrase itself is well known as coming from Wilfrid Sellars. (Sellars 1963), p. 212.
63. (Thompson 2004).
64. (Thompson 2004), p. 353.
65. (Thompson 2004), p. 344.
66. There is a controversy about how to interpret the sections on mastery and servitude concerning whether there really are two people in a dyadic relation to each other or whether the passages present a kind of allegorical treatment of the relation between the conceptual and the empirical within one subject. John McDowell has made the case for the allegorical reading, and part of his case has to do with what he thinks makes better sense of the shift from consciousness to self-consciousness in the Phenomenology. He accuses, for example, Robert Brandom of interpreting the shift as simply a change of topic, and he argues (rightly, I think) that this is at cross purposes with Hegel’s stated aims about the shift. (McDowell 2009), chapter 8. Robert Pippin has agreed with McDowell on the point that it is not simply a change of topic, but he also claims that McDowell’s interpretation does violence to the text and to the ideas at work there. (Pippin 2010) (The key troublesome passage in Hegel for McDowell’s interpretation is: “The doubling, which was previously distributed between two individuals, the master and the servant, is thereby turned back into one individual.” (Hegel 1969a), p. 163; (Hegel 2010) ¶206. McDowell says that is merely allegorical.) Pippin’s retort to McDowell was to argue that the authority in question cannot be individualized since all authority exists only as recognized authority, and that agency itself exists only in the networks of mutual recognition of such matters as authority, that agency itself is a social status. McDowell has in turn responded with the idea that, to be sure, nobody becomes an agent without being socialized into such a status, but once one has become an agent, one possesses an authority that is independent of such sociality. His example is that of speaking English: What counts as “English” is obviously dependent on social authority, but once one has acquired the capacity, one has it independent of being recognized by others. McDowell notes: “Suppose everyone around me dies just as light is dawning for me, so there is no one to recognize me as a self-moving speaker of English. It would be wildly implausible to think it follows that I do not have that status. Suppose years later English-speakers from the Antipodes arrive on the scene of the disaster that I alone, of my local community, survived, and they recognize me to be expressing thoughts in English. It would be wildly implausible to think I had to wait for their recognition of me to acquire that capacity.” (McDowell 2009), chapter 9, p. 169. McDowell is right on that point, and it seems to undermine the sweeping claim that we are the kinds of human subjects we are only in networks of recognition (or at least it demands that the claim be heavily qualified), and it thus seems to undermine, or to weaken, Hegel’s own assertion: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself by way of its existing in and for itself for an other; i.e., it exists only as a recognized being.” (Hegel 1969a), p. 145; (Hegel 2010) ¶178. The view presented here departs from both views (or, perhaps, picks the happy middle). The subject is a subject only by being the life that brings itself under the concept of subject, and that concept of itself cannot be monadic at ground level. However, once it has acquired the relevant capacities (such as speaking a language, moving about in a normative social space), it is to that extent free-standing (as McDowell claims). But such a free-standing agency would in Hegel’s sense only be “abstract,” barely an agent at all. It would require further recognitive relationships. A concrete agent is part of a web of recognition. Once the step is taken to demand the kind of recognition that goes on in the dialectic of mastery and servitude, however, it pushes itself into a new practical enterprise that implicates itself with others in a non-escapable way.
67. (Kant 1929), p. 153 (B133): “As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. From this original combination many consequences follow.”
68. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994) p. 82; (Hegel 1975), p. 70.
69. In systematic terms, this means that the concept of subjectivity in the Logic has to be filled out with the concepts of nature and concrete subjectivity in the other two books of the Encyclopedia. The Logic only gives us the “concept” of the thinking, acting subject. The rest of the system fills out the “Idea” of the thinking, acting, feeling subject—what it is for such a thinking, feeling, and acting subject to be real. (Or, if one wants to be picky, the Logic gives us only the abstract “Idea,” whereas the rest of the system fleshes out the concrete “Idea.”)
70. See the discussion in (Yeomans 2015). Yeomans makes the claim that that talents, as individual features of ourselves, are, relatively speaking, objective features of ourselves and our interests, as taking up those talents, are, relatively speaking, subjective features and are the way we make ourselves at home in the world by learning to exercise and actualize our talents.
71. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 81; (Hegel 1975), p. 70. Hegel also notes there that we must include the general concept of what “interests” the agent in his world, what pulls him as the person he specifically is into that particular concatenation of passions and principles: “If I put something into practice and give it a real existence, I must have some personal interest in doing so; I must be personally involved in it, and hope to obtain satisfaction through its accomplishment—in other words, my own interest must be at stake. To have an interest in something means to be implicated and involved in it, and an end which 1 am actively to pursue must in some way or other be my own end.”
72. I tried making the case for this in (Pinkard 1992), although that attempt was flawed. The case for seeing Hegel as a version of “internalism” in moral psychology is made at greater length in (Moyar 2010). Robert Pippin had earlier made this point, (Pippin 1997) and (Pippin 2008). See also (Padgett-Walsh 2010); (Padgett-Walsh forthcoming). See also the excellent overview of the internalism debate in (Wallace 2005).
73. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 81; (Hegel 1975), p. 70.
74. See the discussion in (Moyar 2010), chapter 4, “Motivating and Justifying Reasons,” pp. 43–80.
75. (Kant 1960), p. 19: “… the observation, of great importance to morality, that freedom of the will is of a wholly unique nature in that an incentive can determine the will to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it the general rule in accordance with which he will conduct himself); only thus can an incentive, whatever it may be, co-exist with the absolute spontaneity of the will (i.e., freedom).” For the “incorporation thesis” itself, see (Allison 1990).
76. Hegel’s pre-Phenomenology arguments against Kant on these points have been explored by Robert Pippin in “Avoiding German “Idealism: Kant, Hegel, and the Reflective Judgment Problem,” in (Pippin 1997), pp. 129–156. Sally Sedgwick has devoted a large part of a book to a careful explication and defense of Hegel’s case against Kant mostly based on those early writings: (Sedgwick 2012).
77. On this conception of “distinguishable but not separable” in Kant and Hegel, see (Pippin 2005). For a discussion of how Kant’s incorporation thesis translates into romantic and Wittgensteinian themes that also connect with Hegel’s discussion, see (Eldridge 1997).
78. This is not to deny the possibility that the desire may eventually overwhelm the subject and lead to something looking like an action, but in those cases, that is a matter of losing one’s agency. One’s agency is simply swept away by something outside of itself, as if one is caught in a windstorm or wave of water and carried along by a superior force.
79. In the Phenomenology, Hegel had argued that point when he contrasted the knight of virtue to the way of the world. The knight of virtue thinks he is struggling to realize “the good” as opposed to the subject who embodies the wicked way of the world (the world of passions and egoism). The knight of virtue takes himself to have made reason his motive, whereas he takes the subject of “the way of the world” to be moved by only natural self-interested desire. This amounts only to shadowboxing (Spiegelfechterei—“fencing with a mirror”) since what is at stake is what counts as a good or overriding reason for each of them. In Hegel’s telling of the story, the way of the world wins out not because animal passion triumphs over virtue, but because the constellation of reasons at work in the emerging early modern world win out over the antiquated conceptions of virtue. After authors such as Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees had already made the claim that in the newly emerging modern world, private vice could actually be public virtue, Hegel broadened considerations like that into the view that the structure of reasons that we have can itself only be comprehended in terms of its sociality and historical embeddedness, and in the modern world that comes with market-oriented practices that provide a basis for thinking that self-interested reasons can be actually be legitimate, ethically based reasons. I discussed this in (Pinkard 1994). See the discussion of how this plays out in terms of self-individuation in Hegel’s thought in (Yeomans 2015).
80. (Aristotle 1998), book III.
81. Dean Moyar conceives of this as in terms of a nesting of purposes within other purposes that provides the basic girders to Hegel’s version of internalism. See the summary given by (Moyar 2010), p. 75. It is not clear that Hegel quite has such nesting in mind, since that draws on a largely Humean picture of action as always that of choosing means to an end, such that any action is, if not immediately directed instrumentally to a specific end, always at least part of a wider set of purposes to which it is directed. The subject may act in terms of a specific purpose that is manifested in the action without its being linked as a matter of conscious activity to any wider set of purposes, something Moyar acknowledges. Moyar’s claim is not that we always have these wider purposes in mind (although we can) but that the wider purposes can and often do serve to justify the motivating reasons that are nested in the wider purposes without our having to have them in mind while acting. In making that claim, Moyar distinguishes the subjective way in which motivating and justifying reasons coincide and the objective way in which they do (which involves the nesting of purposes within wider sets of purposes), and he notes, “On Hegel’s view complete justification depends on the systematic whole of the institutions of Ethical Life.” (Moyar 2010), p. 74. It is unclear on Moyar’s nesting proposal whether it still supposes that the means-end model of practical reason holds, even if it has to be reconfigured into more complicated nesting relationships. Hegel, on the other hand, thinks that there can be manifestations of an overall end without the actions being able to be lined up so that they fit into an instrumental model of reasons. Spirit’s purpose, to become self-conscious about what it truly is, is not an end to which ultimately everything else is a means. All our other purposes are not a means to spirit’s self-comprehension (although they are ingredients of it), nor is spirit’s self-comprehension inclusive of all those purposes, nor are other purposes merely approximations to spirit’s self-comprehension. Spirit’s overall purpose need not be modeled on that of conscious action—for example, Hegel’s statement that “the difficulty here comes mainly from representing the teleological relationship as external, and from the prevalent opinion that an end exists only in consciousness.” (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 389; (Hegel 1969c), §360, p. 473.
82. (Hegel 1969b), §66, p. 156; (Hegel et al. 1991), p. 115. See the discussion of the puzzles associated with making the “ethical,” which seems to require reflectivity, line up with the “habitual.” (Novakovic 2015)
83. (Hegel 1969g), p. 40; (Hegel 1963), p. 21: “The person (Mensch) who in itself (an sich) is rational has come no further when he is rational for himself. The in itself is preserved, and, nonetheless, the distinction is huge. No new content is produced, but yet this form is a huge difference. All of world history concerns this distinction.”
84. (Hegel 1969e), §7, p. 57; (Hegel 1991), p. 42.
85. He says that “Freedom lies neither in indeterminacy nor determinacy but is both at once.” This is a component of Hegel’s well-known rejection of orthodox Kantianism: On its own, the will is merely reflective, indeterminate and incapable of generating content for itself. That content as Hegel says in the same passage can come from nature or spirit. If it comes from spirit, it is content generated by others, and that can take the form either of convention (in effect, doing what others do) or of what is necessary to achieve success in attaining spirit’s goals (the concepts with which Hegel is concerned). The agent’s will as capable of reflective distance thus remains “indeterminate,” and it becomes determinate when it is taken up with the (rational) wills of others (that is, the wills of others, and in the best case, insofar as they embody a shared rational will). In any event, the shared wills of others is, in concrete terms, social, and to the extent that the shared will is not rational, it is defective and subject to dissolution because of its own senselessness. Self-consciousness itself is at once both: It is awareness of itself and as such indeterminate; and it is aware of a content that comes from outside of itself (and is thus determinate), and as it is aware of itself as subject, it is aware of itself as aware of objects, without there having to be a separate and distinct act of reflection on this self-awareness. This two-in-one structure of self-consciousness really is the core of the Hegelian dialectic. (Hegel 1969e), §7, p. 57; (Hegel 1991), p. 42.
86. (Hegel 1969g), pp. 41–42; (Hegel 1963), p. 23: “In coming around to itself, spirit attains its freedom. Genuine self-possession and genuine conviction on one’s part come on the scene only in this. In nothing else but thinking does spirit attain this freedom. In intuition and in feeling, I find myself determined and am not free; but I am free when I have a consciousness of this my feeling.”
87. (Hegel 1969g), p. 42; (Hegel 1963), p. 23: “In willing, one has determinate purposes, determinate interests; I am indeed free in this being ‘my own’ (das Meinige); however, these purposes always include an other, or include the kind of things which is for me an other, such as impulses, inclinations, etc.”
88. (Hegel 1969h), p. 493; (Hegel 1956), p. 413: “In this piety, there is superstition , a being bound to something sensuous, to a common thing—it occurs in the most various of shapes: that of the slavery to authority, for spirit, as external to itself within itself, is not free, is fettered to what is external to itself.”
89. (Hegel 1969g), p. 42; (Hegel 1963), p. 23: “Only in thought is everything that is alien transparent, vanished; spirit is free here in an absolute manner. The Idea’s interest, and at the same time the interest of philosophy, are given expression.” See the discussion along similar lines in Yeomans’ conception of the threefold activity of self-possession, specification of content, and effectiveness in (Yeomans 2015).
1. The full quotation is: “The general perspective of philosophical world history is not abstractly general, but concrete and absolutely present; for it is the spirit which is eternally present to itself and for which there is no past. [Or it is the Idea.]” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 24; (Hegel 1987), p. 11. He also notes: “… the history of philosophy includes at the same time an inner conflict, because philosophy aims at knowing what is imperishable, eternal, and in and for itself. Its aim is truth. However, history relates the sort of thing which has existed at one time but at another has perished, displaced by its successor. If we start from the truth’s being eternal, then the truth cannot fall into the sphere of the transient and it has no history. But if it has a history, and history is only a display of a series of past shapes of knowledge, then truth is not be found in it, since truth is not something past.” Another formulation by him: “If the thought which is essentially thought, is in and for itself and is eternal. That which is genuinely true is contained in thought alone. It is true not just today and tomorrow but is outside of time. How does this world of thoughts come to have a history? In history what is given exposition is transient, is over with, is what has been submerged within the night of the past and is no more. Genuinely true, necessary thought—and it is only with such thought that we deal with here—is capable of no change. The question raised here constitutes one of those matters which is first to be brought under our consideration.” (Hegel 1969d), pp. 23–24; (Hegel 1963), p. 5.
2. Taken from (Lauer and Hegel 1983), pp. 68–69.
3. There is another possible answer to Hegel’s own question that is usually ascribed to Hegel, but, so I shall argue, is not Hegel at all. It goes like this. Spirit is some kind of entity that begins undeveloped, develops itself according to its essence, and achieves its completion in history sometime around 1807 (or maybe as late as 1820). It is like a child that matures into an adult, and its history does not involve a change in its essence. This would in effect deny Hegel’s historicism in favor of some kind of essentialism that Hegel rejects. The most sophisticated version of this interpretation comes from Heidegger’s arraignment of Hegel to the effect that, like all Western metaphysicians, he took an “ontotheological” approach. By that, Heidegger meant that Hegel tacitly assumed that the “meaning of being (Sein)” consisted in determining that it lay in one entity (Seiendes), which usually involves claiming that such an entity is the most real, or perhaps the only real, entity of all beings. Once the problem is framed in that way—and, for Heidegger, all of Western metaphysics frames it in that way—one looks for some kind of semi-causal relation between the most real entity and everything else. That relation can be manifestly causal (as in Aristotle’s causes) or disguisedly causal (as in Plato’s idea of “participation” in the forms). All inquiry into origins (of truth, normativity, meaning, etc.) turn out to be thus ontotheological since they look for the “being” that “causes” the other beings to be what they are. (He called it “ontotheological” because of the way all such inquiries replicate the Judeo-Christian story of creation, and not because they are all explicitly theological.) On the Heideggerian reading, for Hegel, the meaning of being was supposedly “spirit” (subject) instead of substance. Heidegger bases his reading on a passage that is not from Hegel himself but was erroneously put into the text by Georg Lasson and which Heidegger cites. In that text, Hegel supposedly speaks of spirit’s “falling into” time. Hegel said no such thing. See (Bouton 2004) However, this simply misunderstands Hegel’s conception of spirit. Spirit is not an entity, although it is also not equivalent to the sum of all its members. It is something more like a joint commitment than it is like a separate entity. To be sure, Hegel speaks of what “the” spirit does in history, and he attributes various actions and motives to it, but this is a grammatical feature of the language Hegel speaks, not a feature of his metaphysics. In German (as in English), the use of “the” can refer to a genus without making any special metaphysical assumptions about it, as in the sentences, “The Robin mates in Spring,” and “The American Robin vocalizes differently in different regions.” This assumption that Hegel is pursuing an ontotheological theory in Heidegger’s sense drives the interpretation given by (Hodgson 2012). This “ontotheological” interpretation is also worked out in (Dale 2014). The idea that there is “a” spirit that functions as a final cause of the movement of history also animates Burleigh Wilkins’ attempt to put Hegel’s Logic to use in assessing Hegel’s philosophy of history, which leads him, rightly, given the premise, to think that Hegel’s view on how history develops in terms of its purpose has to be taken as a noble effort but fully indefensible: “I am no more inclined to campaign for the resurrection of Hegel’s immanent teleology than Walter Kaufmann or J. H. N. Findlay is to labor for the resurrection of Hegel’s dialectic.” (Wilkins 1974), p. 120. This also leads Dennis O’Brien to think that Hegel must be taking the process of history as a kind of unitary “something” to which the categories of efficient, material, and final causes apply, so that states and constitutions are the material and formal causes and the passions and world historical individuals are the final causes. (O’Brien 1975) A thoroughgoing critique of the older “monistic” interpretation that sees what is nonetheless right about it is to be found in (Kreines 2008) Frederick Beiser seems to think it is just textually obvious that Hegel intends that type of immanent teleology and unitary structure and that a devout reading of Hegel’s words simply has to go along with it. (Beiser 2005)
4. (Hegel 1969b), §383; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 16.
