A Hegel Symposium

Citation preview

TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/hegelsymposiumOOOOtrav

A HEGEL SYMPOSIUM

A HEGEL SYMPOSIUM

Essays by CARL J. FRIEDRICH

SIDNEY HOOK

HELMUT MOTEKAT

GUSTAV E. MUELLER

HELMUT REHDER

Edited and with an Introduction by D. C. TRAVIS

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN 12

:

I 962

COPYRIGHT 1962 BY BOARD OF REGENTS, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

Contents Contents

.

v

Introduction

A Philosopher Reconsidered. D. C. Travis

....

3

The Power of Negation: Hegel’s Dialectic and Totalitarian Ideology. Carl J. Friedrich.13 Hegel and the Perspective of Liberalism. Sidney Hook

.

.

39

Hegel and Heine. Helmut Motekat.65 Hegel’s Absolute and the Crisis of Christianity.

Gustav E. Mueller.83 Of Structure and Symbol: The Significance of Hegel’s Phenomenology for Literary Criticism. Helmut Rehder

.

115

Notes on Contributors.139

1 i r) 1 Xlo'lo t

The department of Germanic languages

of The

University of Texas sponsored a series of lectures in the fall of 1960 as a symposium in honor of Hegel. The essays in this volume substantially represent the lectures given at that time. Professor Motekat read his paper in the afternoon of Novem¬ ber 1st; Professor Rehder and Professor Friedrich read theirs in the afternoon and the evening of December 5th, and Pro¬ fessor Mueller and Professor Hook theirs in the afternoon and the evening of December 6th. The informal discussion follow¬ ing the first evening lecture was moderated by Professor A. P. Brogan of The University of Texas, and that of the sec¬ ond evening by Professor R. A. Tsanoff of Rice University, Houston.

INTRODUCTION

D. C. TRAVIS

A Philosopher Reconsidered In sponsoring a series

of lectures and in publishing a

group of essays on Hegel a language and literature department of a contemporary university rashly braves the current compartmentalization of learning and boldly asserts the claims of the human mind to know and to understand an integrated wholeness in the manifestations of the human spirit. Such a venture is surely especially fitting when it honors a philosopher who proudly proclaimed the universality of the spirit. Ordinarily it is customary to make reappraisals of significant in¬ fluences in our intellectual history by tacking them onto neat roundnumber anniversaries. The 190th anniversary of a man’s birth and the 129th anniversary of his death are scarcely occasions of this convenient, if in the end historically meaningless, sort. The movements of the hu¬ man mind bear, in fact, little relation to the neat numerical patterns of the calendar. Our need to understand the past does not really depend on centennials, and the history of ideas has its own rhythms. To find our way in the present we must know the paths that come out of the past. “To become acquainted with Hegel,” Professor Friedrich has written elsewhere, “is to become acquainted with oneself and one’s intellectual background.” A period is beginning which may well prove to be unusually critical in the history of mankind, particularly for that configuration of hu¬ manity in the West that looks back upon a more or less continuous tradition of two thousand years. At a comparatively recent juncture in this millennial tradition Hegel attempted an extraordinarily compre¬ hensive summation, an intellectual achievement that has had enormous influence in further shaping this tradition to make the world the present has inherited and in creating the disciplines by which we seek to under¬ stand and control that world. In the succeeding century and a half, given the dialectical process of influence, Hegel’s thought has had to submit to exceptional use and

3

TRAVIS

abuse. The philosophy of history as the process of freedom in the world has undergone ominous subversions, and our immediate past has ex¬ perienced half a century of irrational attempts and inhuman struggles to force the free dialectic of human history' into the totalitarian rigidity of various millenary absolutes. The principle of negativity, in Hegel’s conception a profoundly creative source of understanding, has degen¬ erated into the shallow basis of sundry sterile nihilisms. The dialectic, for Hegel the dynamic mode of comprehension, has been reduced to a trite and static formula. Any reconsideration of Hegel should seek to achieve a realization of the spirit of Hegel, as the essays in this book do, for this spirit has been largely lost to us in the alienations his philosophy has suffered at the hands of motley Hegelians and Anti-Hegelians. To use Hegel’s expres¬ sion, it is time once more that his philosophy become for itself what it is in itself: a grandiose effort to read in the mind of man cosmic purposes having universal meaning. The time has also been reached in the dialectic of intellectual fatherson relations when the popularity of the sons’ revolts, from Marx to existentialism, may be waning. As intellectual grandchildren we may now be ready to listen to what our intellectual grandfather had to say. Certainly the uses of Hegel’s philosophy are more important than the abuses of it, as Professor Mueller and Professor Rehder suggest in their essays, though these uses, in the spirit of Hegel, may only be discernible in the polemic over its abuses, as Professor Friedrich and Professor Hook show in theirs. It is clear, once more in the spirit of Hegel, that the abuses as well as the uses have their dialectical origin in Hegel’s philosophy itself, as Professors Hook, Friedrich, and Motekat all point out. The spirit of Hegel’s philosophy holds for us a vision of an expanding perspective for human freedom, and it calls for a progressively purifying humanization of man that will transcend his shortcomings and atone for his lapses. It is in this conciliatory view that Hegel joins with Goethe, and it is in this sense that the last two lines of a dedication that Goethe wrote into a copy of Iphigenie in 1827 have been taken, on the sugges¬ tion of Professor Walter Kaufmann in connection with Hegel in an¬ other context, as the motto of this Hegel Symposium: 4

A PHILOSOPHER RECONSIDERED

Alle menschliche Gebrechen Siihnet reine Menschlichkeit. Pure humanity reconciles all human defects. If we take Goethe’s dialectical lines to epitomize Hegel’s vision of hu¬ man destiny in its central focus, we can also lay claim to those that Walt Whitman wrote, after reading Hegel, as a succinct statement of the dynamic vision that Is Hegel’s dialectical view of the world: Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead. and we can understand what Whitman meant when he projected, in Democratic Vistas, a future role for American poets “consistent with the Hegelian formulas,” to which Professor Friedrich has called atten¬ tion elsewhere. The Mikado, on the other hand, considered it the part of justice to consign those he did not like to be “sent to hear sermons from mystical Germans,” and all of the authors in this book bear witness to the cudgel¬ ling Hegel’s language can cause. Goethe and Schiller were worried, when Hegel first came to lecture at the University of Jena in 1801, about how they might remedy the young philosopher’s stiff and obscure use of German. Then Heine, writing in 1833 a little book in French on religion and philosophy in Germany in order to counteract Madame de Stael’s insidious propaganda for German obscurantism, stopped short of expounding Hegel for fear of confounding the French. Yet every philosopher must struggle to force the ordinary counters of language to carry the comprehensive meanings he has in mind, and the result is sel¬ dom limpid elegance. Hegel is able, nevertheless, to reward well the effort the reader has to make to cope with his language. Professor Muel¬ ler, especially, has wrestled with Hegel’s refractory and recalcitrant terminology, and in trying to force Hegel to speak English he has wrested from it new equivalents for the stubborn German. The other authors, too, have felt the exertion of coming to grips with Hegel's central terms, 5

TRAVIS

and the reader has the advantage of comparing the differences and the resemblances they have worked out. There are few contemporary ills besetting the Western world whose philosophical parentage has not been attributed to Hegel. Actuality has struck back at rationality with a vengeance. Faced with our own ca¬ lamitous loss of political nerve, we have sought to use him as a con¬ venient whipping-boy for our intellectual and moral shortcomings. There are, of course, adequate sources of confusion and ambiguity in Hegel’s thought. While Professor Friedrich refutes the view that current totalitarian ideologies as such are direct outgrowths of Hegel’s philos¬ ophy, he does make it abundantly clear that Hegel indulged ways of thinking that can prove dangerously irrational. For the illogic inherent in the Hegelian dialectic can lead on to the operational opportunism of totalitarian systems, and the principle of negativity can be made to justify the attitude of mind that expresses itself in the urge for destruc¬ tion. In this. Professor Friedrich confirms after the fact what Heinrich Heine, as Professor Motekat shows, anticipated more than a century ago, when he identified the Hegelian philosophy as the source of modem atheism and communism. For his part Professor Hook also has his issues with Hegel, and, turn¬ ing Hegel’s dialectic on Hegel’s own self-sufficient conservatism, he shows up the ruthlessness of believing in the rationality of actuality. At the same time he finds that Hegel can help to clarify the sometimes blurred or intransigent perspective of liberalism. The demand for pro¬ gressive change needs to be balanced against the maturity of the his¬ torical situation; insistence on principle ought to be tempered by con¬ sideration of concrete specific needs; fanatic partisanship should be curbed by keeping the mind open towards truth as a whole. x\mong the authors in this book only Professor Mueller Is an avowed Hegelian, and he is probably inclined to regard apostasy from Hegel as the real cause of modem intellectual discomforts. His discussion of Hegel’s conception of the Absolute insists on the central place of the¬ ology in religious thought, and it stresses the evident importance of Hegel's philosophy of religion for any re-thinking of Christian theology in a time of religious crisis. The literary uses of Hegel are perhaps the least obvious, but Professor Rehder has discovered between Goethe and Hegel a remarkable in6

A PHILOSOPHER RECONSIDERED

stance of contemporaneous identification in the history of ideas. The events of mind that Hegel called the phenomenology of the spirit, the dialectical process that makes up the effort of comprehension, is found to parallel the events of literary creation, the dialectical process to which Goethe gave the name of symbolism. Professor Rehder’s analysis then leads to an illuminating interpretation of what has always been the most obscure part of Faust 11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was bom in 1770 on the 27th of August, the eve of Goethe’s own birthday. Twenty-one years Goethe’s junior, the philosopher had the custom of waiting up on his birthday till after midnight in order to toast the poet. It was on the last such anniversary, scarcely three months before Hegel’s sudden death on November 14, 1831, and little more than half a year before Goethe’s own death, that Hegel, for whom Goethe represented the most exem¬ plary human personality, saw fit to acknowledge that the owl of Mi¬ nerva must avert her bleary eyes to the ground before the radiant works of Apollo. Hegel’s deference accorded with Goethe’s own view that in the end it is poetry rather than speculation that is able, as far as this is possible at all, to give expression to the final mysteries. In the circumstances students of literature can take heart, for with the authority of Hegel they can assert the high human place of literary art, the contemplation of which leaves the mind open to the wholeness of truth while it takes delight in the concrete particulars that carry uni¬ versal significance. But in order to understand literature and the mys¬ teries of life that it embodies, it Is well for them not to forgo philosophy. For philosophy will perdure as long as man’s stature remains human. Students of literature should have a share in the continuing revaluation and in the reappraisal of those whose thought, constantly under recon¬ sideration, comprises the perennial philosophy. That has been the in¬ tention of this symposium in honor of Hegel.

7

A SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL Stuttgart, August 27, 1770-Berlin, November 14, 1831

Alle menschliche Gebrechen siihnet reine Menschlichkeit. —Goethe, 1827

The Power of Negation: Hegel's Dialectic and Totalitarian Ideology

CARL J. FRIEDRICH

The Power of Negation: Hegel’s Dialectic and Totalitarian Ideology

In bringing together and confronting two highly contro¬ versial topics such as Hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology, one encounters formidable difficulties. Even if one were more completely specialized in either of these topics than I am or ever expect to be, he might well despair. Maybe it is a case of a fool prancing where angels fear to tread. Yet there is so much said and written that light-heartedly links the two and gingerly asserts that totalitarian ideology is the “out¬ come” or the “necessary consequence” of Hegelian dialectic,1 that the attempt deserves to be made of seeing to what extent a causal or con¬ comitant link can be established. But before we can examine Hegel’s dialectic in relation to particular facets of totalitarian ideology, it is necessary to delineate what is to be understood by such an ideology. It also needs to be stated at the outset that I believe such ideologies to have been and to continue to be important to the leadership of totalitarian regimes, since some outstanding students of totalitarianism have as1 E.g. Karl Popper, in Vol. II of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), entitled “The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath,” wrote (pp. 27-8) : “. . Hegel’s influence has remained the most powerful force . . . [it] is very powerful in moral and social philosophy and in the social and political sciences.. In politics, this is shown most drastically by the fact that the Marxist extreme left wing, as well as the conservative centre, and the Fascist extreme right, all base their political philosophies on Hegel..” Popper’s is perhaps the sharpest and ablest voice; it was answered in bristling rejoinder by Walter Kaufmann in “The Hegel Myth and its Method,” The Philosophical Review, LX (1951), pp. 459ff.

l3

FRIEDRICH

serted the contrary.2 Such views are in part the result of ideological con¬ cerns of the critic, such as the authors of The God that Failed. It is probably easier for a non-Marxist to appreciate the extent of the ideo¬ logical commitment of the Soviet leadership than for a Marxist to whom any position except his own is apt to appear as a betrayal, cynical or other, of the “truth.” It is then very natural to speak of “the mon¬ strous immorality of ideological politics,” rather than to appreciate that “ideological politics,” while indeed immoral, is no more so than other politics, domestic and foreign. In order to avoid underestimating the role ideologies play in the thought of totalitarian elites, it is of crucial importance to arrive at an adequate concept of ideology. Ideology has a function in the process of politics which is very general, and therefore it ought not to be linked to particular content. If one defines ideology, e.g. as claiming “to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the uni¬ verse’, or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man,”3 the inescapable consequence is to gainsay its specifically political function. This function is a special case of the functioning of ideas in politics which will be commented on in connection with Hegel’s dialectic. The concept of ideology has been of great importance in recent scien¬ tific analysis and political oratory. It has its roots in 18th century notions of Helvetius, Holbach, Mandeville, and others, more especially in Hol-

2 See esp. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), pp. 372 ff. and throughout. She alleges that elite formations are “not even supposed to be¬ lieve in the literal truth of ideological cliches.. The elite is not composed of ideologists ... The topmost layer in the organization of totalitarian movements .. to them ideological cliches are mere devices to organize the masses ...” A some¬ what different position is taken by Jeanne Hersch, Ideologies et Realite (1956), who, because she believes the totalitarians, and more especially the Communists, have betrayed ideology, pleads for a new one, democratic, socialist, federalist, which is to replace it. Against such notions, Raymond Aron, L’Opium des Intellectuels (1955), argued that the age of ideologies was possibly drawing to a close, for reasons which relate to what is said in the text above. 3 Arendt, op. cit., p. 159; this characterization contrasts strangely with the as¬ sertion that “every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and im¬ proved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine,” for the content suggested as characteristic of ideology appears to be just that.

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

bach’s techniques of “unmasking” ideas intended to preserve the exist¬ ing order. They provide the background for the notion of ideology as developed by Marx, Mannheim, and others.4 Like propaganda, ideology denotes for many “the other fellow’s ideas which are wrong.” Karl Mannheim, a number of years ago in a pathfinding study, insisted that particular ideologies “structurally resemble lies.”5 “The term de¬ notes that we are sceptical of the ideas and representations advanced by our opponent; they are regarded as more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of the situation, the true recognition of which would not be in accord with his interest.”6 This sort of psychologizing approach to ideology is highly misleading. It stemmed from Mannheim’s earlier preoccupation with the Marxist position which sees all ideas as “super¬ structure” of the economic condition of man. Fundamentally, his analy¬ sis was concerned with “proving” that the Marxist position was like¬ wise “ideological” in this sense. In the political perspective, it is not of primary importance whether ideology contains misrepresentations or not. Take, for example, the statement from the Declaration of Inde¬ pendence that “all men are created equal.” This statement, when con¬ sidered in purely observational perspective is undoubtedly incorrect. 4 There is a resemblance here to the “propaganda analysis” activities of recent years. Raymond Aron’s notion that the end of the “age of ideology” is in sight, L’Opium des Intellectuels (1955), pp. 315ff., seems rather doubtful; the same general theme has been even less convincingly developed by Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology (1960). See for the 18th century background Hans Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie (1945), esp. pp. 54ff. 5 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936, 1953), p. 238 and elsewhere. The entire phrase refers to particular ideologies, which he distinguishes from “total ideologies” discussed below, and reads:

“...all those utterances the

‘falsity’ of which is due to an intentional or unintentional, conscious, semi-con¬ scious, or unconscious, deluding of one’s self or of others, taking place on a psy¬ chological level and structurally resembling lies.” “We speak of this conception of ideology as particular because it always refers only to specific assertions which may be regarded as concealments, falsifications or lies without attacking the in¬ tegrity of the total mental structure of the asserting subject.” (Italics in the original.) This book contains Mannheim’s original work of 1929, as well as an article of 1931 and an introductory chapter written after he had come to Eng¬ land and intended to introduce the subject to Englishmen. The work is meant to make ideology the key to the “sociology of knowledge.” 6 Ibid., p. 49.

15

FRIEDRICH

Anti-democrats have never wearied in dwelling on this aspect of the matter. The Declaration also asserts a considerable number of “facts” to prove the “absolute tyranny” of the British King. Some of these “facts” are quite fanciful, others are quite true. So is the proposition that “prudence will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes . . .” Of all these state¬ ments, some true, some false, the one first stated and alleging the equality of men is most distinctly ideological. Not because it is either true or false, but because it receives its significance from the implications it carries: hereditary privileges are bad and should be abolished, and a society without such privileges is good and should be established. In short, men should be treated, as if they had been created equal, and public policy should be framed in accordance with this projection. Ideologies are action-related systems of ideas. They typically contain a program and a strategy for its realization, and their essential function is to unite organizations which are built around them.7 It is confusing, and fails to provide the opportunity for political analysis, to label as ide¬ ology any system of ideas, such as the philosophy of Aristotle, or the theology of the Old Testament. Such systems of ideas may provide the basis for an ideology, but only after being related to action in a specific sense and for a specific situation. For ideologies are sets of ideas related to the existing political and social order and intended either to change it or to defend it. They came into use in connection with modern party activity. Napoleon Bonaparte gave “ideology” its modern slant when he attacked Destutt de Tracy and his “Institut de lTdeologie” as subver7 Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (1953), p. 24 and elsewhere, calls this kind of ideology an “operational code,” but it is more than that, namely a system, more or less, of ideas relating to action. Clyde Kluckhohn, in Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951), p. 432, likewise speaks of ideology as “a system of ideas” but does not develop the implications. It is striking, indeed, that this ambitious attempt at formulating a general “theory of action” makes no other analysis of ideology and hardly refers to ideas at all. All earlier analysis in terms of ideas is swallowed up by an analysis in terms of “values,” yet these are treated as subjective givens, rather than as the objects which are subjectively reflected in “ideas.” This is in keeping with the mechanical view of system. The action-relatedness of ideology is clearly recognized by Alfred G. Meyer who, in his Marxism—The Unity of Theory and Practice (1954), de¬ lineates also Marx’ own vague concept of ideology, pp. 103ff.

l6

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

sive. Though he and his associates thought of ideology as the study of ideas, more especially the ideas of the revolution, Napoleon used the term “ideologues” in a pejorative, accusative sense to belabor a group of opponents who argued the cogency of the revolutionary “ideology.”8 Since the ideas an ideology contains are as such action-related, they may or may not be very true and appropriate; what makes them “ide¬ ology” is their function in the body politic. An ideology is thus a set of ideas which unites a party or other group for effective participation in political life. Such a functional political concept of ideology is particu¬ larly useful in assessing its role in totalitarian dictatorship. In contrast to such a functional concept of ideology, the term has been broadened to cover any “general system of beliefs held in common by the members of a collectivity . . .”9 Such a definition would make an ideology a characteristic feature of any politically organized community, serving the purpose of integrating the community. It resembles Mann¬ heim’s notion of a total ideology as “the characteristics and compo¬ sition of the total structure of the mind of this epoch or of this group,”10 but omits the latter’s historical dimension. There is no sense in arguing about word use, but since the terms “belief system” and “value system” are common expressions for the phenomena they refer to, there is little advantage in also calling them an “ideology.” We need a term to desig¬ nate a reasonably coherent body of ideas concerning practical means of how to change, reform (or maintain) a political order, and the word “ideology” offers itself conventionally as the best word for it. Such a body of ideas is typically based upon more or less elaborate criticisms of what is wrong with the existing or antecedent order, including criticism of the critics.11

8 Hans Barth, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 15-35. 9 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (1951), p. 349. 10 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1953), pp. 49 and 111; Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (1950), para. 3.1, 6.1 and 6.3, politicize this notion, calling an ideology a “political myth” and defining it fur¬ ther as a “pattern of basic political symbols.” 11 Such criticism and proposals for reform are meant to encompass a conserva¬ tive critique of transformations which are in the course of taking place, presum¬ ably as a consequence of reformist ideologies; this sort of counter-criticism too is action-related. Cf., e.g., Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (1955).

FRIEDRICH

Such political ideologies may be partial or total, depending upon the range of the criticism involved. If it entails a total rejection of the existing order, and ideas about a total reconstruction, the ideology may properly be called “total.” Since such total transformation would be utopian without the employment of violence, total ideologies character¬ istically also encompass the positive acceptance of violence as an instru¬ ment of politics, be this class war or war between other groups, such as races or nations.12 Totalitarian ideologies, in carrying such criticism to a radical extreme, turn from reform to revolution. The parties which are built around them cease to have the characteristic features of democratic parties and turn into “movements” seeking to monopolize the political arena. Vio¬ lence ceases to be merely an ingredient of the ideological combat; it be¬ comes an accepted tool in the group’s daily activities. Such ready acceptance of violence in the service of ideas constitutes a first link to Hegel’s dialectic. In a famous passage he speaks of world history as the world court, to clinch the argument that war is the ultimate test of the vitality of ideas which the nations are called upon to realize in the course of world history. Such “concretization” of ideas was at the base of Marx’ notion of the proletariat as the class called upon to realize the next (and in Marx’ view) final step in the evolution of mankind.13 And what holds for nations, the “world historical” individuals, holds also for their leaders: “If we cast a glance at the destiny of these world historical individuals, [we see that] they have had the good luck to be the executioners of a purpose which forms a stage in the forward march of the general spirit.” And thus “so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.” The lot, Hegel adds, of these “world historical persons, whose vocation 12 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), II, p. 28. For a further elaboration of the problem of totalitarian ideology, cf. Carl J. Friedrich and Z. K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), ch. VII, and the latter’s The Soviet Bloc—Unity and Conflict (1959), which extensively deals with the ideological problems of the Communist states, prior to the recent clash between the USSR and China. One has to remember, however, that accord¬ ing to the Hegelian doctrine of the reconciliation of opposites Marxist ideology “preserves” as well as supersedes the existing order. 13 Konrad

Bekker, Marx’ philosophische

Entwicklung—sein

Hegel (1940), passim. Cf. also Meyer, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 98ff.

18

Verhaltnis zu

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

it was to be the agents of the World Spirit, we find not to have been an happy one”; they are haunted and murdered, but “they are great men, because they willed and accomplished something great; not a mere fancy, a mere intention, but that which met the case and fell in with the needs of the age.” Whatever their personal psychology (and Hegel mocks at the psychologizing engaged in by the “valets” who moralize), they fulfill what is objectively called for by the World Spirit,—a process Hegel speaks of as the “cunning of reason,”14 which puts men and na¬ tions to work without their realizing what is happening. With such an approach the basis is laid for a glorification of violence in the name of the dialectics of history. A full appreciation of the dialectics of history presupposes an under¬ standing of the dialectic itself. But this understanding is itself most readily gathered, if it is seen in the perspective of the history of philos¬ ophy.15 This history reveals the gradual unfolding of the truth, as the dialectic of the spirit explicitly works out its several phases. It shows that there is “only one spirit, one principle, which expresses itself in politics, as it does in religion, art, ethics, manners, commerce and in¬ dustry. . . . The spirit is only one, it is the substantive spirit of an epoch, of a nation . . .” He adds that neither is philosophy the basis of the other manifestations of the spirit, nor are they the roots of philosophy. “All these aspects have one character . . .” Thus the unity of culture in all its manifestations is conceived by Hegel as its “spirit.” 14 A similar notion was put forward by Burke who spoke of the “tactic of his¬ tory.” In a longish passage on the lessons of history in the Revolution in France, Works, III, pp. 167ff., he also speaks of the futility of moralizing upon the evil deeds of men engaged in historical struggles but then expresses vague hopes of a future which will bring a cessation of such barbarism. Still, I agree with Leo Strauss that “Burke comes close to suggesting that to oppose a thoroughly evil cur¬ rent in human affairs is perverse, if that current is sufficiently powerful . . .” (Natural Right and History (1953), p. 318.) Cf. also Hegel’s reluctant recogni¬ tion of a shepherd’s morality in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, my The Philosophy of Hegel (1953), p. 20. 15 Hegel’s History of Philosophy is, in my opinion, the very key to an under¬ standing of the dialectic in history. Though the work has been known for a long time, only through lecture notes, like several of Hegel’s key works, it has now been critically edited with the help of manuscript material. It is, unfortunately, not available in English, except for the excerpt included in my The Philosophy of Hegel, pp. 161-173; cf. also my comments pp. XXX-XXXI.

l9

FRIEDRICH

If it is asked what this “spirit” might be, Hegel’s answer is that it can be discovered only in the workings of reason. The workings of reason are the dialectic, and this dialectic is therefore the key to the universe, which is to be discovered and described in a new “logic.”16 Hegel has expressed himself with straightforward explicitness on this score. In the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, he wrote: The logical and even more the dialectical nature of a concept which is that it determines (bestimmt) itself, that it posits determinations (Bestimmungen) and that it suspends these in turn, and, by this suspension [preservation and transcendence] gains an affirmative and indeed richer and more concrete determination—this inherent necessity and the neces¬ sary succession of pure abstract conceptual determinations is the subject of the Logik}7 Thus we can come to comprehend the historical process by investigat¬ ing the human thought processes as revealed in logical operations which are quite different from traditional formal logic. Such a logic does not deal with “abstract” concepts, but with the “concrete” implications of the basic concept of being which these several categories “unfold.” The Science of Logic, it is evident, is no logic in the traditional sense at all, and Hegel took great pride in the fact that it was not. For this traditional logic was concerned with what Hegel considered “abstrac¬ tions” and lifeless ratiocination concerning such abstractions. The true logic is concerned with the ground of being, the beginning and the end of all philosophy. In short, it is ontology. Traditional logic is based upon the law of contradiction, according 16 There are three main versions of Hegel’s Logik, the early one, written at Jena around 1802-03 but published by Lasson in 1925, the Grosse Logik of 1812-4, and the summary included in the Enzyklopaedie of 1817. Cf. the classic analysis in W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (1924), which has been bitterly attacked by Mueller in the article cited below, note 21. 17 Hegel, ed. Friedrich, pp. 28-29. The translation by J. Sibree, recently pub¬ lished by Dover, p. 63, is rather different in detail but carries the same point. For the objection to rendering aufheben as transcend see my Intro., p. XXIX. Hegel liked to play upon the treble meaning of this word which can mean sus¬ pend, but also “elevate” and “preserve,” in attempting to convey his notion of negation in Logic: the concept of not-being suspends and yet preserves the con¬ cept of being; both are suspended and preserved by becoming which provides a synthesis, thus lifting them to a higher plane. See below p. 22.

20

hegel's dialectic and totalitarian ideology

to which A is not non-A. Hegel’s entire Logic is built upon an onto¬ logical repudiation of this principle. He does not repudiate it for “ab¬ stract thought,” that is to say, for ordinary scientific thought. But he does reject it for philosophical and dialectical purposes. The repudiation takes the form of dialectic. This dialectic is the celebrated core of Hegel's philosophical method, the procedure upon which he based his proud claim of having “completed” the task of the spirit as manifest in phi¬ losophy. “I know,” Hegel says in his Introduction to the Logic, “that my method is the one and only true one.” And the reason he thought so was the dialectic which enabled him, he thought, to grasp the object as it is in itself. This dialectic method is nothing separate and apart from its content or object; it Ls “at work in the object and moves it along.”18 In order to appreciate what Hegel is getting at, it is necessary to realize that the dialectical process is not a type of deduction. It is com¬ mon to associate with the notion of dialectic some idea of a priori reason¬ ing. In Hegel’s view this is entirely inadmissible. Dialectics is descriptive: descriptive of the process of thought which one must have experienced in order to be able to understand it. Dialectic in this sense shares some¬ thing of the intuitive quality of all direct experience. The central experience with which dialectic struggles is the inade¬ quacy of all concepts. Hence Hegel insists that such concepts must be made to correspond to the fluidity and richness of what is being seen when life in its fullness is beheld. I have therefore considered it desir¬ able to render the specific Hegelian Be griff as conception rather than concept;19 for it is intended to be something broader, more compre¬ hensive, and lacking logical precision in the traditional sense. As Hart¬ mann says, “The result is a new conception of the concept.”20 Besides first the object with which the conception is concerned and second the 18 Logik, ed. Lasson, “Einleitung des Herausgebers.” p. XVII. 19 Hegel’s central term Be griff has been rendered by some careful students, e.g. Baillie, as notion; but while notion may be more comprehensive than concept, it gainsays the intended logical sharpness of Hegel’s term. In the same connection, I might mention some of the difficulties encountered in rendering the German term Anschauung, usually translated as intuition. The matter is discussed in my Introduction to The Philosophy of Kant in the Modem Library. 20 See Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophic des Dcutschen Idealismus, II, Hegel (1929), which contains the most penetrating recent discussion of Hegel’s Logik; the reference is to p. 168.

21

FRIEDRICH

conceiver, one other persistent core of so fluid a conception remains: its various aspects form a unique system, and through this interrelation¬ ship all the conceptions in turn form a system. If the conception thus only emerges in the process of reasoning, if it involves “hard work,” as Hegel in good German fashion likes to insist, then the dialectic is this “movement of the conceptions,” this dynamic process by which they are distilled, not as something static and fixed, but as something forever evolving and achieving new forms as the per¬ spectives change through the relation with other conceptions. The law of dialectic is probably the best-known and at the same time the least understood aspect of Hegel’s philosophy. The thesis-antithesissynthesis triad has an arid and formal ring, especially when associated with some of the later notions of the materialist interpretation of his¬ tory. In point of fact, we are here confronted with something very much more perplexing, richer, and yet at the same time more confused, than the simple logical triad suggests.21 I have already discussed the notion, so central to Hegel’s dialectic, that both antithesis and synthesis preserve as well as suspend the antecedent conception. I have also mentioned the related notion that the synthesis “elevates” the two antecedent con¬ ceptions (note 17); it is through such synthesis that the conceptions reach ever new “levels of discourse.” And it is Hegel’s contention that this dialectic process is not something he invented, not a newfangled notion at all, but a sound and objective description of what has actually occurred in the history of the spirit as manifest in the development of philosophy. The “vast power of negation” which fascinated Hegel is the originator of ever-new thought. Hegel does not pretend to understand how this can be; all he knows is that it is so. Philosophical thought records and ana¬ lyzes the experiences which it has made; that is all. Hence the somewhat stereotype character of this dialectic. No synthesis, no matter how unique, can help arousing this power of negation, can help eliciting a 21 It has recently been argued rather convincingly that the almost complete ab¬ sence of the triad from Hegel’s own writings, noted by a number of scholars, in¬ cluding the author of the exhaustive study on Hegel’s language, Theodor Haering, Hegel, sein Wollen und Werk (1929), really constitutes a Marxist gloss; see Gus¬ tav E. Mueller, “The Hegel Legend of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XIX (1958), pp. 41 Iff.

22

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

contradiction and thus starting the process all over again. As already said, in terms of abstract logic, the Hegelian position amounts to claim¬ ing that A is non-A. This formidable challenge to established logical principle is rooted in an ontological, that is to say, metaphysical assump¬ tion. This metaphysical assumption is the core of Hegelian philosophy: the identity of reality and reason. Hence Hegel can assert that dialectic is God’s thinking himself in man or, to put it another way, dialectic is eternal reason realizing itself in man’s thought, in history, and even in nature. The whole argument of The Science of Logic stands or falls with this metaphysical basis. One of the difficult, if not unresolvable, problems of Hegel’s dialectic approach is that of where to begin. He chooses, rather surprisingly, the conception of being (Sein). In order to understand this choice, one has to remember that reality and reason are one, and that therefore the Phenomenology of the Spirit is a kind of prolegomena for the Logic. What is most immediately given is being, but being without reference to any particular thing, indeterminate being. This at once posits the negation of being: the absence of all determination suggests non-being, or nothingness (Nichts). We have here the contradiction of non¬ being/being—a basic dialectic issue in Plato’s Parmenides. But whereas in Plato the static eternity of the ideas stands in the way of a resolution, Hegel dialectically resolves, that is to say, suspends and preserves, the antithetical paradox by suggesting that both being and non-being—or rather nothingness—are superseded by and transcended in the higher synthesis of becoming (Werden). The truth of both being and nonbeing is to be found in their actual coexistence in “becoming” which constitutes “the identity of their identity and their non-identity.” As Hegel puts it in the Logic, the truth is that “each immediately disap¬ pears in its opposite.”22 The category of becoming is extremely important for Hegel; all higher being is movement, development, action, history. Hence God, too, is essentially becoming. God as merely being is lifeless, an abstrac¬ tion, a motionless substance. For Hegel, God is active, a spiritual being full of life and unfolding in accordance with His inner nature. But the process does not stop at becoming; as becoming is actualization, it be-

22 Logik, ed. Lasson, p. 67.

23

FRIEDRICH

comes something. Being here-and-now

(Dasein)

is definite, is a

settled something that has ceased to become. Thus it is, according to Hegel, that becoming (Werden) suspends itself, as it suspends being and nothingness or non-being and becomes something actually existent here-and-now (Dasein). But at the same time it also preserves itself as well as being and nothingness in this being here-and-now. As being and nothingness disappear into becoming, so becoming disappears, because that which is disappearing disappears itself. “Becoming is an untamed restlessness (haltungslose Unruhe) which coalesces into a result that rests.”23 We cannot here pursue further the meandering course of the dialectic through its complex unfolding in the Logic; enough has per¬ haps been said to indicate, if ever so briefly, just how the dialectic proceeds and how extraordinarily obscure much of its reasoning appears. No wonder that Hegel could at one point speak of the true as a “Bacchantian ecstasy (Taumel) in which no member is not drunk, and because each [member] as it separates itself, also dissolves itself, it [such ecstasy] is also clear and simple rest.”24 Finiteness and infinity, quantity and measure, being for and by itself, reflection and essence, phenomenal and actual world, conception, subjectivity, and objectivity, and finally the idea—these and many other minor categories are treated in the same extraordinary way, their interrelationship being traced as one vast system of contradictions, with the conceptions containing these con¬ tradictions.25 This laborious exploration of conceptions may be illustrated by the idea of freedom, so central to the entire Hegelian philosophy. Hegel does not identify freedom with freedom of the will, or freedom from the operation of causality. Freedom is the activation of one’s own inner tendency; it is an unfolding of oneself; it is self-realization. The tele23 Ibid., p. 93. 24 Phanomenologie des Geistes.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der

Deutschen Seele (1937), the first volume of which is devoted to German idealism, has presented a highly suggestive analysis of this aspect of Hegel’s work. He cites (p. 564) Philosophy of Religion: “Aus der Gahrung der Endlichkeit, indem sie sich in Schaum verwandelt, duftet der Geist hervor.” Balthasar comments at another point that “Der Vorgang ist alles, ist die Wahrheit.” Thus truth is in “process.” In this connection compare also Herbert Marcuse’s penetrating Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Geschichtlichkeit (1932), published in Eng¬ lish as Reason and Revolution in 1941. 25 Cf. Bekker, op. cit. (note 13), pp. 100 ff. for a good summary.

24

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

ological, Aristotelian matrix is clearly apparent here, and its inherent contradiction is comprehended in its very conception; without such con¬ tradictions it would not be actual in any true sense. True freedom is true necessity, is true cause, because it is true inner law and hence true substance. To know and understand (in so far as it can be understood) this metaphysical conception of freedom as meaningful destiny through self-fulfillment is vital for a grasp of Hegel’s thought on right, law, and history. The essential systematic connection of his entire philosophy is nowhere more apparent. The Science of Logic provides the conceptions for an understanding of the working of the objective spirit in its various fields; but it is equally true that an intense, ever-moving, concrete vision of the work which the objective spirit has accomplished through¬ out the ages is essential to an understanding of the conceptions with which The Science of Logic deals. The notion of a dialectically fixed, logically inexorable history (and destiny) had a powerful appeal to Karl Marx. The destruction of an existing scheme of things—a scheme passionately rejected by him— thus appeared as not only possible and desirable, but as intrinsically right and just. The “power of negation,” apparent in logic, but trans¬ posed and reified by Hegel as a force in history, could thereby acquire a concrete significance and be made to operate as one vast bulldozer to crush and sweep away all existing social institutions “into the ash-can of history.”26 In his interpretation of this side of Marxism as a species of secular religion—a notion which has since then been widely accepted -—the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev stressed the messianism and the transference of the notion of a chosen people to the proletariat. In this connection he asserted that Marx, being a Jew who had aban¬ doned the faith of his forebears, nonetheless preserved the messianic hope of their faith in the depth of his soul.27 However that may be on 26 This striking phrase is presumably Trotski’s; cf. Leon Trotski, Literature and Revolution (1957), p. 41. 27 Wahrheit und Lilge des Kommunismus (Germ. Tr. 1934), p. 24. In English cf. Berdyaev’s The Origins of Russian Communism (1937) for a similar analysis. Cf. also the comparable emphasis on the “moral genius” of the Jewish people in Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940), p. 306, which contains a readable summary of Soviet ideology as an action pattern. Cf. also Clinton Rossiter, Marxism—The View from America (1960).

25

FRIEDRICH

biographical or psychological grounds, there is a striking parallel be¬ tween the two ideas. The proletariat is the great hope, both for accom¬ plishing the total destruction of the existing and the reconstruction of a totally different society. It is well-known that Marx was considerably more explicit, however, about destruction than about the reconstruction, just as Hegel was more enamored of the power of negation than of any other feature of the dialectical process. The situation is similar in the case of Fascism and National Socialism. Neither Mussolini nor Hitler possessed, of course, the grasp of Hegel which Marx had had. Mussolini, an old Socialist of the Marxian tradition, well acquainted with and esteemed by Lenin, must be pre¬ sumed to have absorbed the dialectic, however, while Hitler on the low level of his intellectual efforts, drifted along in the general sea of vulgar Hegelian notions that were abroad in Germany and Austria. Since he took over and adapted the ideology of Fascism, his notions in this con¬ text are of little interest, anyhow. The word does not, to my knowledge, appear in Mein Kampf, nor in his Table Talk.28 Furthermore, Hitler’s explicit rejection of the state as the focal point of history in favor of the “folk,” i.e. the racially defined nation, gives his thought, as contrasted with that of Italian Fascists, a distinctly un-Hegelian flavor.29 This aspect is, however, counterbalanced by the fact that Hitler shared Hegel’s notion that the great man executes the designs of history, even when he is committing crimes in the pursuit of his world historical goals, as well as the notion that such a man thereby becomes the tool of the world-spirit operating in world history.30 28 The crudity of Hitler’s mind in such matters is particularly revealed in the latter which was published in 1953 under the title Hitler’s Table Talk: 1941-1944 with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper which concludes with this sentence: “the self-revelation of the most formidable among the ‘terrible simplifiers’ of his¬ tory, the most systematic, the most historical, the most philosophical, and yet the coarsest, cruellest, least magnanimous conqueror the world has known.” I don’t know about the comparison, but Hitler’s was certainly an unphilosophical mind, as shown by his complete lack of understanding of the ideological dimension of Communism and Fascism. 29 This conclusion is explicitly reached by Friedrich Glum, Philosophen im Spiegel und Zerrspiegel (1954), esp. pp. 130ff., where Glum shows that Hegel is not the “Verkiinder des totalitaren Staates.” 30 It seems to me doubtful, however, that Hitler appreciated that these w'ere 26

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

The situation was quite different in Italian Fascism. Giovanni Gentile, the key figure in shaping the ideology of it, alongside Mussolini himself, was an avowed and highly sophisticated Hegelian. In him we find a full-blown development and application of Hegel’s notions of the state as the mainstay of ethics and culture, the stato etico, as Gentile called it.31 His views were, however, not generally accepted, and eventually Mussolini offered his highly pragmatic version of Fascism in the En¬ cyclopedia Italiana.32 In what Mussolini has to say on history there is a vague hint of historicist notions, but the proposition that “Fascism is an historical conception” and the appeal to tradition are more Burkean than Hegelian, and of the inexorable logic of the dialectic there is hardly a trace. On the other hand, Mussolini stresses the state “as the true re¬ ality of the individual” and that “nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.” This radical deification of the state is, of course, a far cry from Hegel’s recognition of a civil society apart from the state, but it is a logical consequence of assigning to the state a decisive role in realizing the historical mission which a “folk,” a culturally united nation or people, has been assigned by the world-spirit. There is a distinct inclination to fuse the notions of state and nation or in Hegelian ideas, and even less, that they had a foundation in Hegel’s dialectics. His contemptuous references to National Socialism’s own ideologue, Alfred Rosen¬ berg, whose work he said he had never read, show it. In his Table Talk, he criticized Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930), over a million copies sold) and said it ‘"is not to be regarded as an expression of the official doctrine of the party.” After noting that it seemed mostly to be read by his opponents, especially Catholics, who had put the book on the Index, which Hitler claimed had boosted its sales, he finally added that “like most of the Gauleiters,” he had “merely glanced curiously at it.” (op. cit., p. 422) The unreliable German edition gives a slightly different version. For it see op. cit., p. XXXVI. 31 Che cosa e il fascismo. Extracts from this work are found in Herbert Schneider’s The Making of the Fascist State (1928), pp. 344-53. Schneider’s has remained the most scholarly assessment of Fascist ideology in English, but since it was written before the full “flowering” of the totalitarian potential, it does not discuss the eventual decline of Gentile’s and other ideologues’ influence. For this cf. Dante Germino, The Italian Fascist Party in Power (1959), pp. 133-5, who writes, “Gentile’s influence on Fascist ideology has been vastly overrated. ’ 32 “La Dottrina del Fascismo” reprinted in English in M. Oakshott, The Politi¬ cal and Social Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (1939), pp. 164-179. 27

FRIEDRICH

any case to link them very closely. “It is not the nation that generates the State . . . Rather the nation is created by the State . .

But although

rejecting “the doctrine of historical materialism,” Mussolini does not enter upon the problem of the dialectic, but rather returns to celebrating the State and more especially the conquering State, the Empire as “spiritual or moral.” Discipline, duty, sacrifice,—authority, leadership, order,—these are the watchwords of the doctrine which Fascists believed to be the doctrine of the coming age. Mussolini concluded his famous article with a phrase which contains a faint echo of the dialectics of history: “Fascism henceforward has in the world the universality of all those doctrines which, by fulfilling themselves, have significance in the history of the human spirit.”33 But it lacks the true spirit of dialectics; for this we must return once more to Marx and Marxism. Everyone knows that Marx, and even more Engels, insisted that the state would, after the Communist revolution had been consummated, “wither away.” And much has been made of the fact that on the one hand the development of the Soviet Union seems to belie this prediction, while on the other the official Soviet ideology retains the proposition intact.34 Yet, if the state is defined, as it is in Marxism, as “a public power distinct from the mass of the people,” or as “the executive committee of the ruling class” and in similar terms,35 it is true that the state “withers away.” For whatever we may think of totalitarian dictatorship, it does not fit the Marxist definition of a state. Needless to say, it seems also dramatically opposed to the Hegelian notion of the state as “the actual¬ ity of concrete freedom,” that is a state which enables all persons to develop their individuality as their independent rights are recognized. Thus Hegel would assert that the state is “the actual reality of the ethical idea,” which he elaborates as “the ethical spirit as the manifest substan-

33 Cf. for this also the apt commentary by G. Borgese, Goliath—The March of Fascism (1938), pp. 334ff. 34 Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), p. 76; Alfred G. Meyer, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 60ff; Karl Popper, op. cit. (note 1), ch. 17:1' and notes; Barth, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 86 et al. 35 Origin of the Family, pp. 241-2; Preface to the Critique of Political Econ¬ omy, passim; Communist Manifesto, passim. See for all this Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (1936), esp. ch. III. 28

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

tial will that is fully self-cognizant, and that thinks and knows itself and realizes what it knows and in so far as it knows.”36 This state, defined by Hegel as the actuality of the ethical idea, there¬ fore does not only not seem to wither away, but is precisely what Marx and Engels expected to arise, once the revolution had freed the prole¬ tariat and generally had enabled slaves to become human beings once more. But is this really so? If we consider the more detailed description which Hegel gives of family and society, it becomes obvious that he was sharply opposed to all attempts to widen the sphere of the state.37 Taking his stand with Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, Hegel denies to the state any interference with civil society and sharply criticizes the French revolutionaries for having invaded the private sphere. He not only de¬ fends Magna Charta, but calls it “basic law,” which “contributes to every piece of bread the citizens eat.” Lasson and others have rightly stressed Hegel’s kinship to Montesquieu, B. Constant, and V. Cousin— all classical liberals who confronted the state with a society independent of it and subject to controls through a separation of powers and a bill of rights. No, Hegel’s notion of the state is clearly not total; it is defi¬ nitely idealistic in the normative sense in that it is interpreted in ethical terms. Such ethical interpretation Marx, Engels, and the Marxists, could only accept for the post-revolutionary society, and this society presum¬ ably lacks the private sphere, including private property, which Hegel considered essential. We see, then, that the substantive content of Hegel’s conception of the state is even less part of Communist totalitarian ideology than it is of Fascist ideology. Indeed, if we run through the programmatic declara¬ tions of this ideology in Soviet, Fascist, and National Socialist history, we can readily see that few, if any substantive elements of the Hegelian approach are taken over into totalitarian ideology. Does this mean that there is no connection at all? In Hegel’s own sense, there is a “dialec¬ tical” connection; for the negation “preserves” the thesis which it super36 Philosophy of Law and Right, paras. 257ff. The most sophisticated treat¬ ment of this problem is in Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (1920); cf. especially II, pp. 128ff., 169ff., and 186ff. 37 E.g. Philosophy of Law and Right, paras. 41-53 (on property), 105-114 (morality), 142-157 (ethics) and 182-208 (civil society).