5. The relation between the need for both a statement of principle and psychology draws on the discussion by Robert Pippin of how Western movies provide a partial account of such political psychology. (Pippin 2010)
6. On slavery and the ancient world, see (Finley 1964).
7. In essence, this was the basis of the dispute between Hegel and Leopold Ranke, which led to famous polemics in the 1820s and 1830s on the part of Ranke and his followers against the Hegelian school and vice versa. Superficially, it seems like a dispute between a fact-oriented empirical historian and a lofty and abstract philosophy of history, but the dispute went deeper. Both thought that particular shapes of life could be discerned and described. Ranke, however, seemed to think that each shape of life was sui generis and was, in his famous phrase, “immediate to God.” On Ranke’s view, as a historian, he was doing God’s work by describing these shapes of life in the detail that he did and leaving the meaning of the whole to God himself. Yet, as scholars of Ranke’s work have shown, he did actually think that there was a meaning to history, and he thought that the gifted historian (such as himself) could discern God’s hand without having to have any systematic argument for it. Because the unity of a shape of life, as Ranke said, is a “spiritual unity, it can thus be apprehended in a spiritual apperception.” (“Idee der Universalhistorie 1831 bzw. 1831–32” in (Ranke, Fuchs, and Schieder 1964), p. 78). This divides the philosopher (i.e., Hegel) from himself: “There are two ways to learn to know human things. One is the knowledge of the singular and the other that of abstraction; one is the way of the philosopher, and the other is that of history.” (“Idee der Universalhistorie 1831 bzw. 1831–32,” (Ranke, Fuchs, and Schieder 1964), p. 87). Hegel, of course, rejected that alternative, namely, that one had to approach history either by adding up the singular events and fact or by abstracting from all of them to discover some larger pattern of meaning. Hegel’s project in fact rejected the idea that the pattern of history could be discerned by a process of abstraction (as if one could look at say, Greece, Rome, and Germany and determine what was going on in history by way of the commonalities found in such abstraction). Hegel instead wished to see if there were any “infinite ends” in historical development. Hegel had two other main objections to Ranke and to his mentor, Barthold Georg Niebuhr. First, Ranke’s claim to intuit the hand of God in history was empty, and when one starts from such an empty conception, one can conclude just about anything. Second, Hegel objected to what many took to be Ranke’s strong point, his ability to construct a compelling narrative out of the facts. (Niebuhr did something similar.) For Hegel, such a narrative was just made up. In passages such as this—where Ranke says of Henry IV of France that he “was filled with great ideas. He fancied that he still saw his star hovering over him, destined to do something marvelous”—Hegel objected that this was the stuff of Walter Scott novels and best left to such novelists, who admitted that they were making it up, and not to historians. It is not clear that Hegel was simply denigrating one of Ranke’s strengths, and the role of narrative-telling in a “scholarly” historical work remains a controversial flash point among historians. (The specific quote is taken from (Gay 1974). Gay discusses the tensions between Ranke the dramatist, Ranke the “scientist,” and Ranke the theologian.) Frederick Beiser seems to think that there is not really much of an important difference between Hegel’s and Ranke’s approaches, except on technicalities.: “On the whole, Hegel’s polemic against Ranke is limited to his misgivings about the narrative technique of the [Ranke’s] Geschichte … [and] that Ranke himself … [later] admitted this shortcoming.” Beiser thinks that Hegel’s objection is that Ranke is too detail-oriented and has not adequately achieved a disclosure of the unity of the events (Beiser 2011). Beiser’s view, however, underplays Hegel’s objections to Ranke’s idea of “spiritual apperception” in general, although Beiser does note that Ranke and F. H. Jacobi both share an appeal to intuition. On Niebuhr’s use of Roman history to argue about contemporary Prussian politics—which Hegel also criticized—see (Ziolkowski 2004). On Ranke’s ever-more-explicit commitment to the idea that there was a meaning in history that the Christian historian graced by God, and only by so being graced, could discern, see (Krieger 1977) and (Toews 2004). Toews’ account is particularly insightful about the tension, if not outright contradiction, in the post-Hegelian historicism that arose in the 1830s and 1840s. Toews locates the tension in Ranke’s thought as that between maintaining a stance that the final ends of life are completely transcendent—“Thy will be done”—and the conception of the final ends of life as being bound essentially to the development and constitution of a specific community (“Our will be done”). The project of the kind of historicism which shows up in Ranke’s historical practice (and which, for example, shows up also in K. F. Schinkel’s architecture and in some of Felix Mendelssohn’s music), was supposed to be able to stabilize, as it were, that tension. Hegel would have thought such an approach had to fail, since it simply pitted one “finite” (a particular divine will) against another “finite” (a particular communal will).
8. On the idea that infinite ends have no internal limit, see (Rödl 2010).
9. In connection to the philosophy of religion and the establishment of religious cults at the earliest points in history, Hegel remarks, “As God’s purpose, it has its being in the actual spirit; therefore it must have inward universality and be the genuinely divine end within itself; it must be the end that is substantive, that has substantive universality. A substantive end internal to spirit is one such that the existing spiritual individuals know themselves as one, behave as one, are united. It is essentially an inwardly universal, infinite end, an ethical end, for its soil is in self-consciousness, in freedom, in freedom realized. This is where the practical side first emerges, [God’s] purpose in actual consciousness.” (Hegel and Hodgson 1984), p. 435.
10. Hegel’s mother-in-law reported that Hegel had promised her that the lectures on the philosophy of history would be intelligible “even for women.” Leaving aside the sexism of the remark, the reference makes it clear that Hegel intended that series to be intelligible to a very general audience. As the history of the reception of the lectures shows, he by and large succeeded. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1961), Letter #664.
11. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 108; (Hegel 1975), p. 91: “What makes men morally discontented (and they may even take a certain pride in this discontent) is that they find the present unsuited to their ideas, principles, and opinions concerning ends of a more universal content, which they consider to be right and good (among which we must nowadays include ideals of political constitutions in particular), or to their predilection for constructing their own ideals on which to lavish their enthusiasm. They contrast existence as it is with their own view of how things by rights ought to be. In this case, it is not particular interests or passions which demand satisfaction, but reason, justice, and freedom; and, equipped with this title, such demands give themselves an air of authority and can easily take the form not just of dis-content with the condition and events of the world but of actual rebellion against them. To appreciate such feelings and attitudes correctly, we should have to make a thorough examination of the demands themselves and of the highly peremptory views and attitudes which accompany them.”
12. “Now here, because we are discussing more precisely the state of the world of spiritual reality, we must take it up from the side of the will. For it is through the will that the spirit as such enters upon existence, and the immediate substantial bonds of reality are displayed in the specific manner in which the will’s guides, i.e. the concepts of ethics and law, and, in short, what, in general terms, we may call justice, are activated.” (Hegel 1969c), pp. 235–236; (Hegel 1988), p. 179.
13. (Hegel 1969a), p. 143; (Hegel 2010), ¶¶ 172, 173. “It is the simple genus, which in the movement of life itself does not exist for itself as this ‘simple.’ Rather, in this result, life points towards something other than itself, namely, towards consciousness, for which life exists as this unity, that is, as genus.… But this other life for which the genus as such exists and which is the genus for itself, namely, self-consciousness, initially exists in its own eyes merely as this simple essence and, in its own eyes, is an object as the pure I.”
14. (Hegel 1969e), p. 55; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 37.
15. “Freedom is that which is the in itself of spirit. Spirit must know what it is in itself. We know it, but at the outset spirit does not know it. World history begins with this self-knowledge, and it is a work of 3,000 years which spirit has made in order to know itself.” (Hegel 2005), p. 37.
16. On the comparison of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of history, see (Sedgwick 2015). See also the helpful discussion in (Dale 2014).
17. See the discussions in (Rorty and Schmidt 2009).
18. On the oddly teleological nature of Kant’s short sketch of a philosophy of history, see (Deligiorgi 2012).
19. Polybius: “But the Romans have subjected to their rule not portions, but nearly the whole of the world and possess an empire which is not only immeasurably greater than any which preceded it, but need not fear rivalry in the future. In the course of this work it will become more clearly intelligible by what steps this power was acquired, and it will also be seen how many and how great advantages accrue to the student from the systematic treatment of history.… Previously the doings of the world had been, so to say, dispersed, as they were held together by no unity of initiative, results, or locality.… For what gives my work its peculiar quality, and what is most remarkable in the present age, is this. Fortune has guided almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and has forced them to incline towards one and the same end.” (Polybius et al. 2010) Vol. 1, pp. 7, 9, 11.
1. See the very helpful exposition in Wang Hui’s critical account of this Western view of Chinese history in (Wang 2014), especially pp. 41–53. Overall, Wang understands Hegel’s philosophy of history in terms of its being the teleology of a single individual “thing” (spirit), which, so he also argues, skews Hegel’s (and all his successors’) views about China’s possibilities, since China (or “Asia” in general) can only appear as the beginning stage of the development of this individual: “A major source of Hegel’s philosophy of history is a psychological theory that developed out of an individualist and anthropocentric tradition. The goal of this psychological theory is to resolve philosophical difficulties produced by individualist discourse by using a construct of analogical relationships between world history and history of individual spirit.” (Wang 2014), p. 47. That is indeed the traditional, but, so it is argued in this book, crucial misunderstanding of Hegel’s view of spirit in history.
2. This interpretation of the Phenomenology is, of course, contested. There are interpreters who claim that the Phenomenology is not historical in any but the most superficial ways. Prominent among these interpreters is Stephen Houlgate, who interprets Hegel in a more or less Neo-Platonic form. Thus, Houlgate confidently asserts that “This development is to be understood not as historical, but as logical. The book does not examine how human consciousness has actually changed through time into modern self-understanding, but shows how certain general ‘shapes’ of consciousness necessarily transform themselves, because of their very structure, into further shapes. The development traced by Hegel overlaps in certain parts with European history (for example, in the analysis of ‘Stoic’ consciousness), but what gives Hegel’s book its unity is the fact that it renders explicit what is logically entailed by being conscious.” (Houlgate 2003), pp. 11–12. The interpretation offered here argues that it is indeed from what is involved in self-consciousness that we get the logic of history, but that rests on a different conception of the Logic than Houlgate allows. For him, the Logic is about structures of “Being” that we simply observe as they transform themselves into each other—much as in some interpretations of Plato, the philosopher observes how the forms mix with each other. See (Houlgate 2006). By sharply separating the kind of free, self-determining thought that he thinks Hegel espouses from empirical reality, Houlgate says that “Free, self-determining philosophy shows that human consciousness is impelled by its very nature to develop an awareness of its own freedom over time, and so to generate the process of history.… But, equally, it understands itself to be a product of a history which, given those particular natural and historical conditions, had to lead to the emergence of the consciousness of freedom, because it was generated by the drive towards self-consciousness which is a necessary and intrinsic characteristic of human consciousness itself.” (Houlgate 1991), p. 75. A similar but much more immanent view is also represented by (Winfield 2013). Like Houlgate, Winfield takes Hegel to be observing the course of free, self-determining thought: “Because the presupposed subject-matter develops itself through its own self-examination, what we observe is what our subject matter knows itself to be in function of how it distinguishes its object from its knowing.” (p. 382) Like Houlgate, he also takes Hegel to have offered a timeless account that then finds external instantiation in history: “We observe empirically that the institutions of freedom are beginning to arise in modern times. On the basis of this nonphilosophical, empirical descriptive judgment, we can then look back over the given historical record and interpret it in light of the a priori normative history of what should occur. Thereby we represent what has happened as a history of freedom reaching its fulfillment in our time.” p. 365.
3. On Hegel’s rather careless and biased used of his resources on Africa, see (Bernasconi 1998).
4. Like probably most Europeans of his time (and for a good many European and American historians after that), Hegel did not have any idea of the dynamism and change going on across the African continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a corrective view on that (and also as a corrective for Hegel’s views on the dynamism of Asian societies in that period), see (Bayly 2004). A concise and well-formulated version of the case against Hegel’s view that Africa is somehow outside of history and what is at stake in the debate about Africa’s “role” in history is to be found in (Appiah 1998). On the ongoing damage which Hegel’s dismissal of African life has exercised, see (Taiwo 1998).
5. Hegel says of Africans, giving them some credit while at the same time deprecating them and brushing them aside: “They cannot be denied a capacity for education; not only have they, here and there, adopted Christianity with the greatest gratitude and spoken movingly of the freedom they have acquired through Christianity after a long spiritual servitude, but in Haiti they have even formed a State on Christian principles. But they do not show an inner striving for culture. In their native country the most shocking despotism prevails. There they do not attain to the feeling of human personality—their mentality is quite dormant, remaining sunk within itself and making no progress, and thus corresponding to the compact, undifferentiated mass of the African continent.” (Hegel 1969a) §393, p. 60; (Hegel et al. 1971), pp. 42–43.
6. See Andrew Buchwalter, “Is Hegel’s Philosophy of History Eurocentric?” in (Buchwalter 2012). Buchwalter’s answer to his own question: “While not disputing the presence of such a dimension, I have argued that it is less pernicious than is commonly assumed.” p. 252. Each culture on Buchwalter’s reading of Hegel is an end in itself and calls for its own transcendence (including Europe). That is true, but Hegel does nonetheless have a ranking of how things stand vis-à-vis what they contribute to European modernity, and therefore, or so I argue here, it is far more pernicious than Buchwalter gives it credit for, although Hegel’s conception can within its own terms be corrected.
7. See the excellent account of Hegel’s sources in (Hegel et al. 2011).
8. “The only distinction between the African and Asiatic peoples and those of the Greeks, Romans and modern times is just that the latter know that they are free. It exists for them. The former are also free, but they do not know it, they do not exist as free. This constitutes the enormous difference in the alteration of their conditions.” (Hegel 1969b), p. 40; (Hegel 1963), p. 22. See the discussion of Hegel’s conception of “savagery” in (Alznauer 2015), pp. 77–78. Alznauer thinks that this would mean that the individual is not responsible (in the expanded sense Alznauer attributes to Hegel) and therefore is not really an agent at all, since he or she does not engage in a self-subjection to a legal order but only follows a social norm out of fear of punishment of some sort. On the reading here, Hegel does think that savages are indeed agents but ones for whom the highest principles are simply social norms.
9. (Hegel 1996), p. 123; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 214: “To that extent it has no history. So, in speaking about the most ancient history of this empire, we are not speaking of something past but instead of the shape that it has today.”
10. Thus, Hegel claims: “Passing from the administration to the situation of law in China, we find the subjects regarded as in a state of tutelage in virtue of the principle of patriarchal government. No independent classes or orders, as in India, have interests of their own to defend. All is directed and superintended from above. All legal relations are definitely settled by legal norms; free sentiment, the moral standpoint in general, is thereby thoroughly obliterated.”(Hegel 1969d), p. 161; (Hegel 1956), pp. 127–128.
11. (Hegel 1969d); (Hegel 1956), pp. 130–131.
12. “People only have respect for each other if they have a consciousness of something higher.” (Hegel 2005), p. 68.
13. (Hegel 2005), p. 84. “The state’s civil servants have no other religion than that of accomplishing the will of the emperor and carrying out his laws. Consequently, one calls this political atheism.”
14. (Hegel 2005), p. 72.
15. In speaking of the Greeks in his Encyclopedia, Hegel notes that, “However, burdened with immediacy, the freedom of the subject is only custom without infinite reflection into itself, without subjective inwardness of conscience; with that, the further development of devotion and the religious cult of beautiful art is also determined.” (Hegel 1969a), §557, p. 368; (Hegel et al. 1971), pp. 293–294.
16. (Hegel 1969d), p. 201; (Hegel 1956), p. 151: “If China is entirely a state, then the Indian political existence is only a people and no state.” In his illuminating work on Chinese philosophical and political thought, Wang Hui attributes to Hegel the view that China was not really a state but an empire and would have to become a nation-state in order to become modern. He thinks that is wrong and attributes this view to a Western binary of nation-state/empire which he argues is not appropriate for comprehending the different forms of political organization that China possessed and which thus puts China into a kind of historical teleology in which it looks as if he has to become thoroughly European to make any progress. Thus, “It is only in this implicit contrast between empire and state that Hegel is able to present Europe, which had been produced in Asia, as the center and terminus of the old world.” (Wang 2014), p. 46. He also admits, however, that Hegel compares the state structures of China with those of Europe: “Hegel’s concept of the Orient is a philosophical response to discourses on the Orient in European thought; at its core, it is a comparison of European state structures and Asian state structures.” (Wang 2014), p. 49. Hegel’s negative argument about China, however, is more about the suppression of difference within the state than of China’s backwardness in failing to become a state and about the role of a form of “positivism” in understanding the status of law.
17. In criticizing what he takes to be the Chinese conflation of law and custom with morality, Hegel notes: “Legality may not intrude into matters of sentiment. If some moral point is commanded, the laws doing so can have an excellent resonance, can be in Solomonic language, although this in turn opens the door to a despotism that is all the greater in proportion to how excellent the law sounds.” (Hegel 1996), p. 144; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 233.
18. He even goes so far as to insinuate that some of the great achievements of classical Chinese civilization in fact had to be Greek imports, since they could not have come up with those things themselves: “For it was from the Syrian empire that extended out deeply into Asia … is that there was doubtless conveyed to the interior of India and China, by Greek colonies migrating to there, the meager scientific knowledge which has lingered there like a tradition, though it has never flourished. For the Chinese, for example, are not skillful enough to make a calendar of their own, and they are unsuited, so it seems, for everything conceptual. Yet they exhibited ancient instruments unsuited to any work done by them, and the immediate conjecture was that these had come from Bactria. The ideas about the sciences of the Chinese and the Indians are false.” (Hegel 1963), Vol. II, p. 123–4; (Hegel 1969c), p. 138.
19. Hegel reports an anecdote from British emissaries in China: “When the last legation from England departed after vesting the supreme mandarin, the householder used a whip to clear a path for the imperial dignitaries. Corporal punishment can in one sense be considered something utterly insignificant, since the human being is only injured in his lesser aspect, merely outwardly, in mere mortal existence. But corporal punishment is the most humiliating for the very reason that human being so afflicted is supposed to be coerced with regard to his inner being.” (Hegel 1996), pp. 147–148; (Hegel et al. 2011), pp. 235–236.
20. See the account in “How China Became the First Market Society,” in (McNeill and McNeill 2003), pp. 121–127.
21. The classic but contested treatment of this point is to be found in (Fairbank and Goldman 2006). On the whole, the Fairbank school seeks to understand “why” China failed to become modern and “why” it therefore failed in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century competition with the West. Wang Hui goes after the entire “Fairbank school” for inserting Western categories into a context where, he thinks, they obfuscate more than they reveal (Wang 2014). On the idea of China’s similarity to their contemporaries, the Romans, vis-à-vis their status and strategies for empire, see (Burbank and Cooper 2010). China’s ancient development of its own civilization as resting on the way it successfully integrated its connections with other human developments is nicely told in (McNeill and McNeill 2003). The McNeills take the underlying story of world history to consist of what they call the “human web,” which they define as “a set of connections that link people to one another … which may take many forms: chance encounters, kinship, friendship, common worship, rivalry, enmity, economic exchange, ecological exchange, political cooperation, even military competition … what drives human history is the human ambition to alter one’s condition to match one’s hopes. But just what people hoped for, both in the material and spiritual reams, and how they pursued their hopes, depended on the information, ideas, and examples available to them. Thus, webs channeled and coordinated everyday human ambition and action—and still do.” pp. 3–4. Hegel’s own concern is not with these quasi-causal conditions of what is “driving” history. It is not the place here, but it would be interesting to do a more detailed investigation of what the McNeills’ view of the “human ambition to alter one’s condition to match one’s hopes” with Hegel’s attempt at constructing a philosophical history of the world.
22. See the discussions in the accompanying notes in (Hegel et al. 2011).
23. See the discussion in (Wang 2014): “Chapter 3: Heavenly Principle/Universal Principle and History,” pp. 61–100. Wang Hui attributes a kind of “internalist” Hegelian principle to some of the Neo-Confucian scholars of the Song period: “… their criterion for evaluating change was not time, but rather an internal criterion—‘the propensity of principle’ (lishi).” (Wang 2014), p. 91. See also his characterization of the methodology of that particular school: Their “methodology is something that is inherently needed by the worldviews of Heavenly Principle and Universal Principle but is also the force that causes crises to occur within the worldviews of Heavenly Principle and Universal Principle and leads them to break down under their own weight.” (Wang 2014), p. 95.
24. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 176; (Hegel 1975), p. 145.
25. Thus, Hegel’s argument against the Africans is a part of his argument about the Chinese. Whereas he finds little to count in favor of the Africans, he views them as similar to the Chinese in that they are “stalled” ways of life. However, or so goes Hegel’s account, African social lives do not change in anything other than arbitrary ways, and thus no civilization as such gets created. On Hegel’s highly distorted view about the so-called stalled and therefore unhistorical nature of the Africans and where he thought he found evidence for this, see (Bernasconi 1998).
26. (Hegel 1969d), p. 174; (Hegel 1956), p. 139.
27. For a thorough look at what Hegel’s sources were about India and how they could have misled him, see (Viyagappa 1980).
28. (Sen 2005).
29. See (Halbfass 1988), p. 87.
30. This criticism is reinforced by Hegel’s review of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s piece on the Bhagavad Gita in his 1826 review in the Jahrbüchern für wissenschaftliche Kritik in (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1956), pp. 131–204, where Hegel, confronted with scholarship that rejects his dismissal of Indian thought, dwells on what he takes to be the fundamental abstractness and therefore emptiness of Indian thought and religion and thus its way of carving out a space for tyranny in the kind of regime encouraged by that kind of emptiness.
31. The references to an “enchanted” world and to measuring it against human dignity seem to have occurred in the late 1831 lectures, as Hegel was hardening his already hard views against the calls for a return to a romanticized German past.
32. See the discussion in (Bernasconi 2002).
33. Hegel’s 1827 review (“Über die unter den Namen Bhagavad-Ghita bekannte Episode des Mahabharata von Wilhelm von Humboldt”) is to be found in (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1956). He says (p. 158): “This dissolution is impossible, because what is highest in the Indian consciousness, the abstract essence, Brahman, is within itself devoid of any determination, which consequently can only be external to the unity and thus can only be an external, natural determination. In this falling apart of the universal and the concrete, both are devoid of spirit.—The former is the empty unity and the latter is the unfree multiplicity; the person, falling apart into this, is bound only to a natural law of life; elevating himself to the former extreme, he is fleeing from and in negation to all concrete, spiritual life.” On the relation between Hegel’s review and Humboldt’s original piece, see (Viyagappa 1980).
34. See (Hegel 1999), p. 148: “Von Humboldt translate the word [Yoga] as absorption (Vertiefung), in which the returning-into-itself remains the most striking feature of the person conceived in terms of yoga and what therein is also its own mystical disposition of mind; even though that rendering of an expression, which springs out of a wholly idiosyncratic viewpoint of a language, into the particular word of another language is insufficient.” Hegel equates this “Vertiefung” with “absorption” in this way: “The higher impetus, or rather the most sublime depth which comes to light here leads us at once beyond the European opposition, with which we began this exposition, that of the practical and the theoretical; acting becomes absorbed in knowing, or rather in the abstract absorption of consciousness within itself.” (Hegel 1999), p. 142.
35. Hegel was also at pains to argue against the rising tide of those who, like his good friend, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, were arguing that Indian religion showed itself to be both older and aiming in the same direction as the Christian religion. The Indians were said to be the recipients of an earlier divine revelation, such that Indian culture and religion led directly to the Greeks (and hence to the Europeans). This unnerved Hegel a bit, but he still insisted that the philosophy coming out of the Indian religions, as well as the religions themselves, were, when examined in detail, different in kind from Christianity. He also thoroughly rejected Friedrich Schlegel’s speculation (in 1808, earlier than Creuzer’s writing) about India being the source, since degraded, of the original Christian revelation. See the discussion in (Crawford 2014) (accessed 8/14/15 12:25 PM). An excellent and much more detailed account of the German “orientalist” project is to be found in (Marchand 2009).
36. Hegel says this of the Indians and Chinese in relation to the Europeans: “The English, or rather the East India Company, are the rulers of this land, for it is a necessary fate of the Asiatic empires that they are to be subjected to the Europeans, and China will also at some point be bound to this fate.” (Hegel 1969d), p. 179; (Hegel 1956), pp. 142–143.
37. See the discussion in (Bayly 2004).
38. “The oriental world also has decay within itself; in the oriental principle there lies, however, the determination, the principle, which is opposed to itself, that it does not have itself within itself. It does not within itself release spirit into freedom so that it would turn itself against itself.” (Hegel and Lasson 1923), p. 639. I sometimes refer to the Lasson edition of the philosophy of history in those places where it includes materials not present in the Eduard Gans-Karl Hegel standard edition, but never in those places where it is at odds with the more limited Hoffmeister edition of the introduction to the lectures on the philosophy of world history. Although Lasson improved on E. Gans/K. Hegel edition—he wanted to weave the various lecture materials into a seamless book—that project does not accord well with contemporary philological standards. See the discussion in the editor’s introduction in (Hegel et al. 2011).
39. (Hegel 1969d), p. 266; (Hegel 1956), p. 215. Hegel equates this with the idea that “the human individual has an infinite value in himself.” (Hegel 1969d), p. 266; (Hegel 1956), p. 216.
40. Joseph McCarney makes the interesting suggestion that Hegel’s discussion here is misled by his own metaphor of the sun rising in the East and setting in the West as the expression of what it might mean for Hegel to say that there is a great drama in history whose curtain is now starting to set (but not having already set). McCarney suggests that Hegel is putting too much weight on his own metaphor. (McCarney 2000): “Hegel is in the grip of, it might be suggested, of a crude kind of pictorial thinking which constrains his expression.” p. 174. However, if the reading given here is correct, Hegel’s misreading of the “Orientals,” as a civilization whose glory is now a matter of the past is not driven by a failed metaphor but by his belief that rule-governed and essentially dream-driven societies are to be found in the East at the origins of civilization. See also the discussion about the so-called “end of history” in (Dale 2014). After analyzing various versions of the “end of history” thesis, Thom Brooks takes Hegel’s view of the end of history as merely provisional: “We should view [Hegel’s theses about history’s end] in its systematic context and recognize that the court of world judgment must always revise its assessments over time. Thus, world history is a court of forever provisional and revisable judgments.” (Brooks 2013), p. 157.
41. Hegel sometimes seems to explain ethnic backwardness in terms of geography (where he seems to be partially following Montesquieu), in which case he would have to say that were non-European peoples to migrate to a European climate, they too would become more “spiritual” and free. However, he never actually draws that conclusion. (Given that the premises are false, it is just as well that he doesn’t.) In his meticulous study of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Joseph McCarney claims that Hegel’s conception of “peoples” (Völker) is most emphatically not an ethnic conception. He attributes instead to Hegel the claim “that world historical peoples are not be thought of an ethnic groups, a point on which Hegel is unequivocally firm.” (McCarney 2000), p. 141. This seems too apologetic for Hegel since Hegel is simply not “unequivocally firm” about this. For example, in (Hegel 1969a), §394; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 46, he says: “The philosophy of history, on the other hand, has for its subject-matter the world-historical significance of races, that is to say, if we take world-history in the most comprehensive sense of the word, the highest development to which the original disposition of the national character attains, the most spiritual form to which the natural mind indwelling the nations raises itself.” McCarney also takes Hegel’s arguments against Schlegel’s and Schelling’s conceptions of there necessarily being a primitive “people” that preexists all other mankind (as a replacement for the idea of Adam and Eve in the Garden) to be Hegel’s argument against “the idea of an Aryan race, an Urvolk, to which modern Germans belonged and from which ‘all science and art has simply been handed down to us’” ((McCarney 2000), p. 140). Although such an idea of an Aryan Urvolk did appear in Friedrich Schlegel’s work around 1819, the idea of an Aryan “race” did not really come on the scene until after Hegel’s time, and in any event, Hegel’s argument is mostly aimed against any conception at all of a primordial “state of nature,” which would be humanity as its most pure form and therefore most authentic, a view, which, as Hegel notes, is simply writing history on the basis of pure fantasy.
1. See (Bayly 2004). Bayly convincingly shows that the origins of modernity have to be put into a global view, and that the story—economic, social and intellectual—is not confined to Europe or simply following Europe’s lead. As he sums up his own findings: “Europe and its American colonies may already have had a competitive advantage in several areas as early as 1750. They may have been able to exploit their own and others’ industrious revolutions in local production and consumption most effectively. But this does not mean that all significant change was initiated there. The origins of change in world history remained multi-centered throughout. We need not so much to reorient world history as to decentralize it.” p. 470.
2. “To show that the spirit of the Egyptians presented itself to their consciousness in the form of a problem, we can call on the celebrated inscription in the inner sanctum of the Goddess Neith at Sais: “I am that which is, that which was, and that which will be; no one has lifted my veil.” This inscription gives voice to the principle of the Egyptian spirit; although people have often had the opinion that it is supposed to be valid for all times.… In the Egyptian Neith, truth is still locked away. The Greek Apollo is its solution; his utterance is: “Man, know thyself.” In this dictum, there is no intention to be a self-knowledge that regards the particularities of one’s own weaknesses and defects: it is not the individual who is supposed to get to know his particularity, but humanity as such is supposed to attain self-knowledge. This mandate was given for the Greeks, and in the Greek spirit the human exhibits itself in its clarity and its development.” (Hegel 1969j), pp. 271–272; (Hegel 1956), p. 220.
3. See the account in (McNeill and McNeill 2003).
4. (Cline 2014).
5. See (McNeill and McNeill 2003). The MacNeills argue that the structure of Bronze Age ancient civilization in that area more or less resembled that of Egyptian rule: “Crete nonetheless resembled Egypt in the concentration of resources in the hands of a sacred ruler who probably controlled overseas shipping just Pharaoh controlled the boats on the Nile that undergirded his power.” p. 68.
6. This is a point made by (McNeill and McNeill 2003), p. 72.
7. “In the case before us, the interest of the world’s history hung trembling in the balance. Confronting each other were Oriental despotism—a world united under one lord and sovereign—and on the one side, separate states, insignificant in extent and resources, but animated by free individuality. Never in History has the superiority of spiritual power over the masses—and that of no contemptible amount—been made so gloriously manifest.—This war, and the subsequent development of the states which took the lead in it, is the most dazzling period of Greece. Everything which the Greek principle involved, then reached its perfect bloom and came into view.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 315; (Hegel 1956), pp. 257–258.
8. In fact, Hegel uses the contrast between “China” and Greece to make a related but different point about negativity. If “China” fails to develop the differences and distinctions needed for its members to have a satisfactory life, Greece, which succeeds in developing the aspect of self-sufficiency of individuals (Selbständigkeit) could do so only be exaggerating the difference.
9. “But this immediate unity of the substantial with the individuality of inclination, impulses, and will is inherent in Greek virtue, so that individuality is a law to itself, without being subjected to an independently subsisting law, judgment, and tribunal.” (Hegel 1969e), p. 244; (Hegel 1988), p. 185.
10. (Hegel and Lasson 1923), pp. 570–571.
11. (Hegel 1969f), p. 24; (Hegel 1988), p. 436; Hegel goes on to say on p. 437 (p. 25): “Nor, on the other hand, did the Greeks make the advance to that deepening of subjective life in which the individual subject separates himself from the whole and the universal in order to be independent in his own inner being; and only through a higher return into the inner totality of a purely spiritual world does he attain a reunification with the substantial and essential. On the contrary, in Greek ethical life the individual was independent and free in himself, though without cutting himself adrift from the universal interests present in the actual state and from the affirmative immanence of spiritual freedom in the temporal present. The universal element in ethical life, and the abstract freedom of the person in his inner and outer life, remain, in conformity with the principle of Greek life, in undisturbed harmony with one another, and at the time when this principle asserted itself in the actual present in still undamaged purity there was no question of an independence of the political sphere contrasted with a subjective morality distinct from it; the substance of political life was merged in individuals just as much as they sought this their own freedom only in pursuing the universal aims of the whole.”
12. (Hegel 2005), p. 125.
13. That this is an idealized picture is true. However, the animating idea behind the polis—as that of a place where male self-sufficient equals (many of them slaveholders) met without any natural authority to command each other—was indeed a reality of Greek life, even if it was not quite the fully democratic participatory milieu that Hegel portrays. See the discussions in (Finley 1983) ; and (Osborne 2004).
14. (Aristotle 1941b), 1367a 30–34, p. 1356. The passage can also be rendered as “under the compulsion of another.” David Bronstein suggested to me that the model lying behind the idea expressed in the passage is that of the truly “noble” man who commands others as an architect might command the menial workers. Or, as we might put it, the noble (and therefore the free) man does not take orders from another—neither from his wife nor his slaves. As such a self-sufficient individual, he meets other such noble, free men in the democratic sphere of the polis where nobody is naturally entitled to give orders to the others. In the Politics, Aristotle extends this conception of having to exhibit theatricality to others, to let ourselves be guided by others, as inherently ignoble: “Thus then we reject the professional instruments and also the professional mode of education in music (and by professional we mean that which is adopted in contests), for in this the performer practices the art, not for the sake of his own improvement, but in order to give pleasure, and that of a vulgar sort, to his hearers. For this reason the execution of such music is not the part of a freeman but of a paid performer, and the result is that the performers are vulgarized, for the end at which they aim is bad. The vulgarity of the spectator tends to lower the character of the music and therefore of the performers; they look to him—he makes them what they are, and fashions even their bodies by the movements which he expects them to exhibit.” (Aristotle 1941a), p. 1314 (1341b).