29

FRIEDRICH

sedes, and the higher synthesis encompasses them both. But such dialec¬ tical connections exist between totalitarian ideology and all intellectual and political forces which provided the setting for the Marxist ideology and continue to do so. Thus Christianity, Liberalism, Democracy, and so forth, all provide antecedents, though mostly antithetical antecedents, for totalitarian ideology.38 If we abstain from a one-sided (and often progagandistic) selection of isolated aspects, this sort of dialectical in¬ quiry then revolves itself into the rather trite proposition that Marxist ideology (and indeed all totalitarian ideology) is related to all the intel¬ lectual movements preceding it.39 If, as seems to be in keeping with the evidence, we reason not dia¬ lectically, but logically and rationally, it is undeniable that the con¬ nections between Hegelian dialectics and totalitarian ideology in the matter of content are limited to a belief in the importance of history as a proving ground and the related notions on the value of war. Classes take the place of nations, to be sure, as the “carriers” of the historical mission, and instead of the world-spirit which Marx thought “mystify¬ ing,” there is supposed to exist a largely unexplained evolutionary drive which manifests itself in man’s search for ever better means of produc¬ tion. But whether the war be of nations or classes, it provides the basis for a “reason of state” which allows world historical individuals and their following to violate ethical principles with impunity.40 But neither state, nor society, nor other key aspects of these ideologies are “Hegel¬ ian.” Can we leave the matter at that? Does this conclusion, more specifi¬ cally, mean that there is no special relation between Hegelian dialec¬ tics and totalitarian ideology? It does not. We have already in several connections hinted at the procedural parallels. In fact, totalitarian and 38 A rather extraordinary instance of the “identifying” of all kinds of hetero¬ geneous political philosophies and ideologies under the heading of “gnosis” is provided by Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952). 39 Among the many examples of the tendency to argue this sort of selective post hoc, ergo propter hoc, one might mention W. M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (1941), and A. Kolnai, The War Against the West (1938). 40 On reason of state see F. Meinecke, Machiavellianism (1959), a translation of his renowned Die Idee der Staatsraison (1924), esp. ch. 13 (on Hegel) and my supplementary volume Constitutional Reason of State (1957), esp. ch. VI (also on Hegel).

30

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

more especially Marxist Communist ideology derives its peculiar flavor and significance from Hegel’s dialectic, as it is extended into nature. More particularly, Marx’ dialectical materialism is a direct sequel to Hegel’s rejection of the law of contradiction, his insistence that there is a “union,” an unbreakable link between reason and reality, thinking and happening, theory and action. It is not an identity in the logical sense (if logic is taken in the traditional meaning); but it is an identity, if identity is interpreted dialectically. Hence the notion that truth is “in action,” that action “reveals” the truth, is there. Other aspects of Hegel’s “reconciliation” of opposites or contradic¬ tions also have a place in the totalitarian ideology, such as that quantity changes into quality.41 In this instance, the matter is especially relevant politically, because it serves as an ideological underpinning for the many “quantitative” acts of propaganda, espionage, sabotage and infiltration which the Communist movements engage in, thus piling up what even¬ tually turns out to be the “qualitative” change from constitutional de¬ mocracy to totalitarian dictatorship by revolution or gewaltsamer Umschlag. But the most important single item is the substitution, really, of “be¬ coming” for “being,” as the crux of all reality. Ontology turns into “genomenology,” into a doctrine of everlasting becoming and passing away again.42 Such a doctrine gives a cosmic justification to the kind of relentless trouble-making that Dostoyewsky portrayed in The Possessed. The dissolving of all definite standards, values, and beliefs, in a constant “dialectic” of movement and change characterizes totalitarian ideology. Mussolini and Hitler were of the same opinion as Lenin, Stalin, and lesser lights in this aspect. Such ideology is based upon Hegel’s rarely expressed, but deeply felt conviction that “theoretical work accomplishes more than the practical in this world; once the realm of ideas is revolu¬ tionized, reality cannot withstand it.” Thus Marx in turn said, “When philosophy has become strong enough for the creation of the world, it turns against the existing world, having grown into a world of its own.” And again: “What had been inner light becomes a consuming flame 41 The German word here is more dramatic than “change.” Umschlagen has more the flavor of “revolution,” which is a gewaltsamer Umschlag. 42 If in analogy to deriving ontology from elrai — to be, we form genomenology from ylyro^ai — to come into being, to become.

FRIEDRICH

which turns outward.”43 Such passages can help one to avoid the mis¬ take, already discussed at the outset, of believing that the totalitarians practice an unprincipled disregard of all ideology, contrary to their preachings. It is not so; indeed their viewpoint is radically ideological. But such ideology is more concerned with the disvalues than the values, more with the disbeliefs than the beliefs, in short with the negations more than the affirmations. Thus it could happen that from the vague mist of mere hints there could emerge a reality very different from what the ideology seems to imply to non-believers, without the ideology losing its hold. For if contradictions do not matter, if A is also non-A, then the state may at the same time wither away and not wither away, classes may disappear and not disappear, equality may be realized through inequality. Lenin once wrote: “Any demand for equality which goes beyond the demand for the abolition of classes is a stupid and absurd prejudice.”44 Orwell’s justly famous suggestion of double talk as the great achievement of the Ministry of Truth is poignantly illus¬ trated by the answer of the big brother pig to the horse on the animal farm, which by now everyone has heard about, namely that we are all equal, indeed—but that some are more equal than others.45 This is the dialectic of the concrete concept “which determines itself,” i.e. “posits determinations and suspends these in turn, and by this suspen¬ sion [and preservation] gains an affirmative and indeed a richer and more concrete determination . . .”46 Inequality, equality and the higher synthesis of animal farm ... I believe it can be shown that every one of Hegel’s instances of A being non-A results from a logical confusion—a patent violation of one of the principles of logic, in the non-dialectical sense. Certainly being and not-being are related by one being the nega¬ tion of the other. But this is not a real, but a logical relation, and the term “positing” (setzen) which seems to imply a concrete act is not

43 Marx, Engels, Gesamtausgabe I, 1-131 and I, 1-64; for the Hegel quotation see his letter to Niethammer, Dec. 28, 1808, in Briefwechsel, ed. Hoffmeister (1952), I, p. 253. With this may be compared the passage from the Philosophy of History, Werke, ed. Glockner, IX, pp. 535—6. 44 Lenin, Sochinenya in Works (1935), XXIV, p. 293. 45 Animal Farm (1946), p. 112. Cf. also 1984, Pt. II, ch. IX. 46 Philosophy of History, Intro. Ill, 3, my ed., p. 28. 32

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

an apt expression for this relation, except on the premise of Hegel’s identification of reason and reality. When Descartes wrote: cogito, ergo sum, he did of course imply that if he did not think (cogitate) he would not be. But this is precisely what the law of contradiction means, and it is not admissible to say that it has been “superseded.” Nor is it true to say that being and non-being not only are “preserved,” but also “elevated” (lifted up) beyond themselves into a new synthesis in becoming. The long disquisition in which Hegel tries to show that becoming is both being and not-being is quite unconvincing and abounds with nonsequiturs. If, e.g., water, H20, becomes ice, it remains H20; so on this level of analysis the analogy breaks down. Yet, if we consider a chemical process in the course of which water becomes hydrogen and oxygen, it is not “preserved” in hydrogen and oxygen. Nor is the change expres¬ sible in the proposition that this “becoming” is comprehended in the “being” and the “not-being” of water. Rather hydrogen and oxygen are there all the time, but they change from the condition of being to¬ gether to another. This change is an event in time, and the moment the one condition begins, the other ceases to exist; at no time is it correct to say that water (or H20) both is and is not. Marx was very proud to have extended the Hegelian dialectics of nature to history and society, claiming both as part of nature, and thus to have “objectified” or “reified” the dialectical process in materialist terms. Now one can dispute whether such a phenomenon as the control of the means of production is really a material phenomenon and not rather a social or human one.47 But the production processes might be called “material” phenomena, surely, and Marx transferred to them the idea of the dialectic, on the strength of the alleged identity of reason and reality. Unfortunately, by this transformation he deprived the Hegelian dialectics of history of what limited credibility it had possessed. As long as history is said to be dominated by ideas, the notion that the historical can be successfully understood by a dialectic which is admit¬ tedly taken from the realm of ideas, from the workings of the mind, makes sense to the extent that history is dominated by ideas. But once that premise is doubted or eliminated, the application of the dialectics

47 Cf. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). 33

FRIEDRICH

of history leads to results which are as absurd as those of the dialectics of nature, which are generally acknowledged to be the least successful of Hegel's efforts. The alleged “syntheses,” dubious enough in the case of Hegel—why is the idea of freedom for all the synthesis of the freedom of one and of the freedom of a few?-—become utterly absurd in a “materialist dialec¬ tic.” Why is the bourgeois mode of production the antithesis of the feudal mode, and why the proletarian communist one a synthesis of the two? Or, in another syndrome, in what sense is the Communist society a synthesis of the class struggle between capitalism and proletari¬ ans? The rhetoric of these terms hides the stark reality of the “power of negation.” As Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, so the power of negation is the true hero, just as in Goethe’s Faust Mephisto tends to be, and he engages in a sort of Hegelian dialectic when he says: Ich bin der Geist, der stets vemeint!— Ein Teil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft. By asserting that you may totally reject an existing society, yet in the act of such rejection preserve it and elevate it to an higher synthesis, the most potent and heady wine is offered to the unsuspecting, whose powers of “formal logic” may be presumed to be somewhat less than adequate to the task of discerning the fraud. If such negation is on top of it of¬ fered as inexorable logic of a new kind, namely the logic which is non¬ logic—the relentless drive for destruction is given rein. To let Hegel speak for a last time: The only way to secure progress in knowledge is to acknowledge the logical precept that negation is just as much affirmation as negation, or that what is contradictory resolves itself not into nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, that such negation is not an all-embracing negation, but is the negation of a definite somewhat which abolishes itself, and thus is a definite nega¬ tion . . ,48 In an extraordinary essay Walter Benjamin has talked of the de¬ structive character. “The destructive character knows only one maxim: 48 The Science of Logic, in my The Philosophy of Hegel, p. 191. 34

hegel’s dialectic and totalitarian ideology

to make room, and only one activity: to move out. His desire for fresh air and free space is stronger than all hatred. The destructive character is young and gay. For destruction makes young . . .” The destructive character is always at work, he has no image, and why should he: he he has few needs. He avoids only creative work: he is a signal, does not care whether he is understood. The destructive character does not recognize anything lasting, but he sees roads everywhere, because he is constantly on the move. He transforms everything into ruins, not for the sake of the ruins, but for the sake of the road through them. “The destructive character does not live from the sentiment that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the effort.”49 In short, the destruc¬ tive character embodies the great power of negation. He cherishes the ideology because of what it rejects. The destructive character is the perfect embodiment of the dialectic. This wine is indeed apt to induce not only a headache but a utopian delirium, which Raymond Aron has rightly called “catastrophic opti¬ mism.” In it truth and untruth become indistinguishable, and both may indeed be described as a Bacchantic ecstasy wherein every member is drunk. The orgy is still going, and new participants are still streaming to the banquet. But where is Socrates? 49 Walter Benjamin, Schriften, ed. Adorno (1955), II, pp. 1-3.

35

Hegel and the Perspective Of Liberalism

SIDNEY HOOK

Hegel and the Perspective Of Liberalism

have been subject to more abuse and more adulation than Georg Friedrich Hegel. Spinoza was once called by Moses Mendelssohn “a dead dog” for reasons which would make many philosophers of the past “dead dogs.” But only Hegel has been called “ein toter Esel”—-and worse—and not merely by Schopenhauer and Karl Popper. The very intensity of the opposition to Hegel testifies, even more than the accolades, to the influence of his thought. Hegel once boasted that he was going to teach philosophy how to speak German. But as opaque as the “German” was, it became the philo¬ sophical idiom of outstanding thinkers in England, France, Italy, Rus¬ sia, and the Netherlands. Even in this country a flourishing school of Hegelian philosophy was established in St. Louis by William Harris and then later at Cornell, where it lingered for some years before being killed off by strong doses of logical analysis. Today, however, there are some small signs of a revival of interest in Hegel’s ideas. The most remarkable thing about Hegel’s philosophy is that it has survived despite the terminological barbarity in which it has been en¬ cased and the strange flavor of its doctrines. Heinrich Heine tells us that the study of Hegel undermined the health even of the Devil. There is one key to the exposition of Hegel which seems to me not to have been adequately explored, and I shall try to unlock the mys¬ teries of the Hegelian Begriff or concrete universal by reference to it. This key is suggested by Hegel himself in his very conception of philos¬ ophy. “Every philosophy,” he tells us, “belongs to its own times and is Few philosophers

39

HOOK

restricted by its own limitations.” . . . “It commences . . . when a gulf has arisen between inward striving and external reality, and the old forms of religion [and other institutions] are no longer satisfying.”1 He goes on in a way which explains why he is still worth reading. “The particular form of a Philosophy is thus contemporaneous with a par¬ ticular constitution of the people among whom it makes its appearance, with its institutions and form of government, their morality, their social life and the capabilities, customs and enjoyments of the same.” If this is true, we may legitimately relate Hegel’s philosophy itself to his own times and culture, not to account for its validity, this would be a lapse into the genetic fallacy, but to explore Hegel’s meaning and intent. Not every aspect of a culture or civilization is relevant to the germinating ideas of a philosophy, for a philosophy is also a creation of an individual man and not all men are sensitive to the same influences. In Hegel’s case the evidence of his posthumous as well as published writings shows that the fundamental feature of his philosophy—indeed, his logic—was animated by certain political considerations which de¬ termined both the form and content of its presentation. Hegel came to manhood at the time of the French Revolution and terror. Although his preoccupations in these years were predominantly theological, his intense political interests are clearly expressed in a series of religious essays written between 1790 and 1800. In these writings, in his letters, and especially in his much more remarkable and neglected manuscript Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands, composed in 1801— 1802, Hegel vehemently turns against the cosmopolitanism, the ra¬ tionalism, and liberalism of the Enlightenment and the French Revolu¬ tion whose thought he holds responsible for the humiliation and dis¬ memberment of contemporary Germany. Four distinct times he wrote and rewrote this manuscript, and each time the introductory sentence rings out sharp and clear like an alarm bell to wake his countrymen: “Deutschland ist kein Staat mehrGermany is no longer a state, be¬ cause of the consequences of the French Revolution, the armies of Napoleon, and the thought-ways and logic of the Enlightenment which has infected German thinking. It is this thinking, especially its concept of freedom, which must be reformed. A new concept of the concept 1 Werke (1941), XIII, pp. 59, 66. 4°

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

must be developed which will preserve the world from the terrible con¬ sequence of the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment, whose shrill cries of freedom herald a reign of terror wherever they are heard. It is not necessary to cite from Hegel’s early unpublished manuscripts to establish his political motivation. His published writings make it clear enough. Already in the Phanomenologie des Geistes the absolute freedom of the Enlightenment is criticized as too “simple, homogeneous and uniform,” as a power that “effaces and annuls all social rank or classes which are the component spiritual factors of the differentiated whole.” The grim but inescapable end of the road of critical under¬ standing is the guillotine. “The sole and only work and deed accom¬ plished by universal freedom is therefore death.”2 In the Enzyklopddie der philosophischen Wissenschaften there is a very striking passage in which Hegel explicitly says: The necessity of understanding Logic in a wider sense than as the science of the form of thought is enforced by the interests of religion and politics, of law and morality. At first men had no suspicions of thought and they thought away freely and fearlessly. They thought about God, about Na¬ ture, and the State. . . But while they so thought, the principal ordinances of life began to be seriously affected by their conclusions. Thought de¬ prived existing institutions of their force. Constitutions fell a victim to thought; religion was assailed by thought; firm religious beliefs which had been always looked upon in the light of revelations were undermined, and in many minds the old faiths were overthrown.3 The specific reference is to Athens, the implicit one to Hegel’s own times. The life of the understanding, according to Hegel, consists in the use of abstractions. But, he warns in the History of Philosophy, “To make abstractions hold good in actuality means to destroy actuality. The fanaticism which characterized the freedom which was put in the hands of the people was frightful.”4 And one final quotation from the Rechtsphilosophie. When the Understanding “turns to actual practice, it takes shape in religion and

2 English translation by Baillie, 2nd ed. (New York, 1931), pp. 601-2, 605. 3 English translation by Wallace (Oxford, 1874), Sec. 49, Addendum. 4 English translation by Haldane (London, 1892), III, p.425.

41

HOOK

politics alike as the fanaticism of destruction—the destruction of the whole subsisting order.”5 The reason why “freedom” bom of understanding

(V erst and)

rather than reason (Vernunft) can be only negative, and lead only to “the fury of destruction” is recounted in a Zusatz in which explicit reference to the French Revolution is made. This form of freedom appears more concretely in the active fanaticism of both political and religious life. For instance, during the Terror in the French Revolution all differences of talent and authority were supposed to have been superseded. This period was an upheaval, an agitation, an ir¬ reconcilable hatred of everything particular. Since fanaticism wills abstrac¬ tion only, nothing articulated, it follows that when distinctions appear, it finds them antagonistic to its own indeterminacy and annuls them. For this reason the French Revolutionaries destroyed once more the institutions which they had made themselves, since any institution whatever is antago¬ nistic to the abstract self-consciousness of equality.6 Hegel’s hostility to the French Revolution derived from the disap¬ proval of its effects and not, so to speak, of its causes or occurrence. He at no time glorified the ancien regime. And in various places in his writings there is still apparent a nostalgic appreciation of the possibili¬ ties and promises with which the French Revolution, signalled by the fall of the Bastille, burst upon the world when Hegel was a young man. But neither the retrospective appreciations nor the even more unquali¬ fied admiration expressed for Napoleon in Hegel’s correspondence mili¬ tate against his unalterable hostility to the mode of thinking of the En¬ lightenment, especially the French Enlightenment, which he held responsible both for the excesses of the French Revolution and for the humiliation of Germany. We are now in a position better to understand the development of Hegel’s system. It centers around his theory of logic or Reason and is counterposed to the formal understanding which is the instrument of ordinary reasoning and the kind of criticism associated with 18th cen¬ tury' liberalism. Its upshot is a position which undercuts all the claims of the Enlightenment. The demand that all institutions justify them5 English translation by Knox (Oxford, 1942), Sec. 5, p. 22.

6 Ibid., p. 228.

42

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

selves before the bar of reason Hegel would accept, provided that reason was construed not as a set of abstract principles valid in all times and circumstances but as a principle which respects growth, development, and continuity, and expresses itself in them. The nature of anything is revealed in its relations to what has preceded it and to what will follow from it-—in its history. If one wants to be reasonable about the present, therefore, one must see it as part of a developing whole which gives it a significance that cannot be grasped by dislocating it from cause, con¬ text, and consequence, and by absolutizing the immediacies of the pres¬ ent moment. The demand of the Enlightenment that all institutions justify themselves by reference to human needs Hegel is prepared to accept, provided that human needs are conceived as a system of wants related to each other, to the family, the state, and the culture, which have nurtured these needs, provided that they are not interpreted as imperi¬ ous demands for immediate gratification. The exaltation of the principle of utility, another characteristic of the Enlightenment, Hegel would accept, provided we realize that what is useful is not necessarily the pleasurable, that there are long-time uses not always visible to the myopic eyes of the critic who wants quick results, that what appears useless to contemporary eyes may be the neces¬ sary condition for the health, virtue, and ultimate happiness of mankind. The emphasis upon the experimental approach to human affairs is legitimate to Hegel only if we see in history itself the product of ageold experiments, and in existing historical traditions the cumulative re¬ sult of the pooled experience of mankind. There are good and valid rea¬ sons why things are as they are, which can be grasped by reflection, which does not require artificial experiments whose effect on human life is as disruptive as pulling up flowers by their roots to see how they grow. The cry for justice to Hegel’s ears is legitimate, if it is not merely a cry for abstract equality but is rooted in the judgment that there are dif¬ ferent ways of being equal, that things and persons can never be literally equal to each other, that equality is compatible with—nay, positively re¬ quires, differences in rank, function, order, and degree of perfection. At every point and in every field the claims of critical rationalism are not denied by Hegel but set in their place, their teeth drawn and fangs filed. Revolutionary enthusiasm is portrayed as the youthful ex43

HOOK

cess of impatient spirits trying to hurry to deliver the great things aborn¬ ing in the womb of time. If logic is historical, history is also logical. Whatever is logical must be necessary. Therefore the logic of history—considered by superficial rationalism as the realm of the contingent, whose record, as viewed by Gibbon, a typical figure of the Enlightenment, is a compound of folly, ignorance, and bloodshed—is also the logic of necessity. But if this is true of history, then it is also true of culture—for there is no history' ex¬ cept of culture—and if it is true of both, then it is true of nature, too—since they are interdependent. Indeed the logical sweep of the Hegel¬ ian philosophy is so comprehensive that nothing is excluded from its panlogism. The great—and fatal—difficulty is to understand what Reason can mean in a world in which nothing, once it is grasped in its net of necessary relations, can be declared Unreasonable. If “whatever is” is “what it must be” and if everything “that must be” is, how can anything that is be really irrational? If we ask, how can we establish that anything “which is” must be, Hegel’s answer reads: if we try to deny what is, we shall end either in self-contradiction or in contradict¬ ing something else we believe true on grounds that are just as good or better. What is true is ultimately the whole of things, and what is true is ultimately good too, for what cannot be in the world cannot be de¬ clared good; it is a chimera of the understanding. Let us look a little more closely at the structure of Hegel’s logical thinking. Most of the characteristic doctrines of Hegel’s Logic can be derived from a series of fundamental but complex propositions which I have tried to express and to relate to each other not in Hegel’s language but in my own. 1. Something is: total skepticism is self-defeating. This something, whatever it is, is what it is in relation to some mode of experience. 2. Since whatever anything is, it is dependent upon or related to some¬ thing else, we can grasp things intellectually only by their relations; there¬ fore feeling is not knowing, for there is no immediate knowledge. 3. If any finite thing is regarded as independent, analysis will show that it involves reference to the existence of its opposite. 4. Every something must be part of a whole from which it derives its meaning; every whole reveals a systematic structure in which contrary 44

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

determinations are involved which become the source of a transition or development to a more inclusive whole. 5. Any two somethings can be shown to be part of some whole. For given any whole, there are three possibilities: (a)

It will contain both.

(b)

It will contain neither.

(c)

It will contain one and not the other, and three conclusions:

(a)

If it contains both, the statement is true.