15. See (Pinkard 2008).
16. In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel is fully explicit about how this idea of heroism is only mythical and has no place in a modern order of thoughts. For example: “Such a state of affairs is the one we are accustomed to ascribe to the Heroic Age. Which of these situations, however,—the civilized and developed life of the state, or an heroic age—is the better, this is not the place to explain; here our only concern is with the Ideal of art, and for art the cleavage between universal and individual must not yet come on the scene in the way described above, no matter how necessary this difference is for other ways in which spiritual existence is actualized. For art and its Ideal is precisely the universal in so far as the universal is configurated for our vision and therefore is still immediately one with particular individuals and their life./(αa) This occurs in the so-called Heroic Age which appears as a time in which virtue, in the Greek sense of αρετη, is the basis of actions.… But this immediate unity of the substantial with the individuality of inclination, impulses, and will is inherent in Greek virtue, so that individuality is a law to itself, without being subjected to an independently subsisting law, judgement, and tribunal. Thus, for example, the Greek heroes appear in a pre-legal era, or become themselves the founders of states, so that right and order, law and morals, proceed from them and are actualized as their own individual work which remains linked with them. In this way Hercules was extolled by the ancient Greeks and stands for them as an ideal of original heroic virtue.” (Hegel 1969e), p. 244; (Hegel 1988), p. 185.
17. “Another circumstance that demands special attention here is that of slavery. This was a necessary condition of an aesthetic (schönen) democracy, where it was the right and duty of every citizen to deliver or to listen to orations respecting the management of the state in the place of public assembly, to take part in the exercise of the Gymnasia, and to participate in the celebration of festivals. It was a necessary condition of such occupations that the citizens should be freed from handicraft occupations and therefore that what among us is performed by free citizens (the work of daily life) should be done by slaves.” (Hegel 1969j), 311; (Hegel 1956), pp. 254–255.
18. Adorno only sees freedom as determinate negation, as the idea of what is lost in some condition of unfreedom, as he puts it gnomically: freedom is the “determinate negation of any given concrete expression of unfreedom.” This has to do with Adorno’s admission of only a “negative” dialectic. (Adorno and Tiedemann 2006), p. 243.
19. See (Pinkard 2007) and (Pinkard 2008).
20. Raymond Geuss makes an allied, although not identical point, about the flaw at the basis of the ancient conceptions of authority: “The ancient situation is one that opens a space for a particular kind of tragedy, namely a misproportion between a discretionary power that can, admittedly, be used appropriately or inappropriately and the failure to specify any effective moral recourse to those who, being subject to this power, might be disadvantaged by its inappropriate use. The modern conception closes off this particular space by assuming a certain moral equality among people and by vesting in each individual a prima facie right to self-protection, which means a right ‘in principle’ to resist.” See the very helpful discussion in (Geuss), p. 118.
21. (Hegel 1969e), 513; (Hegel 1988), p. 400: “The Dike of the Greeks, for example, is not to be called an allegory; she is universal necessity, eternal justice, the universal powerful person, the absolutely substantial basis of the relations of nature and spiritual life, and therefore herself the absolutely independent being whom individuals, gods as well as men, have to follow.”
22. See the discussion in (Osborne 2004). For a less-rosy picture than that of Hegel of the freedom of the polis, see M. I. Finley’s discussion: “What gave it an uncommon twist in Greece was the city-state, with its intimacy, its stress on the community and on the freedom and dignity of the individual which went with membership. The citizen felt he had claims on the community, not merely obligations to it, and if the regime did not satisfy him he was not loath to do something about it—to get rid of it if he could. In consequence the dividing-line between politics and sedition (stasis the Greeks called it) was a thin one in classical Greece, and often enough stasis grew in into ruthless civil war.” (Finley 1977), pp. 59–60.
23. An argument for its falsity is to be found in (Romm 1989). An argument for its plausibility can be found in (French 1994).
24. On the overestimation and mythologizing of Alexander by later historians, see (Beard 2013). On Beard’s account, the epithet, “the great,” is probably a Roman addition to Alexander’s name—which would make sense for a new conquest state seeking to legitimate itself in its Mediterranean world. (Beard also notes that this idea is not original to herself—others have also suggested that “the great” was a Roman invention). See also (Green 2012) and (Osborne 2004).
25. “Greek ethical life had made Greece unfit to form one common state, for the dissociation of small states from each other, and the concentration in cities, where the interest and the spiritual education pervading the whole, could be identical, was the necessary condition of the freedom. It was only a momentary combination that occurred in the Trojan War, and even in the Median wars a union could not be accomplished.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 324; (Hegel 1956), p. 265.
26. Mary Beard has noted how conflicted the origin stories were for the Roman themselves: “More often, though, ancient theorizing broaches a cluster of issues that underlie so much of Roman cultural debate more generally: What was Roman about this characteristically Roman institution? Do the roots of Roman cultural practice lie outside the city? How far is traditional Roman culture always by definition “foreign”? These themes are familiar from the conflicting stories told of the origins of the Roman state as a whole, where the idea of a native Italic identity (in the shape of the Romulus myth) is held in tension with the competing version (in the shape of the Aeneas myth) that derives the Roman state from distant Troy. They are familiar too from the more self-consciously intellectualizing version of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the aim of whose Antiquitates Romanae (Roman Antiquities) was to prove that Rome had been in origin a Greek city.” (Beard 2007), p. 322. In more recent work, she has laid out how problematic the differing origin stories were for the Romans themselves, both in terms of how they conflicted with each other and in terms of the conflicts within each of the stories themselves. Roman “self-consciousness” about this was quite developed. See (Beard 2015).
27. Hegel thought that history was only possible for states. His reason for thinking so was that until a “people” had organized itself into a state, it could not be recognized as a genuine “people” by other states who by virtue of being such states have the authority to bestow recognition or to withhold it. Until it formed a political unity and fought for recognition, a “people” would have to be formless or ambiguous about who they were and hence could not collectively struggle for recognition. This seems contentious at best. For example, the Greeks could not form a single state, but they were recognized nonetheless as “Greeks.” The Persians recognized them as a unitary force even though the Persians did not establish political relations with a unitary Greek state because they could not. Nonetheless, the idea that only as a “people” is a “nation” can it thus be recognized as a “state.”
28. “The Roman people were not produced from a natural unit. They were something made, and thus made violently. By birth, they were not something originary. (Ursprüngliches).” (Hegel 2005), p. 143.
29. “Such an origin brought with itself the hardest discipline. The sacrifice must be the strongest in a band of robbers who in stand in hostile relations to everyone outside of themselves and which have no legitimacy, unlike other peoples whom they revered, since they knew that these others had occupied their land from time immemorial. The bond was not a liberal bond but that of a forced condition of subordination.” (Hegel 2005), p. 144.
30. On the contingency of the formation of Rome’s imperial ambitions, see (Woolf 2012); and (Beard 2015).
31. See the discussion about Rome’s being a conquest state and tributary state in (Woolf 2012). See also (Finley 1983). See also the discussion in (Burbank and Cooper 2010).
32. See (Woolf 2012), p. 37.
33. See (Woolf 2012), p. 226.
34. “The influence of Greece also reaches into the Roman world, and hence, we have to speak of philosophy in the territory of the Roman world; but the Romans produced no proper philosophy any more than any proper poets. They have only received from and imitated others, although they have often done this with esprit; even their religion comes from the Greek, and the special character of Roman religion makes no approach to philosophy and art, but is philosophical and inartistic.” (Hegel 1969h), p. 123; (Hegel 1963), Vol. I, p. 101.
35. “Of the general character of the Romans we can say that, in contrast with that original wild poetry and inversion of everything finite to be found in the Orient and in contrast with the beautiful, harmonious poetry and the equally tempered freedom of Spirit of the Greeks, here, with the Romans the prose of life makes its appearance: The self-consciousness of finitude, the abstraction of the understanding and the hardness of legal personality, whose intractability even in the family is not expanded all the way to natural morality but rather remains the unfeeling non-spiritual, heartless “unit,” which posits the unity of this “unit” only in abstract universality.” (Hegel 1969j), pp. 350–351; (Hegel 1956), p. 288.
36. See the nice discussion in (Beard 2015).
37. “In considering the Roman World, we have not to do with a concretely spiritual life, rich within itself; but the world-historical moment in it is the abstractum of universality, and the purpose which is pursued with severity, devoid of spirit, is mere dominination, in order to that abstractum into valid force.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 340; (Hegel 1956), p. 279.
38. (Hegel 1969j), p. 273; Sibree nicely renders : “Mit dem Lichte der Perser beginnt die geistige Anschauung, und in derselben nimmt der Geist Abschied von der Natur” as “With the ‘Light’ of the Persians begins a spiritual view of things, and here Spirit bids adieu to Nature.” (Hegel 1956) pp. 221–222.
39. The overall conception of Roman subjectivity as contrasted with Greek subjectivity is summed up at (Hegel 1969j), pp. 239–240; (Hegel 1956), pp. 278–279: “Here in Rome then, we find from now on this free universality, this abstract freedom, which on the one hand posits an abstract state, politics and power, over concrete individuality and thoroughly subordinates individuality to politics and power, while on the other side it creates a legal personality (Persönlichkeit) in opposition to this universality—the freedom of the I turned within itself (Ichs in sich), which really must be distinguished from individuality. For legal personality constitutes the ground-level determination of right: It comes into existence chiefly [the institution of] property, but it is indifferent to the concrete determinations of the living spirit with which individuality is concerned. These two elements, which constitute Rome—political universality for itself and the abstract freedom of the individual within itself—at first have to do with the form of inwardness itself. This inwardness—this turn into the self which we saw to be the corruption of the Greek spirit—becomes here the basis on which a new side of world history arises.”
40. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 19; (Hegel 1975), p. 21.
41. “That, therefore, which was abidingly present to the minds of men was not their country, or any kind of ethical unity; rather, they were directed only to yield themselves to fate, and to achieve a perfect indifference to life—an indifference which they sought either in freedom of thought or in immediate sensuous enjoyment. Thus man was either at odds with existence, or entirely given over to sensuous existence. He either found his destiny in the task of acquiring the means of enjoyment through the favor of the emperor, or through violence, testamentary frauds, and cunning; or he sought repose in philosophy, which alone was still able to supply something firm, something existing in and for itself, for the systems of that time—Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism—although opposed to each other, were oriented to the same thing, namely, rendering spirit absolutely indifferent to everything which the actual world had to offer. These philosophies were therefore widely extended among the cultivated: They produced in man an imperturbableness within himself through thinking, through the activity which brings forth the universal.” (Hegel 1969j), pp. 384–385; (Hegel 1956), pp. 317–318.
42. “… The imperturbableness of skepticism made the will’s purpose into the willing of purposelessness itself.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 385; (Hegel 1956), p. 318.
43. “Through its being the state’s purpose, that the individuals in their ethical life should be sacrificed to it, the world is sunk in melancholy: Its heart is broken, and it is all over with the natural side of spirit, which has sunk into a feeling of wretchedness.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 339; (Hegel 1956), p. 278.
44. He takes this in a decidedly Johannine direction to the effect that the divine is reason itself as it manifests itself in life: “Already in John (εν αρχη η ο λογος, και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον, και θεος ην ο λογος [I, 1]) we see the beginning of a more profound comprehension.” [In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.] (Hegel 1969j), p. 401; (Hegel 1956), p. 331. In effect, Hegel makes the Christian God into Aristotle’s god as that divinity is described at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. (Or, conversely, he sees Christianity as the Aristotelian god “becoming flesh,” the concrete, flesh and blood embodiment of “thought thinking thought.”)
45. In discussing the Roman conquest of other “peoples,” Hegel says: “The relation to other nations was purely that of force. The national individuality of peoples did not, as early as the time of the Romans, demand respect, as is the case nowadays. The various peoples were not yet recognized as legitimate, and the various states had not yet recognized each other as essentially existing. Equal right to existence leads to a union of states, such as exists in modern Europe, or a condition like that of Greece, in which the states had an equal right to existence under the protection of the Delphic god.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 374; (Hegel 1956), p. 308.
46. To return to an earlier citation: “For the cognition already contained in the simple logical Idea is only that of the concept of cognition thought by us, not the cognition present at hand for itself, not actual spirit, but only its possibility.” (Hegel 1969c), §381, p. 18; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 8.
47. In the case of Rome, so Hegel thought, this meant that the abstract philosophies of stoicism, skepticism and Epicureanism were the only real possibilities for Roman philosophy: “And thus philosophy stepped over into the Roman world. And even though these philosophies belonged to Greece, and the Romans’ great teachers were always Greeks (these philosophies arose in Greece), these systems in particular constituted under Roman rule the philosophy of the Roman world.” (Hegel 1969i), p. 252; (Hegel 1963), vol. II, p. 234.
48. “In other words, that which exists only in itself is a possibility or potentiality (Vermögen) which has not yet emerged from being an inner into existence. A second moment is necessary before it can attain actuality—that of actuation or actualization; and its principle is the will, the activity of mankind in the world at large. It is only by means of this activity that the original concepts or determinations existing in themselves (an sich seiende) are realized and actualized.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 81; (Hegel 1975), p. 69.
49. In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel credits this to the development of monotheism in the Jewish religion. However, Hegel also held that the Jewish religion could only be a national and not truly universal religion and thus turned out not to be the point in history where the device of “all are free” came to expression. Although Hegel’s rather narrow views on Judaism did indeed expand and change over his career in Berlin, he remained dead set against the idea that Judaism could really be a philosophy of universal humanity. It was, so he argued in the lectures, in fact the destruction of the temple by the Romans and the anguish it produced that pushed some of the Judaic monotheists away from Judaism as a national religion into a religion of humanity—that is to say, Roman power and its abuse created the conditions for Christianity. See the discussion in (Hodgson 2012). This idea of the impossibility of universality for the religion of Judaism was countered by the celebrated neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen in his updating of Kant’s idea of a religion of reason. (Cohen 1995)
50. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 59; (Hegel 1975), p. 51.
51. Hegel notes that: “The racial differences depicted in the Zusatz to §393 are the essential ones, the differences of the universal mind in nature as determined by the concept.” (Hegel 1969c), §394, pp. 63–64; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 46. A. D. Smith’s conception of “ethnies” in his sense is that they are “are constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population” (Smith 1991). Smith uses this concept to explain the phenomenon of nationalism: “A nation … is a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members. By definition the nation is a community of common myths and memories, as is an ethnie. It is also a territorial community. But whereas in the case of ethnies the link with a territory may be only historical and symbolic, in the case of the nation it is physical and actual: nations possess territories. In other words nations always require ethnic ‘elements.’ These may, of course, be reworked; they often are. But nations are inconceivable without some common myths and memories of a territorial home.” (Smith 1991), p. 40. Smith notes elsewhere that an “ethnie” is fundamentally a matter of the “sense of cultural unity and intimacy that ethnicity provides. For the sense of cultural intimacy is what binds the various classes and strata of an ethnie.” (Smith 1998), p. 128.
52. On the idea that Hegel was a racist, see the discussion in (Bonetto 2006).
53. This is the idea lying behind his remarks about “national character,” from which the more general theory of the historical embeddedness of subjectivity must be distinguished, at (Hegel 1969c), (Hegel 1969c), §394, p. 64; , (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 46.
54. (Hegel 1969c), §393, p. 57; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 41: “But descent affords no ground for granting or denying freedom and dominion to human beings. Man is in himself (an sich) rational; herein lies the possibility of equal rights for all men—and the nothingness of a rigid distinction between races which have rights and those which have none.” p. 41.
55. This the subject of Christopher Krebs’s excellent and very important book: (Krebs 2011).
56. See (Krebs 2011), p. 48. Mary Beard notes that Tacitus’ style of argument—to the effect that the “barbarians” may have more virtue than contemporary Romans—had a long history even before Tacitus used it. (Beard 2015), p. 183.
57. Since Hegel held that nature is “impotent”—that it cannot determine sharp boundaries among species, make itself better, etc.—it made little sense for him to think that there even could be clearly demarcated ethnic units. There could be sharp differences among concepts but not in natural unities, whose determinateness always depends on their relation to some “other.” In his Logic, the “something” and its “other” are said to pass over into each other, since there are only provisional boundaries between them that can be drawn.
58. “The ancient Germans (Deutschen) are famed for their love of freedom, and the Romans at the very outset correctly and wholly comprehended them in that way. Freedom in Germany has been the watchword down unto the most recent times.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 425; (Hegel 1956), p. 353. However, he did note that the German tribes were many and racially mixed. For example, he notes: “Germany was originally a set of tribes, which were of partly Germanic (germanisch) origins and partly Slavic origins who had been Germanized. They never made a whole, as happened in France.” (Hegel 2005), p. 200. In his 1822–1823 lectures, he also seems to equate these Germanen with Deutschland. See (Hegel 1996), p. 451; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 470.
59. In a continuation of his reliance on part of the myth of the Germanen, Hegel mentions the importance of the forests—especially ancient, virgin forests—for them, a point Tacitus makes and which became one of the basic bricks of German mythic folklore. In alluding to the idea that it was Roman penetration into “Germania” that forced the Germanen to convert to Christianity and which thus began the modern story, Hegel claims: “A comparison of the free states of North America with European lands is therefore impossible; for in Europe, such a natural outlet for population, notwithstanding all the emigrations that take place, does not exist. Had the woods of Germany been in existence, the French Revolution would not have occurred. North America will be comparable with Europe only after the immeasurable space which that country presents to its inhabitants shall have been occupied, and civil society shall be pressed back on itself.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 113; (Hegel 1956), p. 86. The mythology is even more fraught than Hegel could have known—there also were no longer any virgin forests in Germany by the time of Tacitus. See (Woolf 2012), p. 55.
60. This is a point nicely drawn out by Myriam Bienenstock in her introduction to (Hegel, Bienenstock, and Waszek 2007).
61. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1961), II, #241. (Hegel, Butler, and Seiler 1984), p. 312. For Hegel, those who sought to recapture pure “Deutschtum” were really just showing that they were “Deutschdumm.”
62. (Hegel 1969g), p. 347; (Hegel 1988), p. 1057: “The story of Christ, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Roman law, even the Trojan war have far more present reality for us than the affairs of the Nibelungs which for our national consciousness are simply a past history, swept clean away with a broom. To propose to make things of that sort into something national for us or even into the Book of the German people has been the most trivial and shallow notion. At a time when youthful enthusiasm seemed to be kindled anew, it was a sign of the grey hairs of a second childhood at the approach of death when an age reinvigorated itself on something dead and gone and could expect others to share its feeling of having its present reality in that.”
63. In his 1807 Phenomenology, Hegel makes his case for not allowing the term, “history,” to be used with regard to nature: “In that way, consciousness, as the middle term between universal spirit and its individuality, that is, sensuous consciousness, has for its own middle term the system of the shapes of consciousness as a life of spirit ordering itself into a whole—the system which is here under examination and which has its objective existence as world history. However, organic nature has no history; organic nature immediately descends from its universal, that is, life, into the individuality of existence.… This is so because the whole is not present within it, and the whole is not present in it because the whole does not exist here for itself as a whole.” (Hegel 1969a), p. 226; (Hegel 2010), ¶295.
64. (Hegel 1969a), p. 327; (Hegel 2010), ¶440. “Spirit is the ethical life of a people insofar as it is the immediate truth; it is the individual who is a world. It must advance to a consciousness about what it immediately is, it must sublate that beautiful ethical life, and, by passing through of a series of shapes, it must attain a knowledge of itself. However, these shapes distinguish themselves from the preceding in that they are real spirits, genuine actualities, and, instead of being shapes merely of consciousness, they are shapes of a world.”
65. Interestingly, the argument made in the Logic rests, as Hegel notes in the text, on an argument made in the Phenomenology to the effect that the subject “is absolutely free in knowing its freedom, and it is this very knowledge of its freedom which is its substance, its purpose, and its sole content.” He cites the Phenomenology as the place where he makes that argument. (“[Es] ist absolut frei darin, daß es seine Freiheit weiß, und eben dies Wissen seiner Freiheit ist seine Substanz und Zweck und einziger Inhalt.”) (Hegel 2010), ¶598. The claim in the Logic is found in (Hegel 1969l), p. 545; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 731. (“Consequently the idea enters here into the shape of self-consciousness, and in this one respect coincides with its exposition.”)
66. See also the discussion in (Tinland 2013), pp. 218–230, where he argues that it is precisely in this kind of self-reflexivity that distinguishes Hegel from Schelling. Tinland, however, continues to see this as a kind of “transcendental” project of uncovering the conditions of possibility of subjectivity rather than a series of achievements on the part of historically structured mindedness (or Geistigkeit), although he does not deny the “achievement” part of Hegel’s line of thought.
67. (Hegel 1969a), p. 591; (Hegel 2010), ¶808.
68. One of Hegel’s extended discussions of action and satisfaction is found in (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1956), p. 152: “Action means nothing other than bringing about some end. There is action in that something is ‘brought out’ with it, in that success comes about. The actualization of an end is an achievement (Gelingen); that the action has success (Erfolg) is a satisfaction (Befriedigung), an inseparable fruit of the completed action. Between the acting and the achievement of an end something can place itself in between them and separate them; and someone acting from duty will in many cases know in advance that he can have no external success; but duty is something other than that merely negative indifference vis-à-vis success.”
69. “We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states, and individuals, in restless succession. Everything that can occupy and interest the human mind, every sensation of the good, the beautiful and the great, comes into play; everywhere we see others pursuing aims which we ourselves affirm and whose fulfillment we desire, and we share their hopes and fears. In all these events and contingencies, our first concern is with the deeds and sufferings of men; we see elements of ourselves in everything, so that our sympathies constantly oscillate from one side to the other. Sometimes we are captivated by beauty, freedom, and riches, sometimes we are impressed by human energy, which can invest even vice with greatness. Sometimes we see the accumulated weight of a popular cause lose its impetus and finally disintegrate, to be sacrificed to an infinite complex of minor exigencies. Sometimes we see how a huge expenditure of effort can produce only a trifling result, or conversely, how an apparently insignificant thing can have momentous consequences. Everywhere we see a motley confusion which draws us into its interests, and when one thing disappears, another at once takes its place./The negative aspect of the idea of change moves us to mourning.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 34; (Hegel 1975), p. 32.
70. “The concept of spirit involves a return upon itself, whereby it makes itself its own object; progress therefore is not an indeterminate advance ad infinitum, for there is an end present—namely that of returning upon itself. “(Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 18. (Hegel 1975), p. 149.
71. (Hegel 1969k) , p. 289; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), pp. 210–211: “The fact is that the infinite series contains the bad infinite because what the series is supposed to express remains an ought, and what it does express is encumbered by a beyond which does not go away, and it is diverse from what it is supposed to express.”
72. When Hegel speaks of the “cunning of reason,” he often hedges it to make sure that he intends it as a bit of a metaphor and not a statement of a law of any sort. Thus, he says in the Logic in his discussion of teleology that “but that the purpose posits itself in a mediate connection with the object, and between itself and this object inserts another object, may be regarded as the cunning of reason.” (Hegel 1969l), p. 252; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 663. Likewise, in the lectures on the philosophy of world history, he says, “It is what we may call the cunning of reason that it sets the passions to work in its service, so that those by which it gives itself existence must pay the penalty and suffer the loss.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 105; (Hegel 1975), p. 89. He is less cautious in the Encyclopedia (§209): “This, that the subjective purpose, as the power over these processes within which the objective the processes abrade themselves against each other and sublate each other, and the subjective purpose holds itself externally to them and is what within them is self-preserving—this is the cunning of reason.” In the Zusatz, he says, “Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Its cunning generally consists in the mediating activity which, while it lets objects act upon one another according to their own nature, and work each other off, executes only its purpose without itself mingling in the process.” (Hegel 1969b), §209, p. 365; (Hegel et al. 1991), p. 284.
73. (Hegel 1969l), p. 544; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 731: “Further, since this good is restricted by virtue of its content, there are several kinds of the good; the existing good is not only subject to destruction by external contingency and by being subordinated to evil, but also because of collision and conflict within the good itself.”
74. It is probably worth pointing out that although Hegel is often saddled with a “great man” theory of history, he actually does not hold such a view. Although it was a view that was becoming common enough in his day, he notes that such “great men” were simply lucky. Their greatness was thrust on them by future events, not by any intrinsically superb quality they possessed. Their achievement of their particular ends contingently turned out to be of historical importance, but that was not necessarily their aim. This is part of Hegel’s view of historical development. He does not hold that history consists solely of powerful forces such that there is no room for agency in history. But he also holds that role that agency plays, at least on the part of individuals, is by and large small. He says, “If we go on to examine the fate of these world-historical individuals, we see that they had the good fortune (to be] the executors of an end which marked a stage in the advance of the universal spirit. But as individual subjects, they also have an existence distinct from that of the universal substance, an existence in which they cannot be said to have enjoyed what is commonly called happiness. They did not wish to be happy in any case, but only to attain their end, and they succeeded in doing so only by dint of arduous labors.… Their actions are their entire being, and their whole nature and character are determined by their ruling passion. When their end is attained, they fall aside like empty husks.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), pp. 99–100; (Hegel 1975), p. 85. The idea that Hegel thinks these “great men” are also thereby excused from moral responsibility by virtue of answering to the “higher call” of world-spirit is also effectively demolished in (Alznauer 2015). Alznauer also deals effectively with what had been the standard and best articulated defense of reading Hegel on the “great men” as endorsing a form of amoralism, namely, that given by (Wood 1990).
75. On Hegel’s idea of history as not involving causal laws, see also (Stekeler-Weithofer 2001) ; and (Jaeggi 2014).
76. On this point, see also (Lopez 1967).
77. See (Le Goff 2005) pp. 4–6.
78. (Hegel 1969j), p. 438; (Hegel 1956), p. 364.
79. See (Hegel 1969j), p. 445; (Hegel 1956), p. 369.
80. “Universal injustice, universal lawlessness is brought into a system of private dependence and private obligation, so that it is the formality of requirements that solely constitute the aspect of right.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 446; (Hegel 1956), p. 370.
81. On the more general conception of recognition and social space, see (Testa 2009). See also (Pinkard 1994).
82. (Hegel 1969j), p. 339; (Hegel 1956), p. 278.
83. (Hegel and Lasson 1923), p. 640.
84. “Es ist durch die Welt gleichsam ein allgemeines Gefühl der Nichtigkeit ihres Zustandes gegangen.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 449; (Hegel 1956), p. 373.
85. (Hegel 1969j), p. 470; (Hegel 1956), pp. 391–392.
86. “The discovery of the laws of nature enabled men to contend against the monstrous superstition of the time, as also against all representations of mighty alien powers against which magic alone could win victory … [it turns out that] the Host is simply dough, the relics [of the Saints] mere bones. The rulership of subjectivity was posited against belief founded on authority, and the laws of nature were granted recognition as the only bond connecting the external with the external. Thus all miracles were disallowed: for nature is now a system of known and recognized laws, man is at home in it, and only that which has binding validity is where he finds himself at home; he is free through the knowledge he has gained of nature.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 522; (Hegel 1956), p. 440.
87. “Another technical means was then found to deprive [the nobility] of their superior strength in weaponry—that of gunpowder. Humanity needed it, and it immediately appeared. It was one of the chief instruments in liberating the world from the dominion of physical force, and equalizing the various orders of society. As the distinction between the weapons [of the nobility and non-nobility] vanished, that between lords and serfs also vanished.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 481; (Hegel 1956), p. 402. Hegel also casts doubt on whether the Chinese really invented gunpowder. That is yet another place where he simply gets the facts wrong about matters in Asia. See (Hegel 1969j), p. 481; (Hegel 1956), p. 137.
88. By calling it the “new, final banner,” Hegel indicates that this was not at work until that point, that is, until freedom as this kind of unconditional commitment has emerged as a response to the irrationalities of what came before it. He says: “In the Lutheran Church subjectivity and the individual’s own conviction is just as much necessary as the objectivity of truth. To the Lutherans, truth is not something made; the subject himself is supposed is to become truthful (wahrhaftes), surrendering his particular content vis-à-vis the substantial truth, and making that truth his own.… Thus Christian freedom is actualized.… With that is unfurled the new, the final banner round which the peoples gather—the flag of free spirit, at one with itself, which is indeed existing in the truth and being at one with itself only in that truth. This is the flag under which we serve, and which we bear.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 496; (Hegel 1956), p. 416.
89. “… the principle of holiness had falsely characterized the virtues of the ancients as attractive vices. This ceased.” (Hegel 2005), p. 204.
90. “For honor’s fight for personal self-sufficiency is not bravery defending the polity and the call of justice in the polity or of rectitude (Rechtschaffenheit) in the sphere of private life; on the contrary, honor’s struggle is only for the recognition and the abstract inviolability of the individual person.” (Hegel 1969f), p. 171; (Hegel 1988), p. 553.
91. “But Shakespeare’s characters are self-consistent; they remain true to themselves and their passion, and in what they are and in what confronts them they beat about according only to their own fixed determinacy of character.” (Hegel 1969f), p. 202; (Hegel 1988), p. 579.
92. See (Le Goff 2005), p. 100.
93. (Hegel 1969j), p. 479; (Hegel 1956), p. 400: “The chief point is that the basis and presupposition of such a formation of the state is in the particular nations. [In Europe] there are particular nations present, constituting a unity in their very nature, and which have the absolute tendency to form a state. All did not succeed in attaining this unity of a state.” Some might find Hegel’s invocation of “nations” problematic. One line of thought is that Hegel’s mode of speech is anachronistic since at that time there was no any real conception of “nation” (at least in the later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense of the word). Instead, there were other functional terms, such as “race,” “country,” or “kingdom,” that played similar roles. See the discussion in (Le Goff 2005), pp. 174–176. On the other hand, one can make a good case for Hegel’s view that although modern nationalism (with which he was not particularly sympathetic) was not yet present, the embryonic idea of “nations” was taking shape already in the early Middle Ages. See the discussion in (Lopez 1967), pp. 96–98. Seen in light of the functional similarities between “country” and “kingdom” and the nascent ideas of “nations” in the middle ages, Hegel’s usage does not seem quite so problematic.
94. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 893. See also (Hegel 1996), p. 512; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 510.
95. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 893. See also (Hegel 1996), p. 512; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 510.
96. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 895.
97. “Without war the existence of Protestants could not be secured, for the question was not one of simple conscience but was about respecting public and private property which had been taken possession of in contravention of the rights of the church, for which the church demanded restitution. A condition of absolute mistrust supervened; absolute, because mistrust bound up with the religious conscience was its root.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 515; (Hegel 1956), p. 434.
98. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 895.
99. (Hegel 1969j), p. 479; (Hegel 1956), p. 400: “These historical transitions are assuredly not always so pure, as they have here been presented. Often we find more than one appearing contemporaneously ; but one or the other always predominates.”
100. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 896: “In the way civil wars arose, and one can call these internal wars, although they were not wars of rebellion.”
101. (Hegel 1969j), p. 516; (Hegel 1956), p. 435.
102. That figure is taken from (Fulbrook 2004), p. 64.
103. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 897.
104. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 899. See also (Hegel 1996), p. 512; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 512.
105. (“konstituierte Anarchie”). (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 899.
106. Quoted by (Thomas 2009), p. 60.
107. See (Thomas 2009), p. 64.
108. Cited in (Thomas 2009), p. 64.
109. (Hegel 1969j), p. 509; (Hegel 1956), p. 428: “The rights of the leaders of dynasties and the barons were suppressed, and they were obliged from that time onward to content themselves with official positions in the State. This transformation of the rights of vassals into official functions took place in the several kingdoms in various ways. In France, for example., the great Barons, who were governors of provinces, who could claim such offices as a matter of right, and who like the Turkish Pashas, maintained a body of troops with the revenues thence derived—troops which they might at any moment turn against the King—were reduced to the position of mere landed proprietors or court nobility, and those Pasha-positions became offices held under the government. Or the nobility were employed as officers, generals of the army, that of an army belonging to the state.”
110. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 903. (The phrase is: Außersichsein im Insichsein).
111. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), vol. 4, p. 904.
112. “Among these states there arose many-sided wars.… The purpose and the genuine interest of the wars is now and ever conquest.” (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 908.
113. (Hegel 1969j), p. 509; (Hegel 1956), p. 429: “In this aspect the origination of standing armies is so important an event, for they supply the monarchy with an independent force and are as necessary for the security of the central authority (Mittelpunkts) against the rebellion of the subject individuals as for the defense of the state against foreign enemies.” [In dieser Beziehung ist das Aufkommen der stehenden Heere so wichtig, denn sie geben der Monarchie eine unabhängige Macht und sind ebenso nötig zur Befestigung des Mittelpunkts gegen die Aufstände der unterworfenen Individuen, als sie nach außenhin den Staat verteidigen.]
114. Quoted in (Blanning 2007), p. 286.
115. See (Blanning 2007), p. 286.
116. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 909.
117. (Hegel 1969j), p. 513; (Hegel 1956), p. 431.