(b)

If it contains neither, both somethings become part of a class or

whole constructed by negating the given whole. If X is outside of A and Y is outside of A, X and Y are therewith part of a class A. (c)

If it contains one and not the other, the whole containing the

one may be considered a class (A), and the other an opposite class (A), and we can construct another class or whole B under which A and A are subsumed. 6. Any given whole may be regarded as something, since it is short of the totality of things and can be contrasted with some other whole. 7. What is true for somethings is true for wholes. 8. The logical process can be completed only by the assumption of an absolute whole, which has no intelligible alternative. 9. The development of ideas is at the same time the development of things. 10. Whatever is the outcome of development must already have been implicitly or potentially present in the starting point; the existence of consciousness and mind therefore indicates that the totality or whole of things is systematic, rational, and spiritual. All of these ten complex propositions as well as the transitions from one to the other are highly questionable. But the best way to indicate this is to examine the most important consequences of their conjoint assertion. This is the famous proposition that “whatever is real (or actual) is reasonable, and whatever is reasonable is real (or actual)”

(Was wirklich ist, ist verniinftig, und was verniinftig ist, ist wirklich.) Before doing this, however, let us describe the total world-view of Hegel in its bearing upon life as it is encountered in history and human experience. The world is an interrelated organic dynamic whole in which every part fits into the systematic pattern of rationality. The pat¬ tern is not only rational but just. Hegel is aware of the great gap be-

45

HOOK

tween the logical or abstract certainty that this is so—that God’s in his Heaven and all’s right with the world—and our empirical experience of arbitrariness, brute shock, unexpected novelty in nature, and our ordinary, indeed, almost daily experience of imperfection, injustice, and evil in the life of man. How can we square the glad tidings about the metaphysically real with the sharp pain of the empirically real? If man is a rational creature, how explain his irrational behavior? If nature is an expression of Reason, how account for its fragmentation? If the world is good, what is the place of evil in it? If history is, in Hegel’s own words, “the slaughter bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been made victims,”7 what is its final aim? Hegel answers these questions by invoking three principles. The first involves the distinction between appearance and reality, between what appears at first view or at first blush and what it really turns out to be in a wider context and broader perspective. One damns the insects but enjoys the fruit which results from their activity. If one learns to see how necessary they are to each other, there is no ground of reasonable com¬ plaint. The growth of knowledge, particularly science, shows that com¬ mon sense, “that mixture of sense and understanding,” is helpless be¬ fore the rational complexity of things. What seems like aberrant be¬ havior is really an expression of natural law and necessity. There is an order of nature, a wisdom of the body, an economy of mind, a pattern and meaning in history, which underlie events. The world becomes more intelligible as we investigate it more closely and grasp the complex in¬ terrelation of things. “To him who looks upon the world rationally,” says Hegel, “the world presents a rational aspect.”8 The rational aspect of the reality of things is seen only in relation to the encompassing sense of the whole; the appearance of things is due to the unrelated part isolated or disjointed. Hegel would have cited with approval Browning’s lines: God has conceded two sights to man: One of man’s whole work, time’s completed plan, The other of the minute’s work, man’s first Step to the plan’s completeness ... 7 Philosophy of History, English translation by Sibree (New York, 1900), p. 21. 8 Ibid.., p. II.

46

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

But Hegel would have made two qualifications: first, the sight of “the minute’s work” is inferior and subordinate to the sight of “the whole work”; and second, the sight of time’s completed plan has not been conceded to man but only to Hegel, and to those who have studied his philosophy. The second of Hegel’s principles is die List der Vernunft. “Reason,” says Hegel, “is as cunning as it is powerful.”9 Each person pursues his own end, which seems reasonable to him but often contrary and ca¬ pricious from the point of view of others. Out of the conflict of indi¬ vidual ends, out of the struggle of personal passions, events result and institutions are achieved which no one willed or desired. The great works of civilization were not planned, the great cities, migrations, the indus¬ trial revolution, the operation of the market, the growth of science, the social institutions and tradition which constitute objective mind—all of these are not the consequence of anyone’s design but the work of a force or power in things which uses the immediate ends of human action as bait to lure men into building better than they know. Here is the source of the great ironies in history. Man proposes, but something beyond his control disposes. The invasion of China by Japan leads to a national up¬ surge and movement of unification whose absence originally invited Japanese aggression and whose presence then contributes to Japanese defeat. The introduction of Western military technology to defend the traditional values of the Ottoman empire from foreign encroachment brings with it a cultural revolution that culminates in the victory of the Young Turks who destroy these traditional values. The history of every country is replete with illustrations of what Hegel means. It is as if the Platonic Ideas were endowed with the power of Aristotelian entelechies using with Machiavellian guile prime Matter and the human psyche as instruments to realize their systematic purpose. An apter comparison is suggested by Hegel himself: The cunning of reason, while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and to act upon one another till they waste away and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out the execution of its own aims. With this explanation Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and its process in the capacity of absolute cunning. God lets men

9 Encyclopedia, Wallace translation, Sec. 209, Addendum.

47

HOOK

direct their particular passions and interests as they please, but the result is the accomplishment of—not their plans, but His, and these differ decidedly from the ends primarily sought by those whom He employs.10 When one realizes this, he curbs imperious demands of the critical understanding that everything be made clear to it at once, that every¬ thing conform to its sense of what is appropriate and fitting, that insti¬ tutions which our impulses and desires find cramping produce their credentials of legitimacy before we deign to recognize them. In the light of the Cunning of Reason—what and who is man, that he dare to criticize the historical world? For in criticizing the world, he is criticiz¬ ing Providence. To talk about the errors and mistakes and crimes of history, to wonder what would have happened if some event or act had not occurred, to concern oneself with the great “ifs” of history, is not only fanciful, it is to be guilty of impiety. For that is equivalent to giving hints to the Creator on how to improve the world. True piety is recog¬ nition of the sway of an already established reason over the empire of fact. In passing we should note that the immediate psychological impact of the Cunning of Reason is to fortify the claims to legitimacy of the status quo, to make what is latest in time appear to be the best available in the given circumstances, and therefore to make suspect the critical outcries and judgments of any revolutionary opposition. Unfortunately, however, Hegel’s Cunning of Reason proves too much, since, if it is as powerful as Hegel says, why can’t it use revolutionary criticism as part of its cunning to do the work of reason? Hegel is compelled to fall back on his own cunning to help out the Cunning of Reason in the historical punches. If the Revolution is safely past, over and done with, incorpo¬ rated into existing tradition—as legitimately, say, as the Daughters of the American Revolution are now a part of Tory Republicanism, Hegel will invoke the Cunning of Reason to establish the blessings of Revolu¬ tion. But let the prospect of revolutionary change loom up in the pres¬ ent, and Hegel’s metaphysical hackles rise in horror. He marshals all the logical arguments and, in the absence of logic, all the empirical evi¬ dence, and in the absence of both, all the rhetoric of scorn at his com¬ mand to denounce the revolutionary alternative. We shall return to this 10 Ibid., Sec. 209.

48

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

later, but here it is sufficient to point out that Hegel tends to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds of history. Although he calLs his philosophy absolute or objective idealism, he makes genuine moral idealism impossible, since for him the actual or objectively real is al¬ ready ideal. The idealist as moral crusader, as prophet of what should be, is a mere Weltverbesserer, a meddling do-gooder whose feverish fan¬ tasies can be dispelled only by a sound metaphysical purge. The third principle upon which Hegel relies to bridge the gap be¬ tween experience and reality is the principle of dialectical polarity. Reason may be cunning, but Experience is painful and inglorious. What is the sense of human suffering in a rational and righteous world? Hegel sets himself the task of showing that the pain of the part is necessary for the good of the whole, that evil in history contributes to human welfare and human dignity, that the tragedies of the human spirit give it a ma¬ turity and steadfastness that a guaranteed good fortune can never de¬ velop.

Up to a point there is a great deal of wisdom in what Hegel has to say about dialectical opposition or polarity or conflict in life. Every stick has two ends and every situation at least two factors which limit each other even as they require each other. If there were no hunger, we would never enjoy our food. If there were no danger in the world, there would be no courage; no suffering, no pity or compassion. If there were no challenge or threat to our existence, we would make no creative re¬ sponse but vegetate as Lotus-Eaters. There would be plenty of happy pigs but no restless Socrates. If there were no sin or possibility of sin, there would be only innocence, not virtue. If we had everything our heart desired when and as it desired it, we would be miserable, for true happiness requires that we be without some of the things we want. There are healthy physical growing pains and healthy spiritual growing pains, and if we unwisely forestall them, we stunt growth. Hegel would agree with what Santayana says with much greater felicity. “The soul, too, has its virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.” Applied to history, again up to a point, we can see Hegel’s meaning. Charles Beard adopted, as a heuristic attitude towards the past, the Hegelian notion that the blossom Is fertilized by the bee which robs it of its honey. Karl Marx denounced the manner in which the English ex-

49

HOOK

ploited India, but yet he hailed the conquest as socially progressive, and he invoked Goethe’s lines from the Westostlicher Diwan: Sollte jene Qual uns qualen, Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt? Hat nicht Myriaden Seelen Timurs Herrschaft aufgezehrt? When we examine the past, it seems that only the conquest and plun¬ der of a continent made possible the emergence of an open society, that the rights and privileges and leisure we now enjoy are in part at least a consequence of the deprivation of the rights and privileges and often of the very lives of others—of the slaves, the indentured, the conquered and exploited of the past. I say up to a point, because one can argue that the blossom uses the bee to reproduce itself much as the bee uses the blossom—but there is no such reciprocity in history. Even if all this were granted, even if we admitted that these illustra¬ tions and others showed that out of some evils of the past some good has sometimes come—how much more has to be taken on faith? What a far cry from the sober recognition that some wars have led to techno¬ logical discoveries and therefore to social advance—to the colossal claim that wars generically are necessary for human progress! Where is the evidence that these advances were worth the price? Where is the proof that they could be achieved in no other way except by the slaughter of the innocent? Granted that opposition and conflict are always open or latent phenomena in the affairs of men, who guarantees that they must always be overcome and that they serve a good purpose? Granted that a human disability may become an occasion for the discovery of hidden strength, is this its justification? Should blindness be a necessary price for a good memory, even if it is true that the loss of vision develops the powers of memory? Is it necessary to recite the litany of human horrors, to rehearse the record of man’s bestiality to man, to recall the names of those who have been broken on the wheel, stretched on the rack, burned at the stake, gassed and cremated—in order to expose the mockery and indignity in Hegel’s claim that at the time it was the best thing that could have happened in this best of all possible worlds? Is worship of God worship of history? It seems to me that there is more genuine 50

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

spirituality in skepticism than in this dogmatic rationalism—irrational¬ ism would be a better term—in this idolatry of the divine handiwork. Let us turn now to the proposition that whatever is actual is rational and whatever rational is actual. Hegel complains that this proposition is misunderstood if the actual is identified with the existent. But how is the actual distinguished from the existent? He never clearly tells us. If the actual is ideal, what do we mean by calling it rational? That it is neces¬ sary? How necessary? If Hegel means by logically necessary the logic of entailment, then he has not shown a single thing to be logically neces¬ sary, and if he means by necessary, causally necessary, then everything can be considered logically necessary—the existent as well as the actual. For it is obvious that if rational means causally necessary, then save for chance or contingent events both the actual and existent are causally necessary; that is, in principle we can give the conditions which are necessary and sufficient for them. One interpretation of the distinction between the actual and the existent gives us a sheer tautology; the other a scandalous absurdity. The truth of the matter is this. Where contemporary institutions are in flux or are being challenged, Hegel cannot tell us whether they have actuality or existence. He cannot tell us when they lose or gain one or the other character, until they have become part of finished history. Until history has decided, he is always worshipping at the altar of the established. Once the established is overthrown, he makes the easy, retrospective judgment that it had lost its patent of actuality. But the whole animus of his identification of the real or actual with the rational or necessary is to cut the nerve of criticism, of social reform and legisla¬ tion, and to blunt or turn aside the analytic understanding, of which he says: “it prides itself on the imperative ‘ought’ which it takes special pleasure in prescribing in the field of politics.” “As if,” he jeeringly adds, “the world had waited on it to learn how it ought to be, and was not.”11 Let me document in two important respects what seems to be an almost calculated ambiguity in Hegel’s position and which justifies Tonnies’ devastating judgment: “Sein Wesen war Zweideutigkeit—er

11 Ibid., Sec. 6.

51

HOOK

kannte so, er kannte auch anders.” They bear also on Hegel’s hostility to liberalism. All things for Hegel are in dialectical movement. Negation is the soul of the dialectic. Every finite thing and institution has within it the seeds of its own transformation. If this is true of everything, it must also be true of “constitutions” which express the spirit of a people, its times and traditions. A constitution may be written or unwritten, but in either case it must be capable of development. Hegel reveals a characteristi¬ cally ambiguous attitude towards the “actuality” of constitutions. If they are in the distant past, he tends to interpret them as if they were the product not of individual feeling, suffering, thinking men but of the spirit of the times and the Cunning of Reason, which, since it has itself no feet or hands, uses human beings for its purposes. But when constitu¬ tions are proposed in the present, Hegel regards them as interferences with the order of history'. He is extremely hostile to men drawing up these constitutions, no matter how careful their thought, even though such men have the same right to be considered as much the instruments of historical reason and the divine spirit of the whole as were their for¬ bears. Listen to the expression of Hegel’s double bookkeeping for the claims of the past and the present. In the last thirty years many constitutions have been drawn up, and it would be no hard task for anyone having much experience in this work to frame another. But theorizing is not sufficient for a constitution. It is not individuals who make it. It is something divine and spiritual in history. So strong is this power of the world-spirit that the thought of an individual is as nothing against it; and when such thoughts do count for something, i.e., when they can be realized, they are none other than the product of this power of the universal spirit.12 What is Hegel saying here except that the real or the actual is what triumphs, the merely existent is what fails, that all lost causes are wicked causes, and that whatever survives the test of time is in so far both valid and necessary and therefore good? Is he saying anything different from Napoleon’s dictum that God is on the side of the heaviest batteries?

12 History of Philosophy, Haldane translation, II, p. 8. 52

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

What is true for a constitution is true for all social institutions. So long as social institutions exist, they must be considered necessary, there¬ fore real, therefore actual, and therefore good. “Nothing can subsist,” says Hegel, “if it be wholly devoid of identity between the notion and the reality [i.e. between what it should be and what it actually is]. Even bad and untrue things have being, insofar as their reality still, somehow, conforms to their notion. Whatever is thoroughly bad or contrary to the notion, for that very reason must break into pieces.”13 It follows that what does not break into pieces, what now exists in society, is logically necessary. If individual freedom is action controlled by rational insight into one’s needs, and if these cannot be rationally determined without reference to the complex of social institutions in which one is nurtured, then it follows that genuine or true individual freedom can never be won by overthrowing existing social institutions but found only in the fulfillment of one’s needs, ambitions, and ideals, on the basis of existing social institutions. Hegel is consistent in his anti-liberalism here. True morality for him is not adherence to a creed or code or abstract principle: it is a mode of life rooted in ethical use and wont, in attitudes and values which have become habitual and therefore natural. They constitute the pattern of conduct to which all moral principles must be tethered, if we are to escape anarchy. A people is free when its institutions are reasonable. Reason has its stages, and we must not try to force-feed a society with a diet of ethical principles derived from another society with a different history and at a different stage of growth. Virtue, then, for the indi¬ vidual, Hegel approvingly quotes the ancients, is living according to the customs of one’s own people and community. Were the shamans and medicine men of head-hunting cannibalistic primitive societies Hegelian philosophers, they would make the same excellent case for the preserva¬ tion of the totem-pole and its grinning skulls. The characteristic emphasis of Hegel’s philosophy, viewed in con¬ text and appraised in the light of its motivation, was markedly hostile to all expressions of contemporary liberalism. And not only to the lib¬ eralism of past days but to its perennial values. Nonetheless, as an il¬ lustration of one of Hegel’s insights, it can be shown that present day

13 Encyclopedia, Wallace translation, Sec. 213, Addendum. 53

HOOK

liberalism can learn some things of value from this philosophy, after its metaphysical vapors are fanned aside. But first, what do I mean by liberalism and by the perennial values of the liberal tradition? I do not mean those associated with the theory of economic individualism or free enterprise. I mean a constellation of values, of beliefs and attitudes, which are embodied in the social and political institutions of cultures based on consent, mutuality of esteem, and the use of intelligence. Liberalism eschews all authorities except the ultimate authority of rational or critical method, where this means common sense purified by scientific method. Because liberalism relies on rational and critical method, it seeks only reliability in human judg¬ ment, not certainty. It therefore rejects, on the one hand, authoritarian¬ ism, which even when it speaks of Reason falLs back on “rationaliza¬ tion”—in the bad sense—of the status quo, and on the other hand, fanaticism, which by taking a value or principle, any value or principle, as absolute, independently of its consequences on other values, over¬ looks the truth that no humane or civilized mind or society can live by one value or principle alone. Liberalism is wedded not only to the critical and open mind but to tolerance of variation and diversity, tolerance conceived not as im¬ patient sufferance, but as active encouragement of the conditions which encourage human diversity and variation. It is on the basis of its ap¬ preciation of human differences and respect for human dignity that liberalism believes in the right of self-determination—the right of people affected by the consequences of decisions taken with respect to them to limit and control the power of those who make the decisions. The right to self-determination under certain conditions, e.g. where democratic process is denied, carries with it the right to revolution. This means faith not in impersonal objective rational forces working themselves out in history, as Hegel believed, but in human intelligence. It means faith not in the fatalistic inevitability of Progress but in its possibility, as well as in the possibilities of human nature to liberate itself from the burdens of superstition, ignorance, and prejudice. Liberalism takes as its ap¬ proach to all institutions the saying of the New Testament: “Man is not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath is made for man.” Therefore it seeks to explore and modify the world man inherits, to contrive and invent methods of improving it. Man’s natural fears and social habits

54

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

predispose him against change. Intelligence is the only counterweight we have to the inertial drag of the established order, which tends to give way to the forces of change too slowly and too late and at too great cost. Liberalism is therefore pluralistic where absolute idealism is monistic, melioristic where absolute idealism is confidently optimistic, eager to transform the possible into the probable and desirable, aware of the “ifs” and lost chances of history, whereas absolute idealism is assured that in the end the way things actually happen is far the best. Liberalism in the first and last instance is concerned with persons, with their hap¬ piness and unhappiness; absolute idealism with the rational and dialect¬ ical order of the universe. “The History of the World,” Hegel re¬ marks grimly, “is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony, periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”14 This contrast comes clearly to light in the details of Hegel’s treatment of history and the state. Let us not fall, says Hegel in the “Introduction” to the Philosophy of History, “into the Litany of Lamentations that the good and pious often—or for the most part—fare ill in the world. . . . The so-called well or ill-faring of these or those isolated individuals can¬ not be regarded as an essential element in the rational order of the uni¬ verse.”15 It is this Rational Order that must be realized, and World Historical Personalities—the Heroes—are the instruments by which the meaning of that order is carried out. Hegel admits that “it is even pos¬ sible that such men may treat other great, even sacred, interests incon¬ siderately.”16 But there is no help for it, and we must not yield to senti¬ mentality. “So mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower, crush to pieces many an object in its path . . . Much, therefore, in particular aspects of the grand phenomenon might be found fault with . . . But this subjective fault-finding is easy. It only keeps in Hew the individual and its deficiency, without taking notice of the Reason pervading the whole.”17 This insight into the Reason pervading the 14 Philosophy of History, Sibree translation, pp. 26-7. 15 Ibid.., p. 34. 16 Ibid., p. 32. 17 Ibid., pp. 32, 36.

55

HOOK

whole is the function of philosophy whose task is to proclaim “that the real world is as it ought to be.”18 To this the liberal must reply: there are no objective Reasons in things, there are no Purposes which pervade the whole. There are only causes in things—they are not justifying reasons. Things are reasonable only in relation to our human purposes. It is by whether or not they fur¬ ther our intelligent purposes, needs, and desires, that the goodness or badness of things must be judged. Otherwise we fall into an idolatrous worship of the status quo with all its cruelties. To be sure Hegel does admit that a given state of society or a state of religion or mode of morality may become “perverted or corrupt” and lapse into the domain of mere nature, become subject to the sway of chance, and therefore perishable. But, as we have seen, we have no criterion whatsoever to determine when this is so, except in relation to our own finite human experience which Hegel with a lordly gesture dismisses as incompetent to pass upon the Reason of things. Hindsight is as easy as it is safe. Viewed retrospectively many things are described first as natural, then as plausible, and finally, as alter¬ natives become too dim to discern at a distance, as necessary. The role assigned by Hegel to philosophy is one of extenuation, validation, and justification of the past. Wisdom is not cheap which seeks to reconcile a man or a people to what is unalterable. It prevents them from being consumed by vain regret. But wisdom becomes suspect, however, when it runs out into an undiscriminating, blanket judgment about the past. Genuine wisdom must meet differently the challenge which Hegel states in the Preface to his Rechtsphilosophie. Hie Rhodus, hie salta. It must tell us what to do here and now, and in the face of those obstacles and those perils, it must tell us what policies to embark upon and what policies to forswear. Philosophy is forbidden by Hegel to tell the state what it ought to be, for “to comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason.” To which the obvious reply is that, on this view, what was and what will be are reason, too. What we need to know, however, is what the reasonable thing to do is on the basis of what is. The possibilities of a situation are part of w’hat it is. And since the possibilities are incompatible with each other, we must willy-nilly 18 Ibid., 56

p. 36.