118. See (Blanning 2007), p. 547.
119. “The pretensions of Louis XIV were founded not on the extent of his power (as was the case with Charles V) so much as on that culture (Bildung) which was everywhere, with the French language, taken up and was the object of universal admiration. Ludwigs pretentions could therefore plead a higher entitlement than those of the German Emperor.” (Hegel 1969j), pp. 513–514; (Hegel 1956), p. 432.
120. This ascription of the cultural centrality to France is hedged a bit by Hegel when he notes that “What we call Bildung is the act of thinking of abstract universality. France is the land of culture.” Hegel also thought he had made it clear in the Phenomenology that German philosophy after Kant was the successor to being the land of “thinking of abstract universality.” (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 905.
121. Quoted in (Blanning 2007), p. 286.
122. See the discussion in (Pinkard 2000).
123. (Hegel 1969g), p. 129; (Hegel 1988), pp. 885–886: “And what we find here in political matters is neither a superior nobility expelling its prince and tyrant or imposing laws on him, nor a people of farmers, oppressed peasants, who broke free, like the Swiss; on the contrary by far the greater part, except the courageous warriors on land and the bold heroes on the sea, consisted of townspeople, burghers active in trade and well-off, who, comfortable in their business, had no high pretensions, but when it was a question of fighting for the freedom of their well-earned rights, of the special privileges of their provinces, cities, and corporations, they revolted with bold trust in God and in their courage and intelligence, without any fear of exposing themselves to all sorts of danger in face of the tremendous repute of the Spanish domination of half the world; courageously they shed their blood and by this righteous boldness and endurance triumphantly won for themselves both civil and religious independence. If we can call any particular trend of mind ‘deutsch’ [i.e., Dutch or German], it is this loyal, comfortable, homely bourgeois type: this remains in house and surroundings simple, attractive, and neat, in a self-respect without pride, in a piety without the mere enthusiasm of a devotee, but instead concretely pious in mundane affairs and unassuming and content in its wealth; and it can preserve unimpaired an ancestral soundness in thorough carefulness and contentedness in all its circumstances along with independence and advancing freedom, while still being true to its traditional mores (Sitte).”
124. (Hegel 1969g), p. 129. ; (Hegel 1988), p. 886: The question of how modern conditions limit the role that art can play is one to which Hegel devoted much thought. The depth and intricacy of his views on this topic have been explored very convincingly in (Rutter 2011) and in (Pippin 2014). See also (Rebentisch 2012).
125. (Hegel 1969j), p. 527; (Hegel 1956): “on the contrary their will is regarded as deserving of respect only so far as it wisely wills right, justice, and the well-being of the whole.”
126. (Blanning 2007), p. 288.
127. Hegel does not discuss this two-in-one nature of Enlightenment and “Faith” so much in the lectures on the philosophy of history. His discussion of it does, however, form a major chapter of his 1807 Phenomenology. See the discussion in (Pinkard 1994).
128. “It is Schiller who must be given great credit for breaking through the Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of thinking and for venturing on an attempt to get beyond this by intellectually grasping the unity and reconciliation as the truth and by actualizing them in artistic production. For Schiller in his aesthetic writings has not merely taken good note of art and its interest, without any regard for its relation to genuine philosophy, but he has also compared his interest in the beauty of art with philosophical principles, and only by starting from them and with their aid did he penetrate into the deeper nature and concept of the beautiful.” (Hegel 1969e), p. 89; (Hegel 1988), p. 61.
129. See (Hegel 1969d), §207, p. 359; (Hegel 1991), pp. 238–239: “The ethical disposition within this system is therefore that of rectitude and the honor of one’s estate, so that each individual, by a process of self-determination, makes himself a member of one of the moments of civil society through his activity, diligence, and skill, and supports himself in this capacity; and only through this mediation with the universal does he simultaneously provide for himself and gain recognition in his own eyes and in the eyes of others.—Morality has its proper place in this sphere, where reflection on one’s own actions and on the ends of welfare and of particular needs are dominant, and where contingency in the satisfaction of the latter makes even contingent and individual help into a duty.”
130. (Hegel 1969j), p. 525; (Hegel 1956), p. 443: “Two questions therefore suggest themselves: Why di the principle of freedom remain merely formal? And why did the French alone, and not the Germans, set about realizing it?”
131. (Hegel 1969j), p. 510; (Hegel 1956), p. 429: “This, which was established for the persecution of those who secretly adhered to Judaism, and of Moors and heretics, soon assumed a political character, being directed against the enemies of the State. Thus the Inquisition confirmed the despotic power of the King: it claimed supremacy even over bishops and archbishops, and could cite them before its tribunal.”
132. As Hegel notes: “Likewise, today even a General or a Field Marshal has indeed great power; the most essential ends and interests are put into his hands, and his discretion, courage, determination, and spirit have to decide the most important matters; but still what is to be ascribed to his subjective character as his own personal share in this decision is only small in scope. For one thing, the ends are given to him and have their origin, not in his own individual self, but in matters outside the province of his power. For another thing, he does not by himself create the means for achieving these ends; on the contrary, they are provided for him; they are not subject to him or at his beck and call as a person; their position is quite different from that accruing to the personality of this military individual.” (Hegel 1969e), p. 254; (Hegel 1988), p. 194.
133. (Hegel 1969a), p. 378; (Hegel 2010), ¶510.
134. (Hegel 1969a), p. 369; (Hegel 2010), ¶494
135. (Hegel 1969a), p. 389; (Hegel 2010), ¶¶524–525: “The self-conscious and self-expressing torn-apartness of consciousness is as much the derisive laughter about existence as much as it is about the disorientation of the whole and about itself. At the same time, it is the fading sound of this entire disorientation as it still takes note of itself.… From the aspect of the return into the self, the vanity of all things is its own vanity, that is, it is itself vain.”
136. “These universal determinations, based on contemporary consciousness—the laws of nature and the content of what is right and good, is what one has called reason. The binding force (Gelten) of these laws was called Enlightenment. From France it passed over into Germany, and a new world of ideas (Vorstellungen) opened up. The absolute criterion—taking the place of all authority based on religious belief and positive laws of right (especially constitutional law)—was now that the content of spirit itself in a free present was be itself a matter of insight.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 523; (Hegel 1956), p. 441.
137. (Wittgenstein 1963), p. 3.
138. (Hegel 1969a), p. 430; See (Hegel 2010), ¶581: “This culmination [of faith and pure insight] still lacks the actuality of self-consciousness, which is what belongs to the vain consciousness—the world from out of which thought raised itself up to itself. What was lacking is attained in utility insofar as pure insight achieves positive objectivity in utility.” Hegel thought, as the very chapter titles of the Phenomenology show, that Kant’s theory of the infinite worth of subjectivity, while still an expression of the “view from above,” was the rational successor to the failed shapes of subjectivity to be found in “vanity” and “utility” and not merely one expression among the others. It is in Kant’s philosophy that “thought raised itself up to itself” in its penultimate form.
139. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 910.
140. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), pp. 919–920. “Catherine II of Russia also put the general principles into force, and in the American wars [of independence] thought came out on top.” Hegel was more or less silent about the American war of independence for his adult life. He thought it to be rather unimportant for European history since it was an event that took place far away and in a not yet significant part of the world, at least as far as European affairs were concerned. Although he did rather vaguely anticipate Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the significance of the closing of the frontier in America, and he also famously described the United States as the “land of the future,” for him, these were more or less just rhetorical asides to forestall any further discussion of what the American example might mean for Europe. (Some early critics of the 1820 Philosophy of Right complained about his ignoring of the American example.) However, in some of his lectures on the philosophy of history, he did praise the American spirit in the war of independence, comparing the heroism of the militias to those of the Dutch resisting the Spanish, although he also noted how, shortly after the glory years of the wars of independence at a time later when not so much was at stake, they completely folded against the British in 1814. (The militia of the North American republic proved themselves quite as brave in the war of independence as the Dutch did under Philip II [of Spain]; but generally, where such self-sufficiency is not at stake, less power is displayed, and in the year 1814, the militia posted bad grades against the English in 1814.against the English. (Hegel 1969j), p. 114; (Hegel 1956), p. 86). In his youth in Berne, he gave overt praise to the Americans and their war for freedom. (This was in his youthful commentary on a pamphlet denouncing the Bernese oligarchy. It was a pamphlet he translated from the French and published anonymously. Even his own family in Berlin did not know of his authorship.) See the discussion of Hegel’s time in Berne in (Pinkard 2000).
141. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 920. (“… in that way the Enlightenment puts thought in the driver’s seat.) [… so ist der Gedanke doch durch sie [die Aufklärung] auf den Stuhl der Herrschaft gesetzt worden.]
142. Hegel does throw cold water on the idea that the real distinction between the German response to the breakdown of the feudal state and the French response had to do with Mediterranean passion: “As respects the second question—why the French immediately passed over from the theoretical to the practical, while the Germans remained stuck with theoretical abstraction, it might be said: The French are hot-headed [ils ont la tête près du bonnet]; but the ground lies deeper: The formal principle of philosophy in Germany stands over and against a concrete world in which Spirit finds inward satisfaction and in which conscience is at rest.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 526; (Hegel 1956), p. 444.
143. (Hegel 1969j), p. 529; (Hegel 1956), p. 447.
144. This is nicely summed up in (Hobsbawm 1996), p. 75: “Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a continent by sheer personal talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad poems and novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be—the clichés themselves say so—a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilized man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams.”
145. See the discussion of Hegel’s reaction to the Congress of Vienna in (Pinkard 2000).
146. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 906. See also (Hegel 1996), p. 505; (Hegel et al. 2011), p. 508.
147. (Hegel and Lasson 1968) “They are the missionaries for all peoples with respect to industry and technology; by legal trade, they bring the whole world into contact.” Lasson notes that one of the student notes replaces “Technik” (technology) with “Kunst” (“art”).
148. (Hegel and Lasson 1968).
149. This was discussed in his late pamphlet, “On the English Reform Bill.” This is translated in (Hegel, Dickey, and Nisbet 1999). See the discussion in (Pinkard 2000). Hegel notes that in England, instead of relying on university training in rigorous science, the “crass ignorance of fox-hunters and Landjunker” is prized, and the state’s interests are is in the hands of those whose “education [is] acquired simply through social gatherings or through newspapers,” where political influence is reached after an evening of “pudding and dark beer.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1956), pp. 103, 112; (Hegel, Dickey, and Nisbet 1999), p. 310.] As he puts it: “Nowhere more than in England is the prejudice so fixed and so naive that if birth and wealth give a man office they also give him brains.”
150. (Hegel 1969j), p. 508; (Hegel 1956), p. 427.
151. (Hegel 1969j), p. 449; (Hegel 1956), p. 373.
152. Hegel remarks: “One of the leading features in Germany are the laws in the general legal code [Gesetze des Rechts], which was certainly occasioned by French oppression, since this was the especial means of bringing to light the deficiencies of the old system.” (Hegel 1969j), pp. 538–539; (Hegel 1956), p. 456. This point about the necessity for the Revolution’s results to be imported into Germany is also made in (Weiss 2012), p. 191.
153. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 910.
154. (Hegel 2005), p. 128.
155. (Hegel 1969a), p. 483; (Hegel 2010), ¶658: “Thus, as consciousness, absolute self-certainty is immediately converted into a dying sound, into the objectivity of its being-for-itself, but this created world is its speech, which it has likewise immediately heard and whose echo is all that returns to it. That the echo returns to it does not therefore mean that consciousness therein exists in and for itself, for the essence is in its own eyes not simply any kind of in-itself but is rather its very own self. Nor does it have existence, for what is objective does not reach the point of being a negative of the actual self just as this self does not reach the point of being actual.”
156. A beautiful soul eventually has to take on the character of what in biblical terms is called the “the hard heart.” The confessing agent in Hegel’s language confesses, “Ich bin’s” (“I am he”) who has done this—perhaps a reference to Isaiah 47:10 in Luther’s rendering: “Denn du hast dich auf deine Bosheit verlassen, da du dachtest: Man sieht mich nicht! Deine Weisheit und Kunst hat dich verleitet, daß du sprachst in deinem Herzen: Ich bin’s, und sonst keine!” In the 21st Century King James Version (KJ21): “For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness; thou hast said, ‘None seeth me.’ Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I am, and none else besides me.’” When Hegel also says that in this forgiveness and reconciliation between beautiful souls, “The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable,” he is not offering the rather Pollyannaish idea that all evils just could or should be forgotten and forgiven, but the idea that a new shape of life has arisen that has picked up the pieces so that, wounded as it might be, modern life has reason to carry on in a very determinate way that involves opposition within itself: “The word of reconciliation is the existing spirit which immediately intuits in its opposite the pure knowledge of itself as the universal essence, intuits it in the pure knowledge of itself as individuality existing absolutely inwardly—a reciprocal recognition which is absolute spirit.” (Hegel 2010), ¶670. From the standpoint of the Logic, the early modern “monadic” world gives way to a “dyadic” world in which the motivations for establishing such a “monadic” world are recognized and given their rightful place. It is a process of Aufhebung in which the shape of life picks up the pieces, keeps what works and reshapes itself. Thus, even though, to use his own metaphor, the collapse of the ancient Greek life broke the world’s heart, it nonetheless regathered itself and fashioned a new life for itself, instead of being continually haunted by the distress of having lost a non-alienated political world. To have held onto it, after all, would have meant accepting the continued existence of slavery and the exclusion of women.
157. (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 925.
158. The great archetype of this for just about everybody in Hegel’s generation was, of course, Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions, where, unlike Augustine in his book of the same title, Rousseau confesses not to God but to his public.
159. “Soon the whole attention of the inhabitants was given to labor, and the substance of the whole lay in the human needs, peace and quiet, civil rights and justice, security, freedom, and a community that takes as its starting point atomic individuals, so that the state was merely something external for the protection of property. From the Protestant religion sprang the principle of the mutual trust of individuals—trust in the dispositions of other people, for in the Protestant church its entire life, its activity, is that of its religious works themselves. Among Catholics, on the contrary, the basis of such a trust cannot exist, for in secular matters, what rules are only force and voluntary subservience, and the forms which are here called constitutions are in this case only a resort of necessity, and are no protection against mistrust.” (Hegel 1969j), pp. 111–112; (Hegel 1956), p. 84.
160. “In the way, revolutions have taken place in France, Italy (Naples and the Piedmont) and finally in Spain. The revolution thus makes its entrance in the Romance countries (and Ireland is to counted as belonging to this group).” (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 925.
161. “It is, indeed, regarded as a maxim of the profoundest wisdom entirely to separate the laws and constitution of the state from religion, since bigotry and hypocrisy are to be feared as the results of a state religion. But although the content of religion and the state are different, religion and the state are radically one; and the laws find their highest confirmation in Religion.” (Hegel 1969j), p. 531; (Hegel 1956), p. 449.
162. “In terms of their external constitution the Protestant lands are very diverse, for example, Denmark, the Netherlands, England and Prussia. However, the essential principle is present: everything that is to have binding force in the state must have its starting point in insight and be justified by it.” (Hegel and Lasson 1968), p. 933.
163. (Hegel 1969j), p. 535; (Hegel 1956), p. 452;
164. See the delightful account by Eduard Gans, Hegel’s friend and follower, of his unexpected invitation to dinner at the elderly Bentham’s house in 1831, where Bentham insisted that he and Gans were clearly on the same side in the debates against the historicist school headed by Savigny in Berlin. Bentham held that both he and Gans stood on the side of reason as against mere appeal to “hallowed” custom represented by Savigny. Gans’ invitation from Bentham most likely came about via Gans’ friendly acquaintance with the dean of the Paris law faculty, Hyacinthe Blondeau, who had been appointed dean after the “liberal” 1830 July Revolution and who himself was a Benthamite of sorts. See (Gans 1836), pp. 198–214. On the relation between Hegel, Gans and Savigny, see (Pinkard 2000). On the antipathy of French liberals to utilitarianism in general and to Bentham in particular, see (Welch 2012). However, Welch omits the Benthamite connection with regard to Blondeau.
165. See the account in (Furet 1992).
166. (Hegel 1969j), p. 534.
167. Even though Hegel clearly dismissed liberalism in its “atomistic” form, he could fairly be said to be a version of the kind of familiar, rather authoritarian, liberal of the nineteenth century. Liberalism did not conciliate itself with democracy until the twentieth century. On Hegel’s brand of nineteenth-century “authoritarian” liberalism, see (Kervégan 2007).
168. (Hegel 1969j), p. 535; (Hegel 1956), p. 453.
169. Although Hegel speaks of this in the Philosophy of Right, he also makes the same point in the lectures on the philosophy of history: (Hegel 1969j), p. 539. (Hegel 1956), p. 456.: “The government rests on the world of civil servants, and the personal decision of the monarch constitutes its apex; for a final decision is, as was remarked above, utterly necessary. Yet with firmly established laws, and a determinate organization of the state, what is left to the exclusive decision of the monarch is, with regard to what is substantial, no great matter. It is certainly a very fortunate circumstance for a nation, when a sovereign of noble character falls to its lot; yet in a great state even this is of small moment, since its strength lies in the reason incorporated in it.” (Hegel 1956), p. 456.
170. (Hegel 1969j), pp. 526–527; (Hegel 1956), pp. 444–445: “In Germany the Enlightenment was conducted in the interest of theology: in France it immediately took up a position of hostility to the Church. In Germany, with regard to secular relations, everything had already undergone a change for the better. Those pernicious ecclesiastical institutes of celibacy, poverty and laziness had been already abolished; there was no dead weight of enormous wealth attached to the Church, and no constraint put upon the ethical, a constraint which is the source and occasion of vices; there was not that unspeakable injustice which arises from the interference of spiritual power with secular law, nor that other of the divinely anointed legitimacy of Kings, i.e. the doctrine that the arbitrary will of princes, by virtue of their being the Lord’s anointed ones, is divine and holy. On the contrary, their will is regarded as deserving of respect only so far as in association with reason, it wisely wills right, justice, and the welfare of the polity. The principle of thought, therefore, had been so far reconciled already; moreover the Protestant world was aware that in the reconciliation which had previously explicitly arisen, there was the principle that would lead to a further development of justice in the sphere of right.”
171. (Hegel 1969g), p. 353; (Hegel 1988), p. 1062.
172. Klaus Vieweg has suggested a slightly alternative readings of Hegel’s philosophy of history: The “world spirit” should be taken, he argues, as “cosmopolitanism,” as reason, whose being-for-itself constitutes knowledge, as what is universal, which exists in the multiplicity and plurality of states, as a global whole of states.” For him, the end of history just is the modern state that respects and embodies freedom, except that the “end” (freedom) now goes global. (Vieweg 2012), p. 509.
1. (Hegel 1969a), pp. 22–23; (Hegel 2010), ¶17.
2. (Hegel 1969i); (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 515 “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the “I think,” or of self-consciousness.”
3. In his novel and important work on Hegel (which overlaps with a few of the ideas presented here), Robert Brandom has helpfully distinguished in Hegel’s system the distinction between reference-dependence and sense-dependence, even though Hegel himself does not use those terms. Sense-dependence occurs on the side of deontic normative relations among senses, which are the flip side of the alethic modal relations among objects. Conflating the two is the root of the mistaken conclusion that Hegel thinks objects are somehow mind-constituted. (Brandom 2014)
4. See the helpful discussion in (Pippin forthcoming); and (Pippin 2014).
5. “The aim of world history, therefore, is that the spirit should attain knowledge of its genuinely is, that it should make this knowledge objective and actualize this into a present world, and bring itself forth objectively. What is essential here is that this aim is itself something brought forth. Spirit is not a natural entity like an animal, for the animal is only immediately what it is. Spirit is such that it brings itself forth and makes itself what it is. Thus the first embodiment it assumes so that it may be actual is only self-activity. Its essential being is actuosity, not static existence, for it has brought itself forth, it has come to exist for itself, and made itself what it is by its own agency. It can only be said to have a true existence if it has brought itself forth, and its being is process in the absolute sense.… The world spirit has an infinite urge and an irresistible impulse to realize these stages of its development; for this structuring and its realization are its concept. World history merely shows how the spirit gradually attains consciousness and the will to truth; it progresses from its early glimmerings to critical points and finally to complete consciousness.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), pp. 74–75; (Hegel 1975), pp. 64–65.
6. It would take far too much space here to do it even half-justice, but Robert Brandom’s novel interpretation of Hegel in semantic terms offers another, very different interpretation. As Brandom summarizes his view: “The retrospective, recollective form of reason (the owl of Minerva that flies only at dusk, reason’s march through history) constructs a sunny, optimistic, Whiggish perspective that reveals, amid the random, contingent charnel house of our earlier discursive muddling, the emergence of an unbroken record of progress toward truth, understanding, and correct representation of how it is with the real world we turn out all along to have been thinking about and acting in. This is what Hegel means when he talks about ‘giving contingency the form of necessity.’” (Brandom 2009), p. 102. The model Brandom puts to use as Hegel’s rational reconstruction of history is that of Anglo-American case law, where one judge is bound by the commitments of earlier judges in making her decisions but capable of changing the content in certain prescribed ways. Given this, “Because the future stands to the present as the present does to the past, and there is no final future, hence no final authority, every judge is symmetrically recognized and recognizing.” (Brandom 2009), p. 88. As an account of history, this seems far more Whiggish than anything Hegel would have considered. For example, when Rome assumed control of Greece, it did not do so in terms of extending the precedent Greek culture had established. It sacked Corinth and burned it to the ground, even as it did incorporate elements of Greek culture into itself. A slightly better model of history might be the establishment of common law itself: After violently subjecting the Anglo-Saxon king and his subjects at Hastings, William sent out judges to various parts of his new domain to establish a “common law.” There the object was not to rationally extend some old rulings but to displace the old rulings root and branch and replace them with a new authority, one backed up by more than semantic sanctions. Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s historical mode seriously underplays, if not ignores, the kinds of historical tensions which are so crucial to Hegel’s conception of how the “Idea” takes shape in history. This is no doubt because of Brandom’s decision to interpret Hegel in terms of the conditions and development of discursive activity (which is, to be sure, an essential component of the Hegelian project): “The tradition I have retrospectively picked out (and given a rationale for) by selectively privileging some ampliative and critical moves as precedential, expressively progressive developments has at its core a concern with how conceptual content, in various senses, can be understood in terms of its role in discursive activity more generally.” (Brandom 2009), p. 108.
7. This charge—that Hegel was defending the “ruling classes”—was made in Hegel’s own lifetime, and a rebuttal appeared in an entry to an 1824 “Lexicon for the Cultured Classes” which seemed to have had Hegel’s own input in it. Against that charge, it said that “to the extent that Hegel’s view on the state are known to us through his writings, [the phrase, “the actual is the rational”] was in no way employed later on for the benefit of the ruling classes but arose out of the foundations of his philosophy, which everywhere combats empty ideals and seeks to reconcile thoughts and actuality in the absolute Idea through, as it were, the Idea itself.” Cited and discussed by Friedhelm Nicolin, “Der erste Lexicon-Artikel über Hegel (1824),” in (Nicolin, Sziborsky, and Schneider 1996), p. 212. The 1827 version of the Lexicon article (with only minor changes) is reprinted in (Nicolin 1970), #559, pp. 363–371. See the discussion in (Pinkard 2000).
8. He makes this clear that his interest lies in showing how the non-European civilizations have either never left their natural state and thus have not attained a kind of reflective principled way of thought and that this way of viewing subjectivity has as its consequence some ethical results that, from the point of view of subjectivity as having value in and for itself, are negative. That he thinks that Africans exist in an actual “state of nature” only shows once again how little he understood about African life. Hegel’s argument is, roughly, that if Africans do exist in a real, and not hypothetical, Hobbesian state of nature, then the only element binding them can itself only be something like a Hobbesian set of strategies (and, of course, he took the first premise to be true). The core example around which his argument turns is, once again, that of slavery. (Hegel 1969h), p. 129; (Hegel 1956), pp. 98–99: “The doctrine which we draw from this condition of slavery among the negroes, and which constitutes the only side of the question that has an interest for our inquiry, is that with which we are familiar from the Idea, namely, that the state of nature itself is one of absolute and thorough injustice. Every intermediate grade between this and the actuality of a rational state retains moments and aspects of injustice; therefore we find slavery even in the Greek and Roman states, as we do serfdom down to the latest times. But thus existing in a state, slavery is itself a phase of advance from the merely individualized sensual existence. It is a moment of education, a way of becoming a participant in a higher ethical life and the culture connected with it. Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is freedom, but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal (Aufhebung).”
9. See (Pippin 2014, Pinkard 2012).
10. Hegel thus does not subscribe to an “additive theory” of rationality, as defined by (Boyle forthcoming). A different but related line of interpretation of Hegel in this regard is that of (Yeomans 2015).
11. (Aristotle 1941b), 1367a 30–34, p. 1356.
12. (Aristotle 1998), Book V, chapter 6.
13. The Greek institutions of slavery simply obscure the fact, as David Brion Davis put it, that the slave is “not a piece of property, nor a half-human instrument, but a man held down by force.” (Davis 1966), p. 261.
14. (Aristotle 1941a), 1259b.
15. (Hegel 1969d), §482, pp. 301–302; (Hegel et al. 1971), pp. 239–240: “The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have [the Idea of freedom]. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth (as, for example, as an Athenian or Spartan citizen), or by strength of character, education, or philosophy (the sage is free even as a slave and in chains) that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world.… If the knowledge of the Idea—that is, the knowledge that that people the their essence, purpose, and object is that of freedom—is speculative knowledge, then this very Idea itself is the actuality of people, not something which they have but which they are.”
16. The gendering continued to exercise its hold on Hegel himself, and it shows up in Kant before him. Closely linked to the gendered conception is the idea of independence as not being at the beck and call of another. Kant thought this was a natural feature of women and a contingent, although apparently unavoidable, feature of some men: “This quality of being independent, however, requires a distinction between active and passive citizens, though the concept of a passive citizen seems to contradict the concept of a citizen as such. The following examples can serve to remove this difficulty: an apprentice in the service of a merchant or artisan; a domestic servant (as distinguished from a civil servant); a minor (naturaliter uel civiliter); all women and, in general, anyone whose preservation in existence (his being fed and protected) depends not on his management of his own business but on arrangements made by another (except the state). All these people lack civil personality and their existence is, as it were, only inherence.” (Kant and Gregor 1996), p. 126. When Kant includes “all women” here, he seems to be ruling out the very idea that women could escape the predicament of depending “not on [her] management of [her] own business but on arrangements made by another.”
17. (Hegel 1969b), §213, p. 368, 369; (Hegel et al. 1991), p. 286–287: “The Idea is the truth, for the truth is this, that objectivity corresponds with the concept.… It is because of this judgment that the Idea is at first just the one and universal substance, but its developed, authentic actuality is to be as subject and so as spirit.… It is this deeper sense of truth which is at issue when speak, for instance of a true state or a true work of art. These objects are true when they are what they ought to be, that is, when their reality corresponds to their concept.”
18. (Hegel 1969d), §482, p. 302; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 240. The specifically philosophical approach to history, as contrasted with all the other ways in which empirically oriented historians might approach the subject matter, turns on Hegel’s core idea, that of the intelligibility of the world and of subjectivity within it. Forms of life, shapes of spirit, are, as he puts it, the concepts people have of themselves. As they articulate the “Idea” that holds them together, the antinomies within it begin to appear more clearly (as people are pushed to reflect on what for them has until then counted as the “unconditioned,” the absolute), and, as the “Idea” falls apart, those people turn out to be unintelligible to themselves. The sense of their lives threatens to collapse into nothing. Typically at the end of such periods of breakdown, the subjects defending the current “Idea,” as committed to contradictions that seem to be both unintelligible and unavoidable, end up babbling. In the movement of Hegel’s philosophy, the transition to the next stage is not moving to the presuppositions of the preceding stages but to some way of reconciling the contradictions of those previous stages. These transitions are where the Hegelian Aufhebung comes into play. Hegel is thus not offering a “transcendental argument” for these transitions. The later stages are not the presupposition of the former ones. T. W. Adorno’s influential view of Hegel is thereby fundamentally mistaken: “There is no question of whether Hegel was a transcendental analytic philosopher like Kant. One could show in detail how Hegel, as Kant’s critic, sought to do justice to Kant’s intentions by going beyond the Critique of Pure Reason, just as Fichte’s Science of knowledge had pushed the limits of Kant’s concept of the pure. The Hegelian categories, and especially the category of spirit, fall within the domain of transcendental constituents.” (Adorno 1993), pp. 18–19.
19. (Hegel 1969f), p. 249; (Hegel 1988), p. 980.
20. For an account of Hegel’s philosophy in light of contemporary literature on the nature of oppression and oppressed groups, see (Anderson 2009).
21. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 108; (Hegel 1975), p. 92.
22. That is, the agents acting in light of the ethical requirements and permissions of an earlier period may be said to be justified in what they are doing, but they are acting in light of facts (those of their limited ethical order) that turn out historically to be false (that this order makes sense, is rational). Roman aristocrats were therefore ethically justified in doing certain things that were based on an ethical order that was itself false, but which we can know to be false only by virtue of where we stand in the historical order. Some light on this is thrown by R. Jay Wallace’s discussion in a different context of the conditions under which we might retrospectively judge something to have been a good thing even though we should not say that, even so, the agent was not justified in what she did. (Wallace’s example is of somebody promising to drive a friend to the airport but failing to keep the promise, with the result that the friend missed the flight, and the plane crashed, killing everyone on board. It was still wrong to have broken the promise although neither party will regret that the duty taken on by the promise was not fulfilled.) Wallace notes: “Though they do not affect the justification of my earlier action, however, the subsequent events … might have some bearing on the truth of judgments about what I ought to have done.” (Wallace 2013), p. 99. A similar point is made by (Alznauer 2015).
23. (Hegel 1969g), p. 40; (Hegel 1963), p. 21.
24. (Hegel 1969h), p. 329; (Hegel 1956), p. 269: “Socrates is celebrated as a teacher of morality, but we should rather call him the inventor of morality.”
25. This touches on the contested topic of Hegel’s philosophy of religion and what role it plays in his philosophy of history. Hegel clearly thinks that history is the manifestation in some sense of the divine. But what sense? Hegel’s conception of divinity is very nonorthodox, consisting in a fusion of Aristotle’s god in the Nicomachean Ethics (as contemplating eternal truths) and the view in the Gospel of John that in the beginning was the Logos (the “word”). Hegel does indeed think that there is a rational structure to the world, and that this rational structure—the world’s making sense to rational creatures—is what we really care about when we care about divine things. Religion is fundamentally a comprehensive view committed to the idea that there are goods inherent in the structure of the world, and, so Hegel thinks, also to the idea that these goods show up for rational beings and for which justifications can be given. For him, the Christian God just is this Logos made flesh. Thus, as the way in which Geist comes to know itself in time, history manifests not a divine plan but the way in which divinity takes shape in time. Ultimately, this conception strives for a complete theory of all that is, which cannot on its own come from the natural sciences themselves (even though they may manifest this desire to understand everything comprehensively in their own way). Part of Hegel’s most audacious view is his claim that it is his philosophy, and not the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology that provide this comprehensive picture of the world as a place that can be made intelligible to thought. This is why ultimately “religion” has to be sublated by philosophy in Hegel’s system. Nonetheless, the conception of divinity—as the “higher” or “divine” element in such comprehensive thought—that emerges in modern life is itself historical, and, in Hegel’s system, is also something made retrospectively true. It does point to the way in which Hegel tries to combine a more traditionally Christian conception of justice with his insistent modernism. To sketch out that point: The older conception, like the Greek conception, saw justice in terms of an ordering of the cosmos that was reflected also in the human order. As that conception of justice developed in history, it was seen to be sublated into a conception of justice as resting on freedom. The truly just order was one in which “all are free.” To the extent that the move to the institutional and practical embodiment of the “all are free” principle has taken the shape it has, it expresses the way in which the Logos—or, to stretch matters a bit, the space of reasons—is a development of the divine order itself. This way of drawing the distinction between the “cosmic” order of justice and the “freedom-based” order of justice points back to the way that distinction is drawn in (Taylor 1975). However, in Taylor’s view, Hegel’s version of the modern freedom-based order is still dependent on a cosmic view of spirit developing itself—a kind of subject writ large, seeking its own purposes—rather than the more overtly hybrid logic-historicist view I have articulated. Taylor’s view in effect also locates Hegel as the “ontotheologian” his Heideggerian critics have always made him to be. In any event, it is a separate issue as to whether Hegel has also made his case for such a religious view of history. Hegel’s own position sounds suspiciously like the brand of “religious atheism” that is defended in (Dworkin 2013). It also sounds rather like the view that Hegel himself described in the “Preface” to the 1807 Phenomenology, where he spoke of the thinness of contemporary religious conceptions: “Now it seems that there is the need for the opposite, that our sense of things is so deeply rooted in the earthly that an equal power is required to elevate it above all that. Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment merely in the meager feeling of divinity, very much like the wanderer in the desert who longs for a simple drink of water. That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s needs is the full measure of the magnitude of its loss.” (Hegel 1969a), p. 17; (Hegel 2010), ¶8. On the issue of where Hegel’s philosophy of religion stands in relation to his works, see the analysis in (Lewis 2011).
26. See (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 109; (Hegel 1975), p. 92.
27. “Erst das Wissen der Individuen von ihrem Zwecke ist das wahrhaft Sittliche. Es muß das Unbewegte gewußt werden, der unbewegte Bewegende, wie Aristoteles sagt, der das Bewegende ist in den Individuen. Daß es so das Bewegende sei, dazu gehört, daß das Subjekte für sich zur freien Eigentümlichkeit herausgebildet sei.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 91; (Hegel 1975), p. 91: “No truly ethical existence is possible until individuals have become fully conscious of their ends. They must attain knowledge of the unmoved mover, as calls it, of the unmoved motive force by which all individuals are activated. For this force to become effective, the subject must have developed to a condition of free individuality in which it is fully conscious of the eternally unmoved mover, and each individual subject must be free and independent in its own right.”