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

make a choice—since passivity has consequences and is itself a choice. Depending upon our choice, upon our wisdom or lack of it, things be¬ come different, for better or worse. We make our history, and no one else does. It has been observed by many commentators on Hegel—and every reader who plunges into the details of the Hegelian doctrine of objec¬ tive mind will confirm this—that Hegel’s own metaphysical principles are compatible with different social and political positions from those he takes. For example, the liberal position towards the state or govern¬ ment is that its justification depends upon its protection of the individual from anarchy and the measures it takes to enrich the lives of its citizens by providing opportunities for desirable growth. Consequently the state becomes the supreme means, not the supreme end, of the good life and is subject to the judgment of morality. The state is not necessarily sacred or divine—as Hegel taught—but may be Satanic or evil as in Fascist and Communist countries. But one may agree with Hegel that it is a necessary condition for any good society, since among other reasons there must be a recognized source of authority if civil war and its evils are to be avoided. War between states may be as bad or worse than civil wars. The very same considerations which led Hegel to glorify the national state over any partial interest within it should have led him to the Enlightenment ideal of a federated world-state as a means of diminishing the dangers of war and of allocating the world’s natural resources to remove the in¬ equities in the opportunity for the development of freedom among all peoples. Yet as we know, Hegel regarded war as a necessary stimulus for the renewal of the creative energies of a people, and he was unalter¬ ably opposed to a world-state of any kind. There are several other respects in which, without contesting the va¬ lidity of Hegel’s metaphysics, one could espouse ideas and institutions more congenial to pluralism in social life and personalism in morality. However, I wish to show that, completely independent of the Hegel¬ ian system and its logic of internal relations—which must be rejected, we can find in Hegel’s work certain principles and insights that do il¬ luminate our social, historical, and moral experience. On the other hand, to the world of physical nature Hegel’s philosophy has nothing to contribute but darkness. Hegel’s N atur philo sop hie belongs only in a 57

HOOK

museum of intellectual grotesqueries, even though we can understand the considerations which led him to perpetrate it, i.e., his quest for a qualitative physics. It is possible, I repeat, for contemporary liberalism to learn from Hegel’s philosophy once its pretentious panlogism is laid aside. What his philosophy of society and history reinforce above all else is the im¬ portance of maturation and preparedness for cultural advance. The reformer, sword in hand, proclaims that “Readiness is all!’’ Hegel counters with the reminder that “Ripeness is something, too.” Else we court failure for our reforms, or success at so high a cost, that the fruits of success may set our teeth on edge. No more in history than in law do general principles decide special cases. Without principles, whether of the right to self-determination or equality of opportunity, we grope blindly from one historical infamy to another. Take, for example, the principle of national self-determination. Abstractly, it is just as valid in a country like Hungary, where from the time of Kossuth and even be¬ fore national aspirations were a unifying force for a whole people, as it is in the Congo, in which only tribal allegiances unite and divide the populace. Concretely, however, the matter of timing, of readiness for, and appropriateness of, social and political change required for na¬ tional self-determination makes enormous differences. The danger in the position of those who urge that we wait until a situation is ripe before we do anything to change it is that it may become rotten-ripe. The dan¬ ger in the position of those who disregard the problem of when a coun¬ try or people is ripe for change is that in the name of humanity and justice they may plunge a nation into chaos, which may bring greater inhumanity and injustice than was originally present, and hence dis¬ credit the principles in the name of which the premature change was introduced. Recent events in Japan also illustrate the point. A written constitu¬ tion, imposed by victors with high intentions and honorable motives, which does not reflect the habits and thought-ways, the history and character of the people who must live under it is sure to become a source of trouble. Democracy cannot be imposed from on high all at once. Hegel carries the recognition of this too far. “Amid the pressure of 58

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

great events a general principle gives no help,” he writes in The Phi¬ losophy of History. Historical situations, he says, are too unique for us to learn anything from the past or apply any principles. This is a con¬ fusion between necessary and sufficient conditions—without some prin¬ ciples which are universally valid we are blind—we have no basis of comparison and judgment. But principles are not enough; we must take note of the specificities of things. There is much truth in Hegel’s contention that history manifests an “idiosyncrasy of the Spirit—pe¬ culiar National Genius. It is within the limitations of this idiosyncracy that the spirit of the nation, concretely manifested, expresses every as¬ pect of its consciousness and will—the whole cycle of its realization. Its religion, its policy, its ethics, its legislation, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill, all bear its stamp.”19 There is much truth—and much error. For no more than does Spengler, who borrows the notion from him, does Hegel account for common elements in culture, for the effects of diffusion, for the fact, as Duhem once said, that sciences can be nationally distinguished only insofar as they are deficient and fallacious. Genuine science is inter-subjective, international, intercultural. Another illustration of the consequences of the disregard for the principle of historical maturity is the socialist revolution in Russia, which succeeded, to be sure, in industrializing a backward country but at a most horrible cost in human suffering and degradation. At most a few years were gained over the time period it took other nations to in¬ dustrialize, but it was by methods which generated great evil. The principle of historical maturity or ripeness is a check against unbridled voluntarism. Voluntarism is the glorification of the power of the human will. Even when that power is so limited by other powers that we can say it is impossible to achieve one’s will in the face of limit¬ ing powers, this does not make the attempt to achieve the impossible impossible. That is why voluntarism when it is unchecked is so danger¬ ous. Human beings always get hurt when someone tries to achieve the historically impossible. Here, too, Hegel is instructive. For his doctrine of Essence or polarity, according to which a thing or situation can be conceived as a unity of opposing forces or aspects, safeguards us from 19 Philosophy of History, Sibree translation, pp. 63-4.

59

HOOK

that kind of fanaticism which seeks to reduce all factors to one, which overlooks the antinomies of right versus right and good versus good. It puts us on guard against the self-righteousness which sees only what is illegitimate in the claims of our enemy and which blinds us to our own imperfections. Sum?na jus, summa injuria, Hegel was fond of saying, i.e., the greatest justice or rather the quest for absolute justice may lead to the greatest injury. For since justice must operate by rules which apply to all members of a class, the respect in which individuals of a class differ from each other cannot be regarded by the rule, even when these differences are relevant to the ends of justice itself. That is why justice must be tempered by discretion, by charity, love, and compas¬ sion. Justice must be blind to irrelevant differences but all-seeing with respect to those differences which are not irrelevant. From which we may conclude that hate, contempt, rage, prejudice—anything which prevents us from seeing more clearly into the specific needs of the hu¬ man beings before the bar of judgment is incompatible with the opera¬ tion of justice. According to Hegel the truth can be found only in the whole. Philo¬ sophically, this proposition is untenable. Logically, it leads to what Pro¬ fessor H. M. Sheffer once called an ineffable philosophy. Since its own truth depends upon our having knowledge of all truth, it falls short of the truth itself. But heuristically and psychologically it is a wholesome reminder that any particular truth about complex affairs is incomplete, that we must assert it tentatively and probationally, and that even if we must act on the truth we have, we must do it undogmatically. We need convictions and commitments—an open mind is not an empty mind— but we must be prepared to recognize that our convictions and commit¬ ments have alternatives and that they may be mistaken. This awareness is a characteristic of the liberal temper of mind. Liberalism seeks its truths piecemeal and not in one monolithic chunk. It finds them far short of the whole. Nonetheless, the Hegelian emphasis on totality suggests that the truth adequate to the solution of problems may arise from a cooperative quest in which we pit our in¬ sights against each other in hopes of finding a workable synthesis. This synthesis is not an eclectic melange of unrelated hypotheses, demands, and observations, but a creative solution which incorporates conflicting 60

HEGEL AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERALISM

interests into a tolerable harmony—at a price, of course. Leibniz was roughly justified when he asserted that the great philosophic visions were right in what they asserted but wrong in what they denied. Hegel saw more deeply in recognizing the role of creative negation in the life of the mind—in recognizing that the elimination of error may be a stage in the progress towards truth. If this is so, we must reject the Augustmian dictum that man is not free to err. Intellectual freedom as well as intellectual humility—and above all intellectual tolerance— cannot be preserved without this recognition of the right to err. Hegel despite himself recognized this right to err, for it follows from his doc¬ trine that, since all statements fall short of the truth, they necessarily must be in error. Even Hegel’s logic of the concrete universal contains a liberal moral, once it is pruned of its technical errors. The concrete universal expresses the systematic unity which obtains among the different parts of a whole or the different elements of a class. Its unity is not one of identity, Hegel alleges, for no two things are completely identical. Hegel denies that we can legitimately abstract qualities and relations from the systematic unity of things and understand these things in terms of abstractions. In this he is mistaken. The whole of science consists in abstracting from the particularity of things and events. Through the elaboration of these ab¬ stractions and their relations to each other science makes discoveries about particular things. Science can do this not only with respect to things but with respect to men, too. When we consider human beings from a political and moral point of view, however, it is dangerous and misleading to treat them from an abstract point of view alone. Men are not identical as men. Even when a formal definition can be applied to them physically and biologically, as human beings men are men in different ways. The common feature or character which makes them equally men does not make them equal men, identical men, or the same men. Each man is equally a man but in his own separate and unequal way, with his specific race, color, nation, creed, personality. The recognition of equality among men is not to be construed, therefore, as a demand for equality in every respect. For that entails a program of regimentation in which we try to stretch men to the same size by a rack or cut them down to the same size by sword or 61

HOOK

penal code. The equality of concern for all human beings to develop themselves as men is a respect for equality in difference and diversity, not a demand for an equality only among those who are the same or identical. In this way we can meet the fears and criticisms of those who are op¬ posed to democracy on the ground of liberalism, of thinkers like de Tocqueville who feared equality as a threat to liberty and diversity. Hegel, as we have seen, attacked the principle of “universal equality” of the French Enlightenment because it necessarily “annihilates particular¬ ity,” because its theory of freedom “effaces and annuls”20 all differenti¬ ation of capacity and “all differences of talent and authority.”21 He suggests that to be an individual is already to be suspect in the eyes of a terrorist of Reason who worships the abstractions of equality. This indictment of the Enlightenment is historically unjust and can only be defended by citations from the rantings of Robespierre and St. Just who betrayed its ideals. But the dangers which Hegel warns against —which today are summed up by Talmon in the phrase “totalitarian democracy”—are genuine enough. They become less when we interpret equality of opportunity, equality of self-development, equality of concern, not as a numerical or me¬ chanical equality of treatment but as an equality proportionate to the individual needs of different persons in disregard of irrelevant differ¬ ences of race, creed, and color. I am not contending in the least that Hegel was a liberal or that lib¬ eralism need go to school to Hegel to learn how to apply its own princi¬ ples to problems of modem experience. But in view of the hostility with which his views are regarded, I am trying to show that he repays read¬ ing and reflection because of the validity of his insights into some aspects of social and historical life. We can reject his errors, which were many, heavy, and influential. But there is more in his thought than error. 20 Phenomenology, p. 601. 21 Philosophy of Right, Knox translation, p. 225. Addendum to Sec. 5.

62

Hegel and Heine

HELMUT MOTEKAT

Hegel and Heine

It is only with considerable hesitation that a student of literature undertakes to engage in a discussion of philosophy. The non¬ philosopher, moreover, faces special difficulties as soon as he begins to deal with the philosophy and dialectical system of Hegel and their con¬ sequences and influence. Since his death Hegel’s philosophy has had a turbulent history, with the Neo-Hegelians and the Anti-Hegelians, and the widely differing individual interpretations given his thought by later philosophers not only in Germany but also in England, in France, in the United States, and in Russia. Anyone who takes an interest in political and social history is well aware of the enormously important conse¬ quences Hegel’s philosophical influence has had in the 19th and 20th centuries. With Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, the student of literature is on home ground, and it can be properly his business to investigate Heine’s relation to Hegel. I do not propose, therefore, another essay in the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, but I shall rather concentrate on Heine’s views and opinions as seen in the light of Hegel’s influence on them. The special character of Heine’s relations with Hegel is the source of his opinion of Hegel, and it is necessary to delineate their pe¬ culiar relationship in order to arrive at a view of Hegel's influence, both personal and philosophical, on Heine’s own thought, his personal phi¬ losophy, and his poetry and criticism. It should be noted that the literature on Heine contains very few references to his relations with Hegel or to Hegel's influence on him, and that none of these references is of recent date. There seems to have been very little interest in this matter, and it is doubtless for the reason that the documentary material, entirely from Heine’s pen, is of a rather

65

MOTEKAT

anecdotal character, which makes it difficult to arrive at reliable results. Heine’s accounts of Hegel are, moreover, controversial and polemical in their reflection of Heine’s own position with respect to Hegel’s ideas and their influence, both positive and negative. It requires then a careful analysis and interpretation of Heine’s own opinions in order to arrive at an adequate view of his relation to Hegel and of Hegel’s in¬ fluence on him. Here I can only outline the results of such an investiga¬ tion and try to illustrate by means of some quotations the very interest¬ ing line of development of Heine’s opinions and the role that Hegel played in this development. The philosophical system of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was the last great expression of the idealist conception of man, the world, and human culture; it was the last great attempt to make thought a refuge for reason and liberty. This conception in its 18th century form goes back to the Reformation when Luther and his followers persuaded the emancipated individuals to accept the new social system by diverting their claims and demands from the external world into their inner life. Luther established Christian liberty as an internal value to be realized independently of any and all external conditions. Ever since the Refor¬ mation Protestant Germans had been educated in the belief that the true essence of man is to be sought within himself and that consequently social reality is of no importance whatsoever. This development was the source of the tendency in the history of German thought towards a purely idealist explanation of the world and the consequent complete neglect of social reality.1 Rationalism in the early 18th century had led to a strongly utilitarian explanation of nature, but by the end of the century a very definite re¬ action against the rationalist-empiricist explanation of man and his world brought about a new, strictly idealist conception of man, history, and culture in general. “Culture was, then, essentially idealistic, occu¬ pied with the idea of things rather than with the things themselves. It set freedom of thought before freedom of action, morality before practi¬ cal justice, the inner life before the social life of man.”2 1 Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York, 1960), pp. 14—15. 2 Marcuse, p. 15.

66

HEGEL AND HEINE

Hegel’s system was the last expression of this cultural idealism. But Hegel’s thinking was the result of an original critical impulse that was strong enough to induce him “to abandon the traditional aloofness of idealism from history. He made philosophy a concrete historical factor and drew history into philosophy. History, however, when compre¬ hended, shatters the idealistic framework.”3 “Hegel’s system is necessarily associated with a definite political phi¬ losophy and with a definite social and political order . . . His basic con¬ cepts are,” however, “but the culmination of the entire tradition of Western thought. They become understandable only when interpreted within this tradition.”4 Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, stands on the threshold of a new era of thought and of an entirely new conception of man and his world. For it was precisely during Heine’s most productive years of literary activity that the new age of mechanization, issuing from the industrial revolution, began. It was at this time that the invention of the steam lo¬ comotive and the steamship brought about a complete change in the speed of transportation on land and at sea, and as a consequence an entirely new conception of space and time. This change is brought home to us in its full significance if we remember that just a few decades earlier Goethe on his trip to Italy travelled at exactly the same speed as the ancient Greeks and Romans had travelled, that is, at the speed of a horse-drawn coach. Then, only a short time after the death of Goethe and Hegel, after many centuries of measuring travel-time by the speed of horses, the picture was changed almost unbelievably by the develop¬ ment of railroads and steamships. In consequence a really revolutionary change took place in man’s perception of the world. Distances between important cities, reckoned for centuries in days or weeks of carriage travel, were quickly reduced to hours and minutes of train travel. The minute, up to then of no importance in man’s notion of travel-time, suddenly became a measure of considerable significance. The installa¬ tion of powered machines in the factories brought about not only a large increase in output per unit but also the loss of working places for thou¬ sands of craftsmen and laborers. And for the first time unemployment became an ominous problem threatening the stability of the world. 3 Marcuse, pp. 15-16. 4 Marcuse, p. 16.

67

MOTEKAT

These are a few of the most significant changes that took place in the mid-19th century, and they indicate the great difference in the worlds that formed the basis of Heine's and Hegel's individual thinking. Hegel was the last representative of the period of idealism in a world not yet confronted with the consequences of the industrial revolution. Heine belonged to the first generation of a new epoch in human history, and his works reflect its turbulent spirit and the altered perception of the world. Heine’s break with his German literary heritage can perhaps be best illustrated by pointing out that his style bears some resemblance to that of Thomas Mann. Heine’s literary style, however, differs greatly from that of Goethe despite the fact that to some extent they might be considered contemporaries. Young Heine paid a visit to the Sage of Weimar, and he was already thirty-five years old when Goethe died. Hegel, exactly twenty-one years Goethe’s junior, died in 1831, a year earlier than Goethe. Goethe and Hegel were truly contemporaries in every sense of the word. Although Heine admired them both, he takes up his own position, however, this side of the unbridgeable gap that marks the end of the 18th century spirit and view of the world and the beginning of the quite different spiritual and practical life that de¬ veloped in the 19th century. This gap, it seems to me, opened in the years between 1825 and 1840, when Heine was in his thirties. Hegel’s personality made a deep impression on Heine when at the age of twenty-one he was a student of the philosopher at the University of Berlin. From this time on he was attracted again and again by the principles of Hegel’s system, dark as Hegel’s philosophy might some¬ times appear to him, and he encountered on all sides disciples and ene¬ mies of the master. Their interpretations of the Hegelian philosophy ranged all the way from strict discipleship to an open antagonism that gave to Hegel’s pronouncements an exactly opposite meaning to that intended by their author. Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and others, too, in fact turned Hegel’s ideas around by 180 degrees. Yet, however much Heine may have been interested in Hegel’s personality and thought, he was not a philosopher but rather a very talented poet, essay¬ ist, and critic, and he belonged to a new era in history, different from that of Hegel. As a young man Heine had always tended to flee into a romantic 68

HEGEL AND HEINE

dream-world at the least prick of reality. But now, under Hegel’s influ¬ ence, he discovered in himself the ability to pass judgment upon per¬ sons, things, and experiences, in a curiously radical manner. Having long been ruled by his emotions, Heine now became conscious of his ability to give free rein to the play of his intellect.5 The influence of Hegel, therefore, provides us with a basis for understanding Heine’s peculiar individuality, which in his later life showed a combination of a very romantic and deeply emotional conception of man and the world with a most radically critical judgment in political, social, and cultural mat¬ ters. Heine’s judgment of many of his contemporaries reflects this same peculiar individuality. The joint operation of a very deeply rooted romanticism and an especially sharp critical faculty found expression in Heine’s style, in his remarkably sensitive feeling for the possibilities of the German language, both as a medium for lyrical expression and for criticism in prose. In his work there is almost always an ingenious combination of descriptive and critical techniques. Here is also the source of Heine’s admirable command of irony. Heine reports an anecdote that reveals his impression of Hegel’s per¬ sonality: Hegel’s conversation was always a sort of monologue, breathed out by fits and starts in a dull voice; the oddity of his expressions often struck me, and many of them have lingered in my memory. One starlight night we were standing close together at a window, and I, a young man of two and twenty, I had dined well and drunk much coffee, and I spoke en¬ thusiastically of the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. The master muttered: “The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming rash on the sky.”—“Dear God,” I cried, “Is there, then, no happy land up yonder to be the reward of virtue after death,” But, looking blankly at me with his pale eyes, he said, cuttingly: “You wish to receive a tip for having looked after your sick mother, and for not having poisoned your brother?” As he said these words he looked anxiously about, and he seemed to be re¬ lieved when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had come to invite him to the whist party... .6 5 Cf. Lewis Browne & Elsa Weihl, That Man Heine. A Biography (New York,

1927), p. 81. 6 Heinrich Heine’s Memoirs From His Works, Letters and Conversations, ed.

69

MOTEKAT

This account discloses an important aspect in Heine’s relation to Hegel. For in Hegel Heine found his first witness for his own denial of the existence of God and of a life after death. It is clear that from the beginning Heine was strongly inclined towards atheism. Jehovah, the God of his own people, did not mean much to Heine, and, although he was baptized as a Protestant Christian in 1825, this step was merely an unavoidable one on his way to social acceptance. As Heine wrote, his baptism was the “entreebillett” to higher society in Germany. He chose the Lutheran Church, not because of any serious religious convictions, but rather because he considered Luther one of the great fighters for human liberty. Thus, when Heine encountered Hegel’s influence, the philosopher’s denial of the existence of God and of life after death only strengthened his own inclination towards disbelief. Heine laid the full burden of responsibility for his disbelief, however, on the shoulders of the “master.” Repeatedly Heine’s argumentation takes the line that it was not he who was a convinced atheist, but it was rather Hegel who denied the existence of God, and that he himself was only a follower of Hegel in this matter. In a posthumously published “Letter on Germany,” Heine wrote: I have been upbraided in many quarters for having tom the curtain from the German Heaven and revealed the fact that all the gods of the old faith are gone from it, and that only an old spinster, with heavy hands and sorrowful heart, sits there: Necessity. Ah! I only gave a forewarning of what every man had to learn for himself, and what sounded so strange then is now cried out from the housetops on the other side of the Rhine. And in what fanatical tones these anti-religious sermons are delivered! We have monks of atheism, who would fain burn M. de Voltaire alive, because he is an impenitent deist. I must confess that I take no pleasure in such music, but then, again, I am not frightened by it, for I have stood behind the Maestro, as he was composing it—in very obscure and twisted signs, so that not everybody can decipher them—and I used often to see how he looked anxiously about from fear somebody should understand him. He was very fond of me, for he was certain that I did not betray him. At that time I even thought him servile. Once, when I was impatient with his saying: “All that is, is rational,” he smiled strangely and said, “It might by Gustav Karpeles, English translation by Gilbert Cannan (New York, 1910), I, p. 114. 70

HEGEL AND HEINE

also be said: All that is rational must Be.” Then he looked quickly about, but was speedily reassured, for only Heinrich Beer had heard the words. Only later did I understand such expressions. Thus it was also only later that I understood why, in his “History of Philosophy” he had declared, that Christianity is an advance because it teaches a God who died, while the heathen gods knew nothing of death.7 At this point Heine offers a suggestion of his own to complete Hegel’s notion, for he concludes the passage quoted with the remark: “What a step forward it would be if we could declare that God never existed at all!” Heine frequently refers to Hegel as the philosophical father of athe¬ ism. During the painful years of illness, when Heine lay on what he called his “mattress-grave,” he thought often of Hegel’s atheistic pro¬ nouncements. In a letter of April 1849, Heine wrote: Many a time, especially when the pains shift about agonisingly in my spinal column, I am twinged by doubt whether man is really a two-legged god, as the late Professor Hegel assured me five and twenty years ago in Berlin.8 I have stressed Heine’s conception of Hegel as the first representative of modem atheism. Subsequently, in Heine’s eyes, the philosopher be¬ came increasingly also the father of communism. It seems to me that in his younger years Heine looked on atheism as an almost entirely personal question affecting the individual, and that he regarded communism as an entirely social question; only later did he discover, following the course of their development in the 19th century, how closely the two questions really were connected. Of Hegel’s part in the rise of com¬ munism in Europe, Heine wrote: I could easily prophesy what songs would one day be whistled and warbled in Germany, for I saw the hatching of the birds, who in later days gave voice to the new melodies. I saw Hegel, with his almost comically grave face, sitting like a broody hen on the unfortunate eggs, and I heard his clucking. Speaking frankly, I rarely understood him, and it was only 7 Memoirs, I, pp. 114-115. The translation has been emended slightly after comparison with the original German of “Briefe iiber Deutschland,” Heinrich Heines Sdmtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1910), IX, pp. 483-484. (Ed.) 8 Memoirs, II, p. 221.

71

MOTEKAT

by much thought since that I have come to any comprehension of his words.9 Without attempting to trace the development of Marxism and com¬ munism from the Hegelian system, it is interesting, nevertheless, to note how profoundly correct Heine was in his judgment of Hegel’s philoso¬ phy as one of the main sources of communist theory. Even if we take into account that Heine was acquainted to some extent with Karl Marx and with almost all the other representatives of the communist ideology in its infancy, his judgment still shows an outstanding discernment and ability to grasp the intricate relations of social and political facts and leading philosophical ideas. Heine was not a communist. His political position has been described as follows: It is clear from the chronological study of his opinions, as expressed both in public and in private, that Heine’s political and social faith hardly went beyond a simple liberalism, emotional rather than rational, and wholly unconstructive. He sympathized with the sufferings of the poor and oppressed, but made no concrete proposals for social betterment. He was at home in no political party. His ruling political emotion was a hatred of depotism, whether from the right or the left, and it was mainly by his satirical thrusts at authority that he influenced the political attitude of the Germans.10 Heine was a true liberal and therefore full of forthright hatred of the aristocracy and of everything that kept certain parts of human society within a more or less slave-like state of existence. From time to time this overpowering hatred tempted him to think that communism might be the way to get rid once and for all of the unbearable aristocrats and their suppression of the “lower classes.” In such a mood he could write: Aye, these remnants or successors of the Teutomaniacs of 1815, who have modernised their old German fool’s costumes, and stopped their ears— I have hated and combated them all my life, and now that my sword falls 9 Memoirs, I, p. 113. The translation has been slightly emended by comparison with the German text of Heine’s “Gestandnisse,” Samtliche Werke, X, p. 171; in the original context, the “eggs” clearly refer to communism. (Ed.) 10 William Rose, Heinrich Heine. Two Studies of His Thought and Feeling (Oxford, 1956), p. 89. 72

HEGEL AND HEINE

from my dying hand I find comfort in the conviction that Communism, which will find them its first enemies in the way, will give them the coup de grace. . . . Out of hatred for the nationalists I could almost fall in love with the Communists.11 But, as the quotation clearly indicates, Heine had not decided to become a communist himself. He was, rather, a liberal and a democrat, and he had a strong desire for social improvement. This desire finds ex¬ pression in many of his poems as well as in his critical essays. From among many passages which illuminate this aspect of Heine’s character, I select one from the beginning of Germany. A Winter’s Tale. In it Heine relates how the poet upon arriving at the German border heard the song of a little harp-girl. The returning poet “was deeply stirred to hear a German melody again.” The girl was singing of this earthly vale of tears and She sang a heavenly lullaby, The song of renunciation By which the people, that giant clown Is lulled from its lamentation. I know the authors, I know the tune, I know it line for line: In public, water is all they preach; While in secret they guzzle wine. A new song, and a better song, Oh, friends, I’ll sing for you. Here on Earth we mean to make Our paradise come true. Wheat enough for all mankind Is planted here below; Roses and myrtle, beauty and joy, And green peas, row upon row. Yes, green peas enough for every man, As soon as they break their pods. We gladly leave to the angels and God The dainties of the gods. 11 Memoirs, II, p. 268; for last sentence cf. quotation of passage as given in Rose, op. cit., p. 88. (Ed.)

73

MOTEKAT

The way that Heine arrived at his social conception of mankind is a very interesting one. Originating in basic personal beliefs, Heine’s attitude was strengthened by his observations of the social condition of the poor both in Germany and in France, and his conception was fur¬ ther developed by his keen interest in the theories and experiments of the Saint-Simonists in France. There is good evidence for his very personal interest in that movement as well as in the ideas of Fourier and other socialists. He had met Enfantin, Pereire, and Chevalier. But it must be stressed that Heine never became a member of the Saint-Simonist movement or of any other group of similar character. Heine’s personal view was that a new social order with equal rights for all must not necessarily be the result of a bloody revolution, but rather that it could come from a general positive social reform. But he sensed all too well that the overthrow of the social order of his time would be brought about by a most terrible and bloody communist revo¬ lution. In March 1855, in the introduction to the French edition of Lutetia, Heine again implied the Hegelian background in this connec¬ tion : This confession that the future belongs to the Communists was made in a tone of the utmost anxiety and uneasiness, and alas! it was no mask! In¬ deed, I can think only with fear and horror of the time when these dark iconoclasts will have gained power; with their horny hands they will ruth¬ lessly smash the marble statues of beauty which are so dear to my heart; they will destroy all the fantastic toys and spangles of art which the poet loved so much; they will raze my grove of laurels and plant potatoes in its stead; they will tear from the soil of the social order the lilies that toil not nor spin, and are as wondrously arrayed as King Solomon in all his glory, because they will not take the distaff in their hands; the same fate will be¬ fall the roses, the idle brides of the nightingales; the nightingales, those useless singers will be driven out, and oh! my “Book of Songs” will be used by the grocer to make the little paper bags in which he will wrap up coffee or snuff for the old women of the future! ah! all that I foresee, and am overcome by fury unspeakable when I think of the ruin with which the victorious proletariat threatens my verse, which will be lost with all the old romantic world. And yet, I do openly confess that this same Communism which is so inimical to all my interests and inclinations does have a charm for my soul which I cannot resist; two voices are raised in my breast in its favour, two voices, which will not be silenced and are perhaps after all

74

HEGEL AND HEINE

only devilish enticements—. . . For the first of these voices is that of Logic. . . . and if I cannot controvert the premise, “that all men have the right to eat,” I am forced to surrender to all its consequences. . . . The second of those two tyrant voices which are my affliction is mightier and more daimonic than the first, for it is that of hatred, of the hatred which I have for the party, whose most terrible antagonist is Communism, the party which for this reason is our common foe.12 It was these very bloody and destructive consequences that led Heine to point to Hegel’s part in the origin of communism. “I had seen,” he said, “how the dragon’s teeth were sown, from which sprang the armed men of today, who fill the world with the sound of their arms.”13 For Heine very well perceived the close relation between atheism and com¬ munism as well as Hegel’s role in their rise. Heine did not discuss Hegel’s philosophy in Die Romantische Schule, in De I’Allemagne, nor in Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie

in Deutschland. Hegel’s ideas are mentioned in these works in passing, but Heine deals at length only with the philosophy of others such as Kant,

Fichte, and Schelling. The reason, apparently, that Heine

avoided a discussion of Hegel is that at the time of writing he was not too certain that his understanding of Hegel was really adequate for a critical treatment of his philosophy. When in 1852-1853 Heine finally proposed to deal at length with Hegel’s philosophy, in preparation of a new edition of De I’Allemagne, he was no longer convinced that Hegel’s influence in the spread of the new leading ideas had had a wholly beneficial effect. In his “Gestandnisse,” he wrote: I first learned how difficult it is to understand the writings of Hegel, how easy it is to go astray, and to think one understands when one is only learn¬ ing to construe dialectic formulae, when I was engaged in translating those formulae into French from the abstract school idiom into the mother tongue of sound reason and common sense. The interpreter has to be sure of what he has to say, and the most modest idea is compelled to throw down the walls of mysticism and show itself in its nakedness. I had made a proposal to compose a comprehensible statement of the whole Hegelian philosophy in order to incorporate it in a new edition of my book “De l’Al12 Memoirs, II, pp. 267-268. 13 Translation from “Briefe uber Deutschland,” Samtliche Werke, IX, p. 485.

75

MOTEKAT

lemagne,” so as to make it complete. I was occupied with the work two years, and I was hard put to it to master the arid stuff and set out the most abstract parts of it as popularly as possible. But when at last the work was finished, I was seized by a curious horror at the sight of it, and it seemed to me as if the manuscript were looking at me with strange, malevolent eyes. I had fallen into a curious dilemma: author and writing no longer agreed. My mind had at that time already come under the influence of the afore¬ said repugnance from atheism, and, as I had to confess that this Hegelian philosophy did most terribly advance all Godlessness it was most unpleasant and distasteful to me. . . . After the above confession the gentle reader will easily perceive why I was no longer happy in my work on the Hegelian philosophy. I saw clearly that it would not be good either to the public or the author to publish it. I saw that the thinnest soup of Christian charity must be more life-giving for famishing humanity than the grey mess of cobwebs of Hegelian dialectics— yes, I will confess everything; I was filled at once with great fear of the everlasting fire—it is superstition, but I was afraid—and on a quiet winter’s evening when a good fire was burning in my chimney, I made use of the opportunity and threw my manuscript on the Hegelian philosophy into the glowing coals; the burning pages flew up the chimney with a strange crackling. Thank God, I was rid of them! Oh, if I could only destroy everything that I have published about German philosophy in the same way! ... I owe the resurrection of my religious feeling to the Bible, that holy book, and it was for me as much a source of health as an occasion for pious admiration. Strange, after having passed the whole of my life in gliding about the dancing floors of philosophy, and abandoning myself to all the orgies of the intellect, and dallying with systems without ever being satisfied—I have suddenly arrived at the same point of view as Uncle Tom, taking my stand on the Bible and kneeling beside my black brother in prayer in the same act of devotion. . . . Formerly, when philosophy had a preponderance of interest for me, I could only value Protestantism for the services which it had rendered in the winning of Free Thought, which is the basis on which later on Leibniz, Kant and Hegel moved. Luther, the strong man with the axe, had to go before these warriors and prepare the way for them. I have regarded the Reformation as the beginning of German philosophy, and so justified my pugnacious siding with Protestantism. Now in my later and maturer days, when religious feeling has been roused in me overwhelmingly, and the shipwrecked metaphysician clings to the Bible: now I honour Protestant76

HEGEL AND HEINE

ism quite especially for the services which it has rendered by the discovery and propagation of the holy book.14 Though at this time Heine continued to claim no enthusiasm for any dogma or cult, he clearly saw the close connection of Hegel and German idealistic philosophy with the rise of anti-religious communist ideas in Germany. In 1855 Heine wrote: With the overthrow of the old doctrines of faith the older morality too has been uprooted. But the Germans will continue to hold to it for a long time. They are in this like certain ladies who are virtuous up to their for¬ tieth year and then afterwards no longer consider it worth the trouble to practice the lovely vice, even though their principles have become more lax. The destruction of faith in heaven is important not only morally but politically as well: the masses will no longer put up with their earthly misery with Christian patience, and they will thirst for happiness on earth. Communism is a natural consequence of this altered view of the world, and it is spreading all over Germany. It is just as natural a phenomenon that the proletarians in their attack on existing things have as their leaders the most progressive spirits, the philosophers of the grand school; these latter will move from doctrine to action, the final purpose of all thinking, and they will formulate the program. How will it read? It is long since that I dreamt it and expressed it in these words: “We do not propose to be sans¬ culottes, nor frugal citizens, nor cheap presidents; we shall set up a de¬ mocracy of equally splendid, equally sacred, equally blissful gods. You de¬ mand plain costumes, continent morals, and spiceless enjoyments; we on the contrary shall demand nectar and ambrosia, purple cloaks, precious perfumes, voluptuousness and luxury, the dancing of laughing nymphs, music and comedies.” These words are from my book “De l’Allemagne,” where I specifically predicted that the revolution of the Germans would proceed from that philosophy whose systems have so often been dispar¬ aged as vain scholasticism.15 Heine regarded Schelling’s philosophy of nature as the boldest Ger¬ man statement of the religion of pantheism. Then Schelling’s pupil, Hegel, had developed, Heine found, the philosophy of nature into a 14 Memoirs, II, pp. 249-250, 251-252, 254—255. The translation has been slightly emended after comparison with the original German text, Samtliche Werke, X, pp. 173-187. (Ed.) 15 Translation from “Briefe iiber Deutschland,” Samtliche Werke, IX, pp. 484-T85.

77

MOTE K AT

complete system, and with Hegel the German philosophical revolution had been concluded. The Germans’ next step had to be towards politi¬

cal revolution. But, as Heine would have counselled the German republicans already in 1835, had not the censor intervened, the German revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the “Critique” of Kant, by the “Transcendental Idealism” of Fichte, or even by the Philosophy of Nature. These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces that only await their time to break forth and to fill the world with terror and with admiration. Then will appear Kantians as little tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as in the world of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn with sword and axe the soil of our European life in order to extirpate the last remnants of the past. There will come upon the scene armed Fichteans whose fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest;. . . But most of all to be feared would be the philosophers of nature were they actively to mingle in a German revolution, and to identify themselves with the work of destruction. For . . . the Philosopher of Nature will be terrible in this, that he has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, that he can conjure up the old de¬ moniac forces of old German pantheism; and having done so, there is aroused in him that ancient German eagerness for battle which combats not for the sake of destroying, not even for the sake of victory, but merely for the sake of the combat itself. Christianity—and this is its fairest merit— subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardour of the Germans, but it could not entirely quench it; and when the cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break forth again the ferocity of the old combat¬ ants, the frantic Berserker rage whereof Northern poets have said and sung so much. The talisman has become rotten, and the day will come when it will pitifully crumble to dust. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.... Smile not at my counsel, at the counsel of a dreamer, who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, Philosophers of Nature. Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect. The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder. German thunder is of true German character: it is not very nimble, but rumbles along somewhat slowly. But come it will, and when ye hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen. At this commotion the eagles will drop dead from

78

HEGEL AND HEINE

the skies and the lions in the farthest wastes of Africa will bite their tails and creep into their royal lairs. There will be played in Germany a drama compared to which the French Revolution will seem but an innocent idyll.18 As we look back at Heine’s life and seek to determine the significance that Hegel’s philosophy had for him, it seems clear that his interest lay not in the philosophy as such but rather in the portentous impact Hegel’s ideas were having in the world, which he was the first to discern. Heine was primarily a poet and a critic, and one who no longer lived in the idealistic climate of the 18th century, but rather one who found himself faced with the realistic situation of the 19th century. In this new state of things Heine’s exceptional critical faculty led him to perceive the possibly dire consequences Hegel’s teachings would have in the world. Rationally, and emotionally in his hatred of those who denied liberty and justice to all, he could only welcome certain develop¬ ments that had been influenced by Hegel as necessary events. At the same time, however, in his romantic soul he was horrified at the pros¬ pect of a future ruled by proletarians. As Heinrich Laube once said of Heine, it was an irony of fate that this wholly poetic nature should find himself in a completely political society. In this situation Heine pursued his own independent course and based his decisions on his own critical judgment. If we seek the source of these decisions, however, we shall find that in one way or another they have been influenced by Hegel and his philosophy. For it was to a great extent in his acceptance or rejection of Hegel’s ideas that Heine found his own position in the struggle for the liberation of mankind, in which he participated so bravely to the end. Early in his own struggle he confessed his faith in this cause and asserted his own role in it: I do not know if I deserve to have a wreath of laurel laid upon my coffin . . . I have never held my fame as poet of much account, and I care little whether my songs are praised or derided. But lay a sword upon my coffin, I pray you; for I have been a brave soldier in the war for the liberation of mankind.17

10 Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, translated by John Snodgrass (Boston, 1959), pp. 158—1'60. 17 Memoirs, II, p. 270; passage is taken from Heine’s Reisebilder III, written in 1828.

79

Hegel's Absolute and the Crisis of Christianity

GUSTAV E. MUELLER

Hegel’s Absolute and the Crisis of Christianity

INTRODUCTION When hegel approaches

the ultimate center of his phi¬

losophy of religion, his language begins to foam and to glitter like a river gushing towards a water-fall. He heaps his most favorite terms: “Concept” (Begriff), “Comprehension” (Vernunft), “Absolute Spirit”

(Geist), “Absolute Idea”—the eternal totality sometimes identified with, sometimes distinguished from the religious term “God.” He chants them like a hymn, he waves them like a magic wand. They are linked with images: the abyss, the depth; with values: love, truth. “The Con¬ cept itself is that which can never be conceptualized; evident, revealed to speculative comprehension, but not to perception or reason.”1 This intoxicating whirl creates an intense confusion like a dense incense float¬ ing in a clair-obscure cathedral. Nevertheless, his intention is crystalpure: “The ancients called it enthusiasm; it is the pure theoretical con¬ templation, the highest quietude of the mind which is at the same time its highest activity: to grasp and to become aware of the pure Idea of God, to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity.”2 I think it would help if we simplified this amazing exuberance of expressions. I shall, therefore, speak only of the “Absolute” and not clut¬ ter it with “Concept,” “Comprehension,” “Spirit,” “Idea,” etc., and 1 Hegel, Samtliche IVerke, Jubilaumsausgabe, ed. Hermann Glockner (Stutt¬ gart, 1927-1939), XVI (Vorlesungen ilber die Philosophic der Religion. 2. Band), 235, 358. Subsequent references in Roman numerals refer to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 2 XVI, 227.

83

MUELLER

reserve the term “God” to its mythical function. The “Absolute” with¬ out “God” is the concrete, living totality of all opposites; the “Absolute” with “God” has the additional, enriching depth-dimension of being worshipped and actualized in the absolute religion! Thus, when Hegel speaks of the “proof of the existence of God,” I shall have to change this to “the proofs of the Absolute.” This has, by the way, also the advantage of getting rid of the silly term “absolute idealism,” for it might just as well be called “absolute realism.” We shall also see that Hegel’s proposition that God is “the Absolute Spirit” only means: the Absolute is a concrete dialectical totality including human personality or spirituality; there is nothing “spiritualistic” or “spiritistic” about this untranslatable Geist. Finally Hegel’s philosophy is no “Absolutism” either, because the Absolute is also the non-absolute, relative and finite: “This incompre¬ hensible is nothing else but the Concept itself.”3 For Hegel the religions of Being and Essence form an ascending scale in which categories of the Absolute appear in and for the religious consciousness. In religious language: God reveals Himself gradually. Now, in the case of the Christian religion, the philosophical task remains the same: Hegel wants to demonstrate “the comprehensiveness (Ver-

nunft) of the Christian religion,” as identical with the “comprehensive¬ ness of religion as such.”4 Religious freedom in its fullness, the reconcili¬ ation of man in and with his God, corresponds to the Absolute, the un¬ conditional totality of Being which contains life and subject and spirit as its finite manifestations in itself; the Absolute is a dialectical and con¬ crete unity, cause of itself and of its own self-alienation in time and in suffering, and it mediates itself with itself through the cancellation of its own temporal negativity. To think, to comprehend the essence and meaning of religion is neces¬ sary and unavoidable for the religious spirit itself, and this does not mean that Hegel postulates a “religion of thinking.” “To comprehend re¬ ligion in thought implies the justification and necessity of the mythical form of faith which is other than thought.”5 The alternative—to retire into the walls of mythical imagery of faith 3 XVI, 326. (Das Unbegreifliche ist eben nichts anderes, als der BegrifF selbst.) 4 XVI, 353. 5 XVI, 352-353, (Vorstellung).

84

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

without comprehension and to declare that there is no Absolute or that it is unknowable—would spell disaster: After having considered the origin and history of the church, we see that, in attaining realization, it now falls into this condition of inner disruption; its realization appears to be at the same time its de-realization. But ought we to speak here of destruction when the “Kingdom of God is founded eternally,” when the “Holy Spirit as such lives eternally in its Spiritual Community,” and when “the gates of Hell are not to prevail” against the church? Only, how can it be helped? This discordant note is actually present in reality. Just as in the time of the Roman Empire, the Divine was profaned, and political life was universally devoid of principle, of action, and of confidence, and reason was reduced to deal with finite and private matters, and individual well-being was elevated to the rank of an end, so, too, is it now. Public and individual opinion without objective truth have attained authority, and the pursuit of private aims and enjoyment is the order of the day. When in the world of reality and in the sphere of faith nothing is justified, then the rigidity of an external command and the power of the State can effect nothing; the process of decay has gone too deep for that. When the people have been betrayed by their teachers, when the salt has lost its savor, when all the foundations have been tacitly removed, then the people, for whose earthly reason truth can exist only in a pictorial presen¬ tation, no longer know how to assist and direct the impulses and emotions they feel. They are nearest to the condition of infinite sorrow. Intellectuals brought help to themselves by means of rationalistic reflection, and they have found their satisfaction in finitude, in subjectivity and its virtuosity, and consequently in what is empty and vain, but the substantial core of the people cannot find its satisfaction in pleasures from which the infinite sorrow is absent.6 For us, philosophy has harmonized this discord. In all the manifold forms of religion necessary truths were shown, and so we shall also re¬ discover the truth and the Idea in the new decadent revealed religion. But this reconciliation is itself merely a partial one without outward universality. Philosophy forms in this connection a sanctuary apart, and those who serve in it constitute an isolated order of priests, who must not mix with the world, and whose work is to protect the possessions of Truth. 6 XVI, 355.

85

MUELLER

How the actual present-day world is to find its way out of this state of disruption, and what form it is to take, are questions which must be left to itself to settle, and to deal with them is not the immediate concern of philosophy.7

The Absolute as “Concept” and “Idea”

The cognition of the Absolute in the subject Hegel calls “Concept” (Begriff). “The existence of the pure Concept is an individual whom he has chosen to be the vessel of its infinite sorrow.”8 The religious Concept is the necessary result of the phenomenological development of the study of the forms of religious consciousness in rela¬ tion to “objects” of worship. The religions of Being are conscious of themselves in terms of external projection; the Concept or self-knowledge as existing subject is poten¬ tially (an sich) already present in them. They discover Being in the dreadful immediacy of transitory, relative, and subjective objects in the relation to the immediate experience of desires and urges in religious naturalism. The Chinese discover the unity and omnipresent power of Being in its eternally changing configurations and transformations of nature-images fused with states of the soul. The Hindus discover Being as the Nothing in all finitudes, as self-extinction and self-distinction, which is in and for the Hindu religious conscious¬ ness. In the Middle East, Being discovers itself as opposed to itself in good and evil, joy and suffering, and as intellectual riddle. This is the threshold of and the transition to the religions of Essence: I am myself the life of all opposites; I am my own heaven and hell. Being as Substance discloses itself as Subject: the absolute subject is known to be not only unity, but uniqueness. This single, solitary One is at the same time concretely universal, all encompassing; the subject is concrete identity and universality in and for itself. In the Greek religion of Beauty, this same individual, unique, and encompassing unity knows itself as revealed in man, present in and for his intuition; it contains many, essentially opposed, values and powers 7 XVI, 356. 8 II (Phanomenologie des Geistes), 537. It goes against English grammar to call concept “he,” but to get at Hegel’s meaning we have to break this rule and per¬ sonalize this term. 86

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

of life. The gods of imagination are real in and for the human subject, who enjoys and celebrates them in a festive culture. By honoring them, man honors himself. But the uniqueness, universality, and particularity of the Concept is not sufficient; it lacks the empirical individual. To discover it as divine is first present in the Roman emperor-worship; there the mortal individ¬ ual is deified, but in abstraction from all other categories. The Absolute as unique individual and person is mythically realized in the paradox of the Christ. “The innermost subjectivity of man is at the same time encompassing the All.”9 “Subjectivity is recognized as absolute moment of the divine nature.”10 “Man is that spiritual subject who exists as such in and for himself; this is his own objective Concept.”11 In Christian language: “The word became flesh.” The Concept grasps and focuses in itself the essential dialectic of Being. Like Being it determines itself in and for itself; unlike Being, it knows this to be the case. It is thus both substantial and consciously free, an actual totality of affirmations and negations, a living mirror of the universe. It is the identity of subject-object knowing itself as such. The Concept is the essence of personality. The Concept matures in a process of spiritual growth. Its freedom grows as it actively appropriates necessary and substantial contents of the world. As it opens itself to the world, the world discloses itself in it. Such is the two-way movement of freedom. Subjective appropriation and objective-content are dialectical opposites in and of the Concept; it is thus at once “subject-object.” Truth exists for itself in the Concept and nowhere else. Or, truth is the known presence of the ontological dialectic in the subject. Forms or shapes (Gestalten) of the Concept, woven into a living spirit¬ ual texture, constitute actuality (Wirklichkeit). Actuality, therefore, does not coincide with the more abstract category of reality of whatsoever occurs or is given. The task of the logic of the Concept is to examine the value and validity of its concrete forms. Being and Essence are dialectical in themselves; in addition, they are dialectical in and for the Concept. In themselves they are not concentrated 9 XVI, 329. 10 XVI, 328. 11 XVI, 322.

87

MUELLER

in the uniqueness of free persons. In and for the Concept, they are seen as his own universal aspects: he participates in Being and Essence, and they participate in him. Forms of the Concept, thus, are not to be mistaken for concepts in the sense of formal logic. The latter forms are dead, ineffectual, non-actual containers, indifferently consuming anything that is thrown to them; even though formal logic as a whole is itself one of actual forms of the Concept.12 The actual Concept effects himself; he is the cause of himself. As participating in the identity of Being with itself, the Concept is uni¬ versal; as participating in essential opposites or contrary spheres of Being, it is particular; as unique self-determination, which realizes for itself what it is in itself, or as actualizing its potentiality, it is individual. Thus there is no life or actuality in general: universal life is through and through indi¬ viduated, and individuation is fully caught up in universality. The Concept as actual in the unique unity of universality, particularity, and individuality, is the same in all persons. I am what thou art: another to thee; thou art what I am: another to me. This is the concrete identity of the Concept. I am what we all are; we all are what I am. This is concrete universality of the Concept. The dialectical meeting of I and thou unites the concrete identity and the concrete universality of the Concept in one and the same living universe of discourse. The Concept does not leave any of its members outside of itself, as the rational concept does. When this comprehensive meaning of Concept as actual is understood, it is manifestly clear that the empirically concrete is a weak analogy of the concreteness of the Concept. For the former many external items are held together by an equally external form; for example, the concept of an em¬ pirical house is a generalized object-image (Vorstellung). Herein concepts are abstracted both from the universality of Being and from unique indi¬ viduals. The saying that concepts are only abstract is quite valid for empirical generalizations. On contrast, in the concreteness of the Concept, each person honors the other as differently and uniquely representing the same Absolute.13 In the Concept, Being understands itself as intelligible. Thinking and Being, subject and object, are opposites in their dialectical identity. They 12 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, my edition and translation (New York, 1959), 133-134. Subsequent references will be indicated by Enc. 13 Enc., 134-145.

88

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

are as inseparable as they are separable. The absolute world-itself is their concrete unity. The complete speculative “Syllogism” (Schluss) mediates itself through its own dialectical negations: the absolute whole is nothing without that which it is not—nature and mind; mind is nothing apart from the back¬ ground of the absolute whole and without the resistance of nature, both of which it is not; nature is nothing apart from the whole and apart from being known in its objectivity, both of which it is not. Each of the three spheres is the intelligible Concept, the unity of subject-object, thought and Being in different modifications; each poses, opposes, and presupposes the other two totalities as necessary for itself.14

If we reflect back on the movement of the religious self-discovery of Being, disclosing now its innermost core in the Concept, this dialectical unity and difference of absolute and human subjectivity, we are in the presence of another central Hegelian term: the Idea. There is nothing “idealistic” about it. It is derived from Plato’s Anhypotheton, the Un¬ conditional, in the light of which every' “hypothesis” is criticized as in¬ sufficient, and from Kant, where “Idea” is the totality of all conditions. In Hegel this unconditional, self-determining totality is eternal move¬ ment; it means that there are no achievements, manifestations, or spheres, of life which are not drawn into the eternal life of the whole; they are posited, cancelled, and preserved, in its eternal process. All previous determinations of the Absolute are absorbed in this defi¬ nition: The Absolute is Idea. They all participate in its truth and are true only as far as they participate in it. Every single being has barriers and is determined by one particular aspect of itself or another. Each aspect needs other aspects. In their im¬ mediacy they seem to be real in themselves, but ultimately they are real only as being mediated in the total process and inner activity of the Idea, which also constitutes the non-finality of each. The absolute Idea is not the idea of something or other; rather it dif¬ ferentiates itself in many concrete systems of life and remains the One allembracing process and activity in all of them. For object-thinking things are real and ideas are formal-logical abstrac¬ tions of reason; they start from empirical observations and are checked by referring back to them. Reason, therefore, in applying this habit of thinking to the absolute Idea, is baffled because it does not find a particular 14 Enc., 141.

89

MUELLER

empirical starting point; it can think an idea only in the sense of an abstract generality, a generalized object-image over against its manifold content. To grasp the untruth of this standpoint of reason is the beginning of com¬ prehension, which understands why reason is one-sided and to that extent untrue. The Idea of freedom: The Absolute determines itself and is determined by nothing outside itself. Its eternal presence is one with its restless cre¬ ativity. It never stands still; it leaves standing no seemingly finished mani¬ festations of its life. The Idea discloses and contains in its infinite movement all dialectical correlations as its own: it may therefore just as well be called comprehen¬ siveness (Vernunft), or unity of subject and object, identity and difference, ideal and real, infinite and finite, or body and soul, or absolute possibility which necessarily brings itself into actuality, or the Absolute whose nature includes its own negation in itself and can only be thought of as affirmation of itself, and the like. Analyzed by reason, such dialectical structures may seem formal or static; in truth they are different modifications of the ab¬ solute internal process of the Idea which eternally beholds its own creativity in the Other created by itself. It infinitely divides itself (Ur-Teil) in its immense totalities—each of which participates in its independence and freedom—and withal it is their transition and self-transcendence. The ab¬ solute Idea is intelligible activity, an absolute purposiveness perfectly actualized in each imperfect moment: the Final Cause.15 Being as Concept, thinking itself as intelligible being and as existing intelligence, and Being as Idea, the eternal process, life, and activity, of the concrete totality, find their explication in the dialectical logic of philosophy. The unity of one and other, of quantity and quality, of infinite and finite in Being, and the units of identity and difference, of reality and appearance, of essential and existential in Essence, this dia¬ lectical unity is an ontological principle as well as a logical one. Dia¬ lectic, as the logic of the thinking mind, is also that method which makes Being as Concept and as Idea or Process explicit. Or, the dialectic, which enables Being to transform its potentiality (an sich) into its ac¬ tuality (being for itself what it is in itself: subject), is the same method which enables man to think the Absolute and to think its own thinking as a necessary aspect or moment of the Absolute. A theology which denies dialectic either does not or cannot think at 15 Enc., 152-154.

90

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

all, for such a denial is equivalent to saying that there is no truth in and for religion, or such a theology is consciously or unconsciously deceiving itself in constantly using dialectical categories without admitting it. And a philosophy which would reduce dialectical thinking to a formal, abstract reason and confine its application to the immediate experience of appearances likewise does not know what it is doing. There is no law against abstractly paying attention to the psychology of reasoning and perceptual experience. But it is the height of folly and self-contradiction to say anything against or about the knowledge of the Absolute, which for this epistemological position is simply not visible at all. This is Hegel's central critique of Kant: Rationalistic metaphysics succumbed to attacks which came from two opposite directions. The first was led by empiricism. It took its stand in immediate experience, which was either sensuous and external or psychic and internal. The empiricist believed he was able to derive all contents of thought from given facts or consciousness; at the same time, in contra¬ distinction to this, he believed that formal-logical analysis of empirical facts—formal abstraction and identities—is the source of truth. The supersensuous Absolute was either radically denied or agnostically doubted. Kant criticized both rationalistic and empiristic metaphysics. He ques¬ tioned the validity of reason for metaphysics. Its categories, he asserted, were synthetic propositions a priori of rational form and non-rational con¬ tent, valid only for scientific experience or object-thinking; they are not derivable from the senses, but from the spontaneity of thought, creating universal, necessary, objective relations. The transcendental unity of self-consciousness-—I am identical in all my thinking—is the original derivation and justification of all categories; they all unify experience. The manifold object-images given to feeling and perception are the empirical contents which are located by the forms of sensibility, space and time; they are thereby outside of one another. These contents are then thought by logical forms. Contents and forms are opposite in an original identity. Such is Kant’s conception of consciousness: I think and connect objects and also relate them to myself; the categories of reason are ways by which I unify the objects in myself. (As Kant puts it: The conditions which make true judgments possible are the same conditions which made the objects of judgment real.) While immediate perception is elevated to the rank of scientific experi-

91

MUELLER

ence by the objectivity of rational categories, their use is nevertheless re¬ stricted to experience. Without the given materials they are empty. On account of this fmitude of reason, scientific object-knowledge is in¬ capable of determining the Absolute, because it is given in no perception. Insight into the limited character or conditional nature of object-science rests on our ability to think the unconditional whole. In its light the scien¬ tific objects are known as appearance. This is comprehension (Vernunft). Kant, however, underrates the impact of his own notion of comprehen¬ sion. He refers to the Infinite as if it were a thing, and he suggests that if reason is to know this thing-in-itself, as it knows other things, it produces necessary self-contradictions, becomes involved in the fallacy of the para¬ logism. Comprehension is thus reduced to reason (Verstand), and reason, which ought to unify experience, is unable to fulfill this demand. The difficulty is again clear: reason can be critical only of object-metaphysics; it cannot be an organ of truth. In its critique of the finitude of the categories of reason, critical philoso¬ phy is right. But it is one-sided in that it fails to comprehend its own com¬ prehensiveness. The dialectical tension between logical, organizing form and organized, irrational material is not understood as a concrete logical process. Kant does not realize that he is not practicing rational scientific logic when he comprehends it in its limited truth. A further deficiency in Kant is his lack of a systematic-dialectical deter¬ mination of the categories. He depends on empiricism and formal logic. If this were remedied, the transcendental unity of self-consciousness would cease to be a mere formal unity. There are many syntheses a priori or con¬ crete unities of opposites in which the unity of self-consciousness manifests and determines itself, and its categories—the categories of comprehensions, including those of scientific reason—determine each other mutually and in the whole; each is that which it is by being also that which it is not. This mutual dialectical relation justifies them systematically (deduziert). Kant’s mannerism and love of formalistic schemes must not let us over¬ look his merits. He has accomplished the profoundest and most decisive progress in the philosophy of recent times. He demonstrated that dialectical opposites are necessary and essential in and for the comprehensive whole. Reason makes them articulate, but it should not confuse its formal-logical contradictions with the ontological reality of the opposites. Equally im¬ portant is Kant’s emphasis on the ontological status and reality of the soul. He has rescued this problem from object-metaphysics and from an empiristic meaningless question. The genuine and essential reality of the soul

92

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

lies in its identity with its own self-experience; the I am is a being which knows and is the self-knowledge which exists. In grasping this appearance of freedom as the essence as well as the existence of the soul, the absolute first ground of philosophy has been reached. These objective values, however, are obscured by Kant’s position, which is subjective idealism or criticalism. It disagrees with empiricism as to what constitutes experience, but agrees with it that there can be no compre¬ hension of the all-comprehensive Absolute, because knowledge is said to be restricted to sensuous stuff. It remains tied to the finite, which is never ultimately real, and to an object-knowledge which wavers between the poles of subjectivity and externality. Further, Kant’s criticism contradicts his own concept of knowledge. On the one hand, scientific reason alone furnishes object-knowledge, but on the other hand, it only furnishes knowledge of appearance to finite ob¬ servers. In this self-limitation of objective reason, the comprehensive Idea or the Concept of absolute truth is lost when Comprehension is degraded to a regulative formal unity, and absolute Being to an empty thing-in-itself. It is the utmost inconsistency to admit that reason is confined to know¬ ing appearances only and, at the same time, to contend that this is the only true knowledge we have. A deficient, incomplete limited mode of knowledge can only be known by comparison with the really-present Idea of a complete whole. It is sheer unconsciousness not to realize that by this dialectical negation of one side, which thereby is known to be finite and limited, a true knowledge is practiced. It proves the reality and the pres¬ ence of an unlimited Infinite. Also religious and moral life presupposes knowledge of the Absolute to be true; it is implied in them. Both have overcome the abstract separation of being in itself and from being for itself. The Absolute is not merely a negativity Beyond, but it comprehends and dissolves the negativity of finite, fixed, and subjective positions within itself. This agreement between dialectical ontology and the practical spirit in ethics and religion also eliminates Kant’s division of theoretical and prac¬ tical reason. Likewise, the atomistic division of the soul contradicts the complete unity of self-consciousness. The faculties of the soul do not dwell in separate compartments. What would practical reason be, if it were not a synthesis a priori, or manifestation of dialectical truth.16 I agree with Hegel’s criticism of Kant, but he should have been more 10 Enc., 91-94.

93

MUELLER

consistent in his terminology. The “proofs of the existence of God” are not such—Hegel is in agreement with Kant on that point—but they are proofs of the Absolute. That the Absolute is “Concept’ and ‘Idea’ simply means: The Absolute can be truly thought. The following proofs of the Absolute show how.

The Cosmological Proof of the Absolute

The traditional “proofs of the existence of God” have succumbed to Kant’s critique. Hegel is in full agreement with him. Kant’s critique is valid. There can be no “proof of God,” if “God” is assumed to be a “thing-in-itself,” a “person,” or a general entity behind or beyond Being, World-Itself, Reality-as-such. The case is entirely different if “God” is a religious term for the Absolute, if by “God” is meant the Absolute in the perspective of worship. And this Kant could not see. The philosophical-dialectical proofs of the Absolute, then, also may become the elucidation of faith, the self-comprehension of religion, “the truth of its certainty.”17 Hegel frequently refers to Anselm as a model of a “faith requesting intelligence” (fides quaerens intellectum) so that “I believe in order to know” (credo ut intelligam). In his phenomen¬ ology of other religions Hegel has practiced this logical founding in their behalf. In Christianity, however, the situation is different. The dialec¬ tical logic of the Absolute is also the logic of Christian theology. As “religion of the absolute spirit,” Christianity actualized the “Concept”; it knows the truth, it does not only feel or mythically represent it. In the Christian myth the truth is evident (offenbar) and revealed or “laid open” (offenbart). As universally true, the proofs of the Absolute express in the logical and necessary form of truth a living, concrete, “spiritual elevation of the soul,” which experiences in an absolute shock the insufficiency of a mere finite existence.18 This religious experience, in turn, is rooted in the dialectical essence of Being becoming aware of itself in its own Concept. In Christian language: it is God’s grace to reveal Himself in man, as man to man. “Spirit is the concrete unity of faith and thought; there is no faith 17 XVI, 382. 18 XVI, 368-369.

94

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

which does not know what it believes, and there is no thought which does not contain faith in itself.”19 “The Absolute is mediated by that which is ‘other,’ which is the oppo¬ site of itself; it is creative activity which shows itself as such in that it creates finite worlds, without which it could not be itself. To maintain its concrete identity in its own finite self-differentiation is the eternal love.”20 “This thought is the essential and true core of faith.”21 “With¬ out this content the Vorstellung ‘God’ is an empty word.”22 “With this thought is inseparably connected my own free conviction, to which it is indifferent whether many agree or not; before this witness of the spirit, mere opinion pales.”23 “The concrete unity of the Absolute with the world is at the same time their opposition; together they enact a living, becoming unity, one side mediating and being mediated by its own other.”24 In the light of the Absolute the non-absolute, finite, and relative character of all natural things becomes evident or manifest (offenhar). “To be finite means to be inadequate, to fall apart, to be external to others; each finite thing depends on other finite things in an endless progression and regression of relativity.”25 This is the truth of nature; but it is not a truth for nature, but for us, who think this cosmological proof of the Absolute.26 Because Being as immediacy cannot create, produce, and maintain itself, it is accidental or contingent; this would not be thinkable if the contingency of nature were not measured and compared with the Idea of a Being which is necessary and true in and for itself; this is the proof ex contingentia mundi.27 Its necessity lies in the undeniable “negativity” in the non-absoluteness, non-necessity of all finite things. One cannot say of any that they must be; there is no contradition involved if they were absent instead of being present; they might just as well be different from what they factually are. This is their own truth, not something we arbi¬ trarily think about them. The Absolute shows itself in the breakdown of any finite thing, or system of things, which would claim any necessary or absolute existence.28 Or, the Absolute negates their negativity, it can¬ cels them in order to preserve them in its eternal life.29 19 XVI, 3 68-3 69 . 23 XVI, 40 2 . XVI, 42 6.

20 XVI, 380-381. 24 XVI, 411. 28 XVI, 463.

21 XVI, 392. 25 XVI, 419. 29 XVI, 470.

22 XVI, 396. 26 XVI, 423.

95

MUELLER

The Absolute is thus that “process which mediates itself with itself by ‘othering’ itself and by cancelling this, its own negativity.”30 So far we have demonstrated the cosmological proof by means of the dialectical categories of necessary substance and accidental contingency; it can also be demonstrated by other categories. The Absolute as infinite is not a Being in distinction from or over against the finite, in which it differentiates and individuates itself. If Being as infinite were only opposed to Being as finite, it would not be truly in-finite (without limit, finis), but it would be limited by that which it is not: the finite systems of natural and human beings. The finite beings, on the other hand, are mortal; they have their end, their finis in themselves. It is beyond their power not to be bom or not to die. It is impossible for them to be other than they are: they must be finite. This absolute impossibility not to be finite is the necessary assertion of the infinite in and through all its finitudes. The infinite is mediated through the perishing of its own otherness, which is the finite.31 In an endless cycle finite realities are posited and cancelled. This is a bad or irrational endlessness. The finite, although it can never last, always recurs and posits and holds on to itself. The finite shall not remain in its finitude, yet it is incapable of true infinity. It is merely the perennial con¬ tradiction or dissatisfaction with itself because it wants and does not want to be finite. This progression ad infinitum expresses the dialectic of the finite one-and-other—a realm of care, futility, and sorrow. Everyone is also the other of another one and vice-versa. If this mutual alienation is comprehended, Being negates its negation and thereby affirms itself as the one in the other. It then remains itself in all changes and tran¬ sitions. This is true infinity of Being. All otherness is both in it as well as for it. It is Being in and for itself.32 Or again, the Absolute is eternal. Its eternity is not something outside or apart from its own temporality. The impossibility of all finite things not to be temporal and mortal is the absolute necessity and presence of eternity in their perishable and vanishing transitoriness. The Eternal is mediated to be and to manifest itself through its own otherness, which is the temporal order of the created world. “The true cancellation and 30 XVI, 463. 31 XVI, 452-157. 32 Enc., 106-107.

96

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

transfiguration

(Aufheben)

of time is its timeless omnipresence or

eternity.”33 “The separation of time and eternity leads to abstract and meaning¬ less questions of reason: Is the world eternal or temporal? Does it have a beginning and end in time or is it eternal? In such questions the world is cut off from the Absolute. The truth is that the Absolute is temporal and eternal; it is eternally present in all temporal orders of before and after, which it is not. To imagine eternity before a temporal world makes it a moment of time, a past; and to imagine eternity to begin after time ends makes it a future.”34 The Absolute as eternal affirms itself through the negation and preservation of all temporal-mortal moments, which are negative in themselves; it mediates itself as omni¬ presence in and through that which it is not, the remembered and antici¬ pated durations, which are relative among themselves. “The being of the finite is thus the Being of its own other, the infinite.”35 “The finite is destined not to be; it is this contradiction to have in itself its own other, its annihilation.”36 The finite and temporal does not leap into the infinite and eternal (Kierkegaard!),37 but the latter is known to be in the finite as absolute necessity and power.38 Again, the cosmological proof of the Absolute may take the category of causality as ground. The Absolute is cause of itself as well as ground of that which is caused or grounded. “This is reciprocity of cause and effect, since cause would not be cause apart from or outside of its effect.”39 “God” could not be “creator” without “creation.” This must not be confused with a causal relation of experience, formulated by sciences, which are merely partial and approximate determinations. If one starts from the positivistic assumption, that any given world is positive in itself, one need not go beyond it; one might then simply stay with it and pursue causal relations in an endless regression. Sec¬ ondly, the tentative and partial rational determinations do not lead 33 I (Aufsatz aus dem kritischen Journal der Philosophie und andere Schriften aus der Jenenser Zeit), 97. 34 IX (System der Philosophie II. Die Naturphilosophie), 51-53. 36 XVI, 458. 36 XVI, 481. 37 XVI, 489. 33 XVI, 491. 39 XV (Vorlesungen ilber die Philosophie der Religion. 1. Band), 174.

97

MUELLER

logically to a perfect engineer or mechanic who has put them there; rather, they imply a botcher. In criticizing those spurious arguments of reason, Kant’s critique holds and is valid, but in destroying insufficient arguments of reason, he did not realize the truly dialectical relations, which all rest on the negativity of the finite world.40 A is non-A: the Absolute posits that which it is not—the non-abso¬ lute, finite, relative, mortal—-and maintains its concrete identity in can¬ celling their seeming independence, while at the same time preserving them as transfigured moments of its eternal life, movement, activity. In human terms this presence of the Absolute in the relative may be called absolute spirit or love. This means that I am one with you in spite of our difference, or that our individual differentiation differenti¬ ates our original living oneness; in losing my isolated self in and for you, I gain my true or concrete self—regardless of our empirical imperfec¬ tions, which are included in a true love. Because the Absolute is thus present in man, aware, or conscious of itself, we may now understand better why Hegel calls it “Concept.” Because it actualizes itself as proc¬ ess and activity, Hegel also terms it “Idea.” The Teleological Proof of the Absolute

Equally invalid is the traditional teleological argument for the exist¬ ence of God: there is purposiveness, wisdom, and goodness, in the world; therefore there must be a wise and good originator of such values. Hegel again agrees with Kant’s critique of this positive argument. Its invalidity lies in its positivity. There is purpose in the world, but there is also blind purposelessness and the destruction of innumerable purposes or ends. God, therefore, is at best an impotent God, and at worst, a devil, providing or abetting evil. Or, conflicting purposes and values may just as well imply many gods at war among themselves. The argument from purposes is an external teleology, the rotation of the earth around the sun, the seasons of the year, night and day, the atmosphere, mechanical and chemical processes, have brought about or have made possible organisms; vegetation, in turn, makes possible ani¬ mals’ feeding on it; and animals, including man, feed on other animals. The “wise arrangement” in nature, in other words, is also a beastly arrangement. 40 XVI, 436-450.

98

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

The plant is interwoven with its environment, whereas the animal breaks this immediate context. It is alive for itself. The animal soul is the inner unity of the whole animal, wholly present in all its functions. Correspond¬ ing to this concentration in itself, the environment becomes for the animal an outer world, to which it has to adapt itself. Whereas in the plants the elementary life of nature in earth, water, air, and light, is directly absorbed, the animal, on the contrary, transforms the elementary life of organic and inorganic nature into stimuli to which it responds in many ingenious ways. Fish learn to swim and see in water; birds and insects take to the air on wings; reptiles and mammals learn to live with the earth. In each realm of animal life there are levels of lower and higher organi¬ zation which are higher or lower in regard to their more simple or more complex forms of organization. The sexual differentiation of animals gives rise to animal families or animal societies. The sexual copulation fuses independent individuals which are in need of dependency upon each other. In the act of copulation, the animals actualize the concreteness of their kind, which reproduces itself through them. [The German word Gattung means kind, genus, race; the word Begattung means copulation, pairing. To Hegel this is a welcome linguistic help to express his concrete universal: Begattung, integrating individuals, actualizes their Gattung in a stream of generations of rising and vanishing individuals.] The longing to be one with another and the feeling of this achieved union with its partner is the highest pleasure of animal life. Lower forms exist only to reproduce themselves; their act of copulation is also their death. The separation and opposition of an inward animal soul against its ex¬ ternal environment is identical with animal mobility: in order to seek food and to adapt itself, the animal explores its life-space and shapes itself ac¬ cording to its ends. The selfish purposiveness determines the visible shape of the animal organism: claws and sharp teeth express the purpose of animals of prey, hoofs and broad teeth express the purpose of feeding on plants. This inner organic purposiveness in action and process is the Idea insofar as it gains existence in animal life; but, as natural and external, the Idea is also frustrated and alienated from itself. It tends to develop beautiful types of individuals, representing their kinds; but it also fails, and develops mon¬ strosities : if fish take to swamp, crawl on land, and become amphibious, or if a bird, like the ostrich, tramples camel-like through the deserts, with ridiculous rudiments of wings and feathers that are like rough fur, or if a

99

MUELLER

mammal, the duckbill, imitates a duck and helps himself to a beak, or if it is not even clear whether an organism is a plant or an animal—then the kinds are mixed up and confusion reigns. It is as if a musician wanted to paint with tones, or as if an historian dramatized his dry stories with blank verse. The second frustration of the Idea is the sadness and brutality of animal life. The purpose of every animal is to maintain itself, violently driven by instinct and greed, ruthlessly at the expense of others. Violent death is the general fate of animals. Each animal has to fight with all it is and has for its survival. Anxiety and alarm are the most common feelings; they express themselves in a protective organ of escape, mimicry, and simu¬ lation. At the mercy of external circumstances, victim of luck and chance, the animal is threatened from all sides and suffers fear, pain, and sickness. The glory of organic teleology is amply balanced by the misery of mutual self-estrangement. This inadequacy of the natural appearance of the Idea, this self-estrangement is a sickness unto death, for which there is no remedy in nature. Animal life is insecure, dreadful, brutal; left to itself it shows the complete futility of finite and external existence.41 The argument from external teleology, therefore, “has fallen into discredit, and justly too; for here we have to do merely with finite ends, which require means, as for instance the fact that man requires this or that for his animal life. This might be further specified. If we regard these ends as something primary and hold that there exist means for the satisfaction of these ends and that it is God who permits these means to exist for the sake of such ends, then we very soon come to see that this method of regarding tilings is inadequate to express what God is. “These ends, insofar as they appear in definite special forms, are seen to be essentially unimportant, so that we cannot possibly hold them in high esteem and cannot conceive that they represent something which is the direct object of the will and wisdom of God. All this has been summed up in one of Goethe’s Xenien. There someone is represented as praising God the Creator on the ground that He created the cork tree in order that we might have stoppers.”42 “In the world is only a relative but nowhere absolute wisdom.”43 This is so, because “in the finite world the purpose and its material means always fall apart,”44 Worse yet, the lower forms are stronger than the higher: the earth could spin around the sun with organisms, and organisms could main41 Enc., 185-187. ioo

42 XVI, 536.

43 XVI, 523.

44 XVI, 524.

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

tain themselves without man; the higher the purpose, the more depend¬ ent.’'’ “Aristotle gave expression to the same idea. Nature is constantly producing living things, and the point is whether or not these will be able to exist. Whether or not any of the things thus produced will be able to maintain itself is a pure matter of accident. Nature has already made an endless number of attempts and has produced a host of mon¬ strosities ; myriads of beings of various forms have issued from her which were not, however, able to continue in existence, and besides, she did not concern herself at all with the disappearance of such forms of life.”40 Hegel did not have to wait for Darwin! If we now consider what goes on in higher spheres of existence, and look at human ends, which we may regard as relatively the highest of all, we see that they are for the most part frustrated and disappear, leaving no permanent result. In nature millions of seeds perish just when they begin to exist and without ever being able to develop the life-force in them. The life of the largest portion of living things is based on the destruction of other living things, and the same holds good of higher ends. If we traverse the domain of morality and go on even to its highest stage, namely, civi¬ lized life, and then consider whether the ends here are realized or not, we shall find, indeed, that much is attained, but that still more is rendered abortive, destroyed by the passions and wickedness of men, and this is true of the greatest and most exalted ends. We see the earth covered with ruins, with remains of the splendid edifices and work left by the finest nations, whose ends we recognize as having substantial value. Great natural objects and human work do indeed endure and defy time, but all that splendid national life has irrecoverably perished. We thus see how, on the one hand, petty, subordinate, even despicable designs are fulfilled, and on the other, how those which are recognized as having substantial value are frustrated. We are here certainly forced to rise to the thought of a higher determina¬ tion and a higher end, when we thus lament the misfortune which has be¬ fallen so much that is of high value and mourn its disappearance. We must regard all those ends, however, as much as they may interest us, as finite and subordinate and ascribe to their finitude the destruction which overtakes them.47 Similarly, we read in Hegel's Philosophy of History: If we look into a world-history then we see an immense image of changes of infinitely manifold shapes of life, of people, states, and individuals, in 45 XVI, 528.

4>! XVI, 529.

47 XVI, 532-533.

101

MUELLER

restless succession. Everything that may affect the soul of man is actualized. Everywhere purposes are pursued which we acknowledge, whose execution we wish to see, for which we hope and fear. In all those happenings and accidents human action and passion is uppermost; everywhere do we find our inclination engaged. Sometimes we are attracted by beauty, freedom, power; sometimes by energies through which even vices appear historically important. Here massive public interests are moved and are dispelled in an infinite complexion of minuteness; there, immense things emerge out of seemingly unimportant small beginnings—everywhere a colorful tur¬ moil, and if one is dispelled, another takes its place. The general category which appears in this incessant change of individuals and peoples which maintain themselves for a while and then disappear is the category of change . . . the thought of the mind which manifests, develops, and culti¬ vates its powers in all directions. Which powers man possesses we experience out of the manifold of his cultures . . . evolution which in nature is a quiet, organic growth, but the spirit is a hard infinite battle against itself. What spirit wants is to reach its own Concept, but he himself hides his goal from himself and is proud in this self-alienation ... if we contemplate this spec¬ tacle of passions and violence and unreason, and we see evil, misfortune, and destruction as a result, we can only be filled with compassion . . . and with the indignation of a good spirit if such a one is in us . . . In seeing his¬ tory as this altar upon which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals are sacrificed, then the question necessarily arises, for what ultimate end have these immense sacrifices been made?48 We have now reached the point where the teleological proof of the Absolute is seen in its true form: it is in this “mourning compassion” and “indignation” and “infinite sorrow” over the incompetence of human practice that the Good is absolutely present; it is again the negativity of the whole range and region of finite purposes which is necessary and unavoidable. This necessity reveals the Absolute as the Good. It is in its light that the failure of all finite goods is realized. “The universal, final end is found in no experience.”49 This negative teleological proof of the Absolute as the Good is valid. Hegel gives it in two different modifications: first as physico-teleological argument concerning the inevitability of physical evil or pain. If we look at the world as if it were external to us, then it appears as 48 XI [Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophic der Geschichte) ,94, 111. 49 XVI, 533.

102

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

physical; this physical world, in turn, appears partly as inorganic and partly as organized in individual shapes of life. Both sides are partial aspects, which condition one another. This whole world-view is a real illusion (Schein) because we cannot look at reality as if we were out¬ side of it; if we do this, nevertheless, we necessarily see in it the work of estrangement, if we understand the necessity of this illusion which is owing to our individuation or finitude, then we see through it; thus truth appears in the breakdown of this illusion. Reality-in-truth, present in this dialectical comprehension

(Ver-

nunft), is this: there is nothing in reality that is not active-reactive or alive. What we call body is this life as it shapes itself and appears to others in their mutual alienation. “This is Plato’s world-soul, the Abso¬ lute as an eternal and living whole. In grasping life in its truth we think the One organic life of the Universe, a living system.”30 Since it de¬ termines itself completely and is not, as any finite purpose in it, partly determined by others, the Absolute as World-Soul is free, always in agreement with itself; it is the Good. This Good or Wisdom appears in the cancellation of all finite purposes, none of which can be said to be unconditionally wise or good. “The highest purpose is the Good, the universal and final end of the world; it is absolutely founded in our comprehension.”51 The absolute Good is, therefore, the unity of what ought to be and what eternally is; the Good coincides with the absolute truth, which is identical with the whole of reality. This dialectical identity of the truth and the good, which are two facets of the same Absolute, is the actuality of the absolute Idea in Geist consciously present in every man who understands the finite in the light of the infinite. Through the absolute Idea the finite subject in all its contradictions and failures is reconciled with itself and with reality.52 The Concept in its immediate finitude appears as a psycho-physical organism. Although the physical body and the functioning soul may be studied as if they were different entities when abstractly separated by rea¬ son, in actuality the body is the appearing and external aspect of the soul. Apart from this dialectical concreteness of the appearing subject-object or 50 XVI, 531. 51 XVI, 533. 52 Enc., 160.

103

MUELLER

Concept, both sides vanish; the object-side becomes unknowable; the sub¬ ject-side has no objective embodiment.53 This living actuality as subject-object is its Concept (Begriff). It is speculative because it mirrors in itself a cosmic life which also is a concrete universality and self-differentiation. I have thus in one and the same consciousness myself and my world; I find myself in my world and I find my world in myself; world-itself—that which is—gives me my objectivity and finds in me its subjectivity. This “I am” is the unity of the subjectivity and the objectivity of Being. This unity is spirit (Geist). As immediate, it is not yet developed; it must become for itself what it is in itself and attain its freedom. Life aware of itself is self-knowledge or Concept. It results from the dialectical negation of reason as object-thinking; or, reason, in overcoming its finite contradiction of subject versus object, becomes the comprehensive Concept.54 That Being can be truly thought or makes itself available in thought is a high principle—higher than the negative or skeptical scientism of recent vintage. But it failed when the Absolute was thought as if it were a thing consisting of general rational predicates. Rationalism did not evaluate critically the categories of Reason (Verstandesbestimmungen), let alone their competence to determine the Absolute. External object-science and metaphysics were tangled up in a knot. For example, existence (Dasein) is not a formal-logical predicate as it is used in the proposition “God has existence.”55 The true transition accordingly is from this finite mode of life to ab¬ solute, universal conformity to an end, to the thought that this world is a kosmos, a system, in which everything has an essential relation to every¬ thing else, and nothing is isolated, something which is regularly arranged in itself, in which everything has its place, is closely connected with the whole, subsists through the whole, and thus takes an active part in the production, in the life, of the whole.56 This physico-teleological proof of the Absolute leads directly to the moral proof: All men seek the Good because none is in full possession of it. The Good has a determinate character in-and-for-itself, and to this na¬ ture stands opposed, partly as physical nature which follows its own course and its own laws, and partly as the natural element in man, his particular 53 Enc., 137. 104

54 Enc., 212-213.

55 Enc., 86.

56 XVI, 538.

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

ends which are opposed to the Good. If we go by our experience, we find much that is good in the world but also an infinite quantity of evil, and we would just have to reckon up the amount of evil, and the amount of good which does not attain realization, in order to discover which pre¬ ponderates. The Good, however, is something absolutely substantial; it belongs to the very essence of its nature that it should be actual. But if it is said to be something which merely ought to be, then this cannot reveal it¬ self except as opposed to experience. That which ought to exist is only a postulate. Since the moral good has not itself the power to realize itself, it is necessary to postulate a “third” through which the final-end of the world is to be realized. This “third” is grounded in the Absolute. Moral good belongs essentially to man, but since his power is finite, and since the realization of the moral good in him is limited—owing to the natural ele¬ ment attaching to him, and because he is himself the enemy of the Good, it is not within his power to realize it. The moralist imagines the existence of God only as a postulate, as something that should be; this moral ought can have for man only private certainty; the moral good represents what is ultimate in his practical reason. This rational certainty remains merely a belief, an ideal, and it cannot be shown that it actually exists. Aye, if the moral good is to be realized, then we must require and presuppose the perpetual existence of the discord, for moral good can only exist and can only be insofar as it is in conflict with evil. It would thus be necessary to postulate the perpetual existence of this moralism as enemy of the Good. If we cling to experience, the good, the final end is something subjective merely, and in this case the contradiction between man’s finite life and the Good would have to exist always. On the other hand, if we turn to the absolute and the supreme end, we find ourselves in another region; here we start from what is inward, not from what is supplied by experience.57 The natural soul in man is essentially unfortunate or miserable (un¬ glue klich) because its wish for pleasure and happiness is constantly frustrated by the course of events; nature responds to his longing only partly.58 While the natural wish for happiness engenders pain and misery, “the spirit of man is essentially evil.”50 Man insists on being evil. “He consciously and conscientiously divides himself against him-

57 XVI, 534. 58 XVI, 279. 59 VII (Grundlinicn der Philosophie des Iiechts, oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse), 201. 105

MUELLER

self; he posits his own evil in order to battle with it. He cannot con¬ ceive of himself without evil; if he could he would not be human but like a plant.”60 Thus man, on the one hand, insists on moral evil in order to combat it; on the other hand, a reduction to the innocence of vegetative life is death of the spirit and a greater evil. So man lives in a choice of evils which is the inevitable and all-pervasive moral selfcontradiction.61 If man sees and confesses that he cannot make himself good—“make earth a heaven”—then this insight into the essential human incom¬ petence presupposes a deeper unity of the spirit, which knows that “he must stand this contradiction.”62 This is “the infinite power of his inner unity”63 and also the “infinite sorrow over his estrangement from the Good.”64 This “deepest depth of the spirit”65 is also the beginning of his recon¬ ciliation. He accepts this evil human nature as that which cannot possibly be other than it is. “The infinite sorrow dissolves the contra¬ diction in the pure depth and unity of the soul.”66 The Absolute and infinite is thus present in the finite subject; the latter at the same time thus reaches agreement with its infinite essence, in which all contradic¬ tions are dissolved—as all past evils are remembered in the unper¬ turbed unity of contemplation. “The conflict is eternally renewed, eternally combated, and eternally transfigured.”67 The horrible futility of evil is known as futile, and it is comprehended in absolute love, whereby the frailty of human nature is embraced.68 “This is the unity of the divine and human nature, so that the finitude and fallibility of the latter does not exclude it from being affirmed in the Absolute.”69 The highest point of most intense condensation of the moral situation of man Hegel finds in his conscience. Here “his evil and his good are found in immediate unity.”70 The absolute Good is present in pointing out that I am evil, that I should have acted differently. In conscience “I am for myself what I am in myself.”71 “In conscience I am this absolute certainty wherein my equally absolute untruth collapses.”72 60 XVI, 270. 61 XVI, 272. 62 XVI, 277. 63 XVI, 277. 64 XVI, 271. 65 XVI, 270. 66 XVI, 279. 67 XVI, 279. 68 XVI, 280-281. 69 XVI, 281. 70 X (System der Philosophic. 3. Teil. Die Philosophic des Geistes), 396. 71II, 49 6. 72 II, 503, 504. 106

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

Here “the absolute substance, the Good itself (Sache selbst) has be¬ come subject.”73 “Conscience is that innermost inward solitude wherein I am concentrated in myself, my limited and external self is annihilated, and that which is Good unconditionally affirms itself.”74 In his conscience man knows himself. This self-knowledge is the source of evil, because it creates a division within the self; the subject posits and at the same time judges itself as its own internal object. But to know itself as evil is also affirming itself as good. Were man only a natural animal, then he would know neither good nor evil, he would be undivided and would therefore not be in need of reconciliation.75 Man exists as this self-contradiction of one and other, of truth and error, good and evil. He becomes, he makes himself evil through his moral imperative to be good, and he knows the absolute Good as the ultimate reconciliation, in which alone he is as he ought to be.76 The Absolute in the struggle of good and evil is not only real but necessary; the world without death, struggle, suffering, and moral evil, would not be the real world. This implies that the non-absolute, the finite will, divided in and for itself, is posited in the Absolute as its own negation and otherness, but also and at the same time posited as that which man cannot hold onto, as if it were absolute and final. Not finitude or subjectivity is the source of evil, but their false absolutization. If man sticks to a limited “ought,” as if it were absolutely sufficient to justify his existence, then the Absolute will undo it in order to mani¬ fest that Good which is absolute harmony and agreement of Being with itself. Human freedom may choose to pretend that a finite good is in¬ finite, a relative end is absolute; this freedom is both the source of evil and the condition whereby the absolute Good can be known in con¬ science; it affirms itself through the negation of human incompetence. The Ontological Proof of the Absolute

The ontological argument is Hegel’s favorite one; he devotes at least 73II, 491. 74 VII, 196, 197. 75 Samtliche Werke, ed. Lasson (Leipzig, 1929), XIV (Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Religion. 3. Teil: Die Absolute Religion), 113; referred to below as M XIV. 76 M XIV, 116-117. 107

MUELLER

75 pages to it. In the cosmological argument the Absolute proves itself through the contingency of the world, in the teleological argument the Absolute proves itself as the Good through the inadequacy of all finite goods, but in the ontological argument the Absolute reveals itself as a dialectical identity of thought and being, of substance and subject, in and for thought. In all three movements the Absolute mediates itself with itself through the negation of its own otherness and negativity in time. In the ontological argument the Absolute reveals itself as “truth knowing itself in the form of truth; it discovers in the subject-thinking the principle of all true knowledge.”77 “The logical essence, the dialec¬ tical Being of the Absolute, is here present in the form of thought, in the existing concept.”78 “The Absolute becomes—in the depth of the sub¬ ject—for itself what it is in itself, the dialectical life of absolute spirit.”79 “The speculative Concept unites and mediates all opposites; thus the Absolute as unconditional activity and dialectical process is evident and present in it.”80 “Comprehensiveness (Vernunft) in man is the divine or absolute spirit in him; the Absolute thus dwells in man-—not beyond the stars.”81 “The comprehensiveness of the Absolute is in and for human comprehension.”82 The logical nerve, the proving “middle term,” or, as Hegel calls it, the true “mediation” is here, as it was in the cosmological and teleo¬ logical arguments—the negativity of reason. Man is not only evil; he also lives in untruths and errors. But if he were a living lie, without knowing this to be the case, he would be happy with his delusion. But, to know errors, delusions, and untruths as such, presupposes the abso¬ luteness of truth, in the light of which errors are known and are cor¬ rected. The Absolute, therefore, is the source and origin of this living, actual process of overcoming errors, which constitute the core and meaning of history. “In the infinite unity of objective Being and think77 M XIV, Anhang: Vorlesungen uber die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, ed. Lasson (Leipzig, 1930), 25; referred to below as M. 78 M, 30. 79 M, 31. 80 M, 35. 81 M, 43. 82 M, 50. 108

hegel’s absolute and the crisis of Christianity

ing subject their difference is preserved; this is the pulse of life, its long¬ ing and dissatisfaction and restlessness.”83 Hegel discusses and praises Anselm’s version of the ontological argu¬ ment at least a dozen times, and he contrasts it with the spurious or pseudo-ontological argument, as it was developed by Gaunilo in op¬ position to Anselm. It was this false version of the ontological argument that was refuted by Kant. Again, Hegel agrees with Kant’s criticism —and again he points out that the argument Kant has demonstrated to be invalid is not the true ontological argument. The pseudo-ontological argument treats the Absolute as if it were an isolated “thing-in-itself” in a “Beyond.” It says: If we think a perfect or absolute Being, then it would not be perfect and absolute, if it did not exist. The concept of the Absolute therefore implies its existence. Gaunilo illustrates the invalidity of this argument by the concept of a perfect island, Kant with the concept of a hundred dollars. We may think a perfect island without discovering it in experience, and I may think a hundred dollars without finding them in my pocket.84 All of which simply shows, as Hegel puts it, that no abstract finite and em¬ pirical concept is the Absolute. The concepts of reason and their empirical-perceptual contents always fall apart and are never identical. This dualism of rational concepts and irrational immediacy is the logi¬ cal incompetence of human reason.85 The true ontological proof of the Absolute starts from this incom¬ petence of finite reason. If I think the Absolute as that “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived,” then we have an abstract defi¬ nition of the Absolute in our reason. As such, it is subjective, only our idea, and it is precisely not that Being greater than which nothing can be conceived. The Absolute, therefore, becomes evident (offenbar) in the negation of this incompetence of reason. It is present in the break¬ down of any finite mind which would be deluded into thinking that its subjective concept of the Absolute is the Absolute. My symbolic presen¬ tation of the Absolute is merely my Vorstellung or “idea.” Anselm expressed the nature of this transition in the following fashion: the idea of God is that He is absolutely perfect. If accordingly we think of God only as idea, then we find that it is merely subjective; whatever is ss M, 61.

84 XVI, 540.

85 XVI, 549. 109

MUELLER

merely represented in the form of an idea is defective and not perfect, for that is the more perfect which is not merely represented as an idea but also is in actuality.86 Only in the Absolute is its own Concept and its Being one concrete identity and process. The finitude of things consists in the fact that their existence is only partly determined by their concepts; they are essentially different. The finite does not correspond to its concepts, let alone to the Concept.87 The Concept is that concrete and universal totality which determines itself, further distinguishes essential spheres (such as nature or history) in itself, and is individuated life and activity. It posits finitude as its own other and mediates itself with itself by cancelling its finitude. It preserves its identity in this negation. The Absolute as absolute Geist or Love creates the world, particularizes itself in it, creates the other of itself, and remains identical in this otherness.88 In the Concept Being understands itself as intelligible. Thinking and Being, subject and object, are opposites in their dialectical identity. They are as inseparable as they are separable. The absolute World-ltself is their concrete unity. The complete speculative Syllogism (Schluss) mediates itself through its own dialectical negations: the absolute whole is nothing without that which it is not—nature and mind; mind is nothing apart from the back¬ ground of the absolute whole and without the resistance of nature, both of which it is not; nature is nothing apart from the whole and apart from being known in its objectivity; both of which it is not. Each of the three spheres is the intelligible Concept, the unity of subject-object, thought and Being, in different modifications; each poses, opposes, and presupposes, the other two totalities as necessary for itself. Anselm’s ontological argument exemplifies the Concept or intelligibility of the Absolute as a dialectical process of self-realization of Being in the subject and of the subject in Being. He says: Certe id, quo majus cogitari nequit, non potest esse in intellectu solo. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re: quod majus est. Si ergo id quo majus cogitari non potest, est in solo intellectu; id ipsum quo majus cogitari non potest, est quo majus cogitari potest. Sed certe hoc esse non potest.89 86 XVI, 541. 87 XVI, 545. 88 XVI, 542. 89 It is certain that a Being, than which a greater cannot be conceived, cannot exist in the mind only. If it were in the mind only, then it could be conceived to exist beyond it; which is greater. Consequently, if that being than which a greater I IO

hegel's absolute and the crisis of Christianity

Taken as a syllogism of reason, Anselm’s argument is forced and faulty. The rational concept of the absolute Being as implying its existence is merely subjective and analytical. In philosophical comprehension, how¬ ever, Anselm’s thought is profound and true: the rational concept of the Absolute is thought as one-sided, subjective, and