28. For the Heideggerians, who think that Hegel simply has to be an “ontotheologian,” this looks like the determining piece of evidence. It looks, that is, as if Hegel is asking for the origin of this normativity and locating it in this unchanging kernel of subjectivity. Hegel’s point, however, is different. There is no “origin” of normativity. To be is to be intelligible, and to make that statement itself intelligible requires one to go back to the ground-zero of intelligibility, which would be the thought of what “is,” of “pure being.” There is no origin to “being.” However, that thought already includes its opposite, “nothing,” since if anything is true, then being is not nothing, and, with no way to distinguish the two at that level of ultimate abstraction, the Logic gets moving. To go deeper into the Logic rather than parsing it in the loose way I have done throughout would be another, very different, and very much longer book. When giving his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel himself preferred to draw on his Logic in this very loose way, and I am at least following his lead here.
29. He notes this in his scribbled marginalia to the Philosophy of Right: “In §57 it is mentioned—in the activity of forming—it’s heterogeneous./Man must form himself. It is historical, i.e., belongs in time, into the history prior to freedom—there is history.” (Hegel 1969e), p. 124.
30. “We must merely note for the present that the spirit begins in a state of infinite potentiality (Möglichkeit)—but no more than potentiality—which contains its absolute content (Gehalt) as something as what is in itself, as the object and goal which it only attains as the end result in which it at last achieves its actuality.” (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 157; (Hegel 1975); p. 131.
31. (Hegel 1969c), §376, pp. 538–539; (Hegel and Miller 2004), p. 445: “But it is one-sided to regard spirit in this way as only a becoming from out of the In-itself only that of being-for-itself. To be sure, nature is the immediate—but even so, as the other of spirit, its existence is a relativity: and so, as the negative, its being is only posited. It is the power of free spirit which sublates this negativity; spirit is no less before than after nature, it is not merely the metaphysical Idea of it. Spirit, just because it is the goal of Nature, is prior to it, nature has proceeded from spirit: not empirically, however, but in such a manner that spirit is already from the very first implicitly present in Nature which is spirit’s own presupposition.”
32. This is why Hegel puts so much effort into his Logic. He thinks that unless he can give a non-question-begging account of why this and not other conceptions of subjectivity are to be given priority has to be answered, and that pushes him, as he rightly saw, into the most abstruse areas of metaphysical theory.
33. See Charles Larmore, (Larmore 2012). (Larmore should not be charged with the use I make of the idea.) For a criticism of the more “factualist” approach to reasons that Larmore seems to pursue, see (Wiland 2012). This idea of a practical reason is illustrated in Hegel’s discussion of “the good” in (Hegel 1969i), p. 548; (Hegel and Di Giovanni 2010), p. 733: “In this the presupposition itself is sublated, namely the determination of the good as a merely subjective purpose restricted in content, the necessity of first realizing it by subjective activity, and this activity itself. In the result the mediation itself sublates itself; the result is an immediacy which is not the restoration of the presupposition, but is rather the presupposition as sublated. The idea of the concept that is determined in and for itself is thereby posited, no longer just in the active subject but equally as an immediate actuality; and conversely, this actuality is posited as it is in cognition, as an objectivity that truly exists.” Like all conceptions allied with a more or less ethical functionalist view of subjectivity, Hegel’s conception has at its core the concept of what it means to be a good subject—what function does subjectivity fulfill? Like his great philosophical model, Aristotle, Hegel thinks that this is a feature of our place in the cosmos, and he shares with Aristotle the basic idea that it is reason that is the essential component of being a subject. For Hegel, however, that place in the cosmos is just our place in the space of reasons, concretely and socially conceived. The divine order is nothing else but that: “The speculative is in its innermost unified with the shape of Christ. John already grasped this shape more deeply [than others]. The Logos is God, and the Logos was first.” (Hegel 2005), p. 168. However, he also thinks that an adequate account of subjectivity must be social and historical, and unlike his other great philosophical model, Kant, he does not think that the general and formal category of “rational being” is adequate to characterize what is meant by “rational animal.” He also shares with Kant the conviction that self-consciousness—or, put even more abstractly, the peculiar kind of “self-relation” that makes up the subjectivity of a rational animal—is the key to understanding how practical content is generated. His theory is decidedly not a purely constructivist theory in which people as conceived as blank slates on which something like “culture” works—nor, as already noted, is his view simply that of a lazy teleological view in which we posit some kind of an end to life or history and then see how things do or do not measure up to it or contribute to it, nor is it that of constructing a single idea (even that of “freedom” itself) which is simply applied to many instances.
34. (Hegel 1969d), §482, p. 301; (Hegel 1969d), pp. 239. See also the related discussion in (Boyle forthcoming). Boyle’s suggestion about the concept of rational animals not being “additive” could be taken as another way of stating Hegel’s otherwise obscure point that the “Idea” is not something that people “have” but what they “are.”
35. (Hegel 1969a), p. 143; (Hegel 2010), ¶173. “But this other life for which the genus as such exists and which is the genus for itself, namely, self-consciousness, initially exists in its own eyes merely as this simple essence and, in its own eyes, is an object as the pure I.”
36. In his study of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Joseph McCarney also notes that the empirical findings of history are important “not merely in bearing out the central doctrine but also as contributing to its derivation in the first place.” He does not go into how this works, except to note that if in some future time, as a thought experiment, civil society reverted to a slave society, we would have to give up “Hegel’s conception of the historical dialectic.” However, Hegel need not accept that such an outcome meant we had to give up what he argued. That a slave society might develop out of a free society could not count as progress, period. This would be a problem only if we thought of the standards of freedom as having some kind of metaphysical causal power in the development of history. That the world might nonetheless go through various bouts of grand irrationality, even for thousands of years, is not ruled out by Hegel’s theory. Indeed, he even worried that such a reversion was transpiring in his own time, as McCarney notes. See (McCarney 2000), pp. 208, 213. On Hegel’s worries about the backsliding of his own times, see (Pinkard 2000).
37. Kieran Setiya has argued for a similar position to be found in Iris Murdoch’s writings. On his interpretation, this applies to all our concepts. For Hegel, this idea of perfecting concepts only applies to the metaphysical—“speculative” in his special sense—concepts. It applies to the basic concepts that have come to assume an essential place in our making ourselves intelligible to ourselves. See (Setiya 2013).
38. This point ties Hegel into a certain type of pragmatism, which sees meaning as fundamentally normative all the way down and for which arguments about meaning are really arguments about something analogous to a different rule of use, that is, about which would be a better rule. On the rule-use version of this, see (Lance and Hawthorne 1997); and (Kukla and Lance 2009). Something like this view is also pressed by (Brandom 2009).
39. This idea that “being one’s own person” and freedom as emerging from that is pursued in a different way by (Menke 2010). Menke speaks of “appropriating” social rules or moral laws as “one’s own” and argues that this already supposes the subject as existing in a normative space. In Menke’s terms, the “event” in which the subject became a subject is not therefore comprehensible in terms of these concepts of normativity. For Menke, there is and cannot be any good account of how we step out of the nonnormative into the normative world. This also holds for concepts such as “revolution,” which signify a break that cannot be understood within the terms that precede the break. See (Menke 2015).
40. It is probably worthwhile to note how Hegel’s conception of an infinite end differs from interpretations often put on it, or, for that matter, other philosophies of history that are said to be inspired by Hegel’s own. To sketch out one of the other views in its broadest terms: There is a goal to history, and the stages of history are means to this end. Likewise, for such an important end, there are great sacrifices worth making, and perhaps even great sacrifices which may be legitimately imposed in order to achieve that end. Any interpretation falling into that model mistakes Hegel’s infinite end for, in effect, a finite end. It would treat the infinite end at work in history as if it were something large and difficult to achieve—such as a passionate desire to become a multi-billionaire—and which, once it is achieved, gives way to a new desire (maybe to become a multi-multi-billionaire or a pop star). The end that history shows to be in fact at work in it has to do with the desire to be at one with oneself—to be “bei sich,” which—to translate “bei sich” another way—is to be one’s own person. Hegel’s own argument about that rests on his social conception of subjectivity, specifically, on the need for recognition by subjects to become subjects and to remain subjects. When those forms of recognition fail, people also fail in their subjectivity. They do not fail to have intentions, to speak languages or to act. They do however fail to achieve the purposes, which, under a very specific self-interpretation and social interpretation, they take to be at the heart of what it constitutes “true” subjectivity. They may then see themselves as acting, speaking creatures caught in nature’s indifferent swirl, playthings of the gods, flotsam captured by the flow of history, or merely painfully subject to the arbitrary whims and despotic desires of those more powerful than themselves. They may even resist all of those thoughts, but even in doing so, in trying to reclaim some form of agency for themselves, the fact or at least the possibility of some kind of enervating and devitalizing failure lies before them.
41. In speaking of the role of the Germanen, he says: “The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its purpose is the realization of absolute truth as the infinite self-determination of freedom—that Freedom which has its own absolute form itself as its content. The vocation (Bestimmung) of the German peoples is to be the bearers of the Christian principle. The fundamental principle of spiritual freedom, the principle of reconciliation, was introduced into the still unencumbered, uncultured minds of those peoples, and the part assigned them in the service of the world-spirit was that of not merely possessing the concept of genuine freedom as their religious substance but of producing it freely from their subjective self-consciousness.” (Hegel 1969h), p. 414; (Hegel 1956), p. 341. He also cites Jesus’ biblical statement from Matthew 5:10, which in Luther’s translation is: “Selig sind, die um Gerechtigkeit willen verfolgt werden; denn das Himmelreich ist ihr.” In the King James version, the reference to justice is not as clear: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ (Gerechtigkeit, justice’s) sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
42. On the pervasiveness of ancient slavery and the failure of the ancient world to come to terms with it, see M. I. Finley’s nice summary of some of his own views: (Finley 1964).
43. (Hegel 1969d), §482 pp. 301–302; (Hegel 1969d), pp. 239–240. He repeats this idea in the lectures: see (Hegel 1969h), p. 31; (Hegel 1956), p. 18. To be sure, Hegel himself sometimes states his own case in such polemical terms that he can be read as endorsing the idea that history’s goal is such a finite end, as when he discusses what he calls “world historical individuals.” See, for example, (Hegel 1969h), pp. 45–46; (Hegel 1956), pp. 29–30. There are various passages in his works where he says that world history is more or less amoral, by which he means that an account of the key events in world history will rarely have a moral imperative as their explanation. (More likely they will be struggles over power, status, and access to resources.) Here is a typical passage: “Justice and virtue, violence and vice, talents and their [expressions in] deeds, the small passions and the great, guilt and innocence, the splendor of individual and national life, the independence, fortune and misfortune of states and individuals—all of the have their determinate significance and value in the sphere of conscious actuality, in which judgment and justice—albeit imperfect justice—are meted out to them. World history falls outside of these points of view; in it, that necessary moment of the Idea of the world spirit which constitutes its current stage attains its absolute right, and the people which live at this point, and the deeds of that nation, achieve fulfillment, fortune, and fame.” (Hegel 1969e), §345, p. 505; (Hegel 1991), pp. 373–374.
44. (Hegel 1969g), p. 40; (Hegel 1963), p. 21.
45. (Hegel 1969d), §482, p. 301; (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 239.
46. (Hegel 1969h), p. 496; (Hegel 1956), p. 416.
47. (Hegel 1969d), p. 171, §408. (Hegel et al. 1971), p. 130. (“Aus diesem Grunde muß auch das Moralische vor dem Sittlichen betrachtet werden, obgleich jenes gewissermaßen nur als eine Krankheit an diesem sich hervortut.”)
48. “Similarly, one citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all. This community is the constitution; the virtue of the citizen must therefore be relative to the constitution of which he is a member. If, then, there are many forms of government, it is evident that there is not one single virtue of the good citizen which is perfect virtue. But we say that the good man is he who has one single virtue which is perfect virtue. Hence it is evident that the good citizen need not of necessity possess the virtue which makes a good man.” (Jowett translation) Aristotle, (Aristotle 1941a)
49. It would be an understatement to say that Hegel’s account as laid out in the 1820 Philosophy of Right has provoked rival accounts of just what that account is. It is clear that in some sense there is a sequence from rights to morality to ethical life, but exactly what that sequence is and how the elements relate to each other is a matter of no small dispute. Entering into it, much less attempting to resolve it, is beyond the bound of this work.
50. (Hegel 1969b) §6, p. 49; (Hegel et al. 1991), p. 30.
51. (Finley 1964); (Finley 1980).
52. See the helpful comparisons of Hegel’s views and those of the Confederacy in (Westphal 2016).
53. See (Baptist 2014).
54. This idea of “necessary, so make the best of it” is drawn off Finley’s nice summation of that tradition: (Finley 1964).
55. (Hegel and Ilting 1973): “there can be a historically grounded right which can be rejected by philosophy as irrational. For example, one might justify slavery in the Indies historically … but notwithstanding this justification, reason has to remain firm that the slavery of the negroes is completely wrong, that it is an institution in contradiction to true human and divine rights, and it is to be rejected.”
56. The idea that there could be a modern moral order based on slavery and the subjugation of people by virtue of race was, so Hegel clearly thought, an absurdity. The attempt of the Confederacy in the United States to draft, implement and defend such an order—an effort in which it was decisively defeated—would have struck him as yet another example of a false start in history. Yet as some recent scholarship has argued, slavery was not merely a relic of premodern past still living on in the nineteenth century but a key factor in the rise of modern financial institutions and the wealth-creating machinery of the modern state. On the way in which modernity and the slave system of the south intersected, see (Baptist 2014). See also (Rothman 2005). On the general issue of Hegel’s attitude to slavery as a combination of historical and philosophical phenomena, see the discussion in (Alznauer 2015). Alznauer gives a nuanced interpretation of how Hegel can argue for the relative historical justification of slavery and still claim that, as Hegel himself puts it, “it is in the nature of the case that the slave has an absolute right to free himself.” (Hegel 1969e), §66, Zusatz, p. 144; (Hegel 1991), p. 97.
57. (Hegel 1969e), §258, Zusatz, p. 403; (Hegel 1991), p. 279: “The state is in and for itself the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom, and it is the absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual.” (I take “absolute end” and “infinite end” here to be interchangeable.)
58. A bit of terminology is in order to grasp Hegel’s point. Hegel understood his own views to be opposed to patriarchal rule in families, but he understood “patriarchy” in an older sense, namely, as that of unbridled autocratic rule by the father. However, in the more modern sense of patriarchy as rule by males, it is clear that Hegel in fact argued for the patriarchal family. Obviously one of the issues for interpreting Hegel and his commitments is to tease out whether his views against patriarchy as autocratic rule also push in the direction of opposition to all forms of patriarchy in the contemporary and broader sense. Although she does not explicitly raise these issues about the family, Sybol Anderson explores this aspect of Hegel’s theory. See (Anderson 2009).
59. On the intricacies of reclaiming Hegel’s views for a form of cosmopolitanism, see (Moland 2011). See also the discussion in (Buchwalter 2012).
60. Hegel’s view is thus not at odds with but has a different focus from that proposed by Joshua Cohen in his well-known piece, “The Arc of the Moral Universe,” in (Cohen 2010). Cohen wishes to show how it is possible that “ethical explanations,” as he calls them, can have a legitimate place in historical explanation. Hegel might well agree that they do, but that is not his concern in his own philosophy of history. Cohen’s piece does fit nicely into the idea that “what drives human history is the human ambition to alter one’s condition to match one’s hopes” to be found in (McNeill and McNeill 2003). In referring to the way world history might be treated in an aesthetic fashion, Hegel himself notes: “This could only be done poetically if the inner architect (Werkmeister) of history, the eternal and absolute Idea, which realizes itself in humanity, either came into appearance as a directing, active, and executive individual, or else asserted itself as merely a hidden ever-operative necessity.… In the second case, the part of particular heroes would have to be played by the different national spirits, and their conflict would be the theatre in which the pageant of history would unfold and move forward in continuous development … if an attempt were made to grasp the national spirits in their universality and make them act in that fundamental character, this too would only give us a similar series, and, besides, the individuals in it would only have, like Indian incarnations, a show of existence, a fiction that would have to grow pale in face of the truth of the world-spirit realized in the actual course of history.” (Hegel 1969f), p. 356; (Hegel 1988), pp. 1064–65.
61. (Hegel and Hoffmeister 1994), p. 34; (Hegel 1975), p. 30.
62. He also did not seem to think that this was a problem that had been solved. In his last lecture on the topic before his death in 1831, he noted (remarking on the French Revolution of 1830): “Each particularization appears as a privilege, but there is supposed to be equality. In terms of this principle, no government is possible. This collision, this knot of this problem stands before history, and it is history which has to loosen the knot.” (Hegel 2005), p. 231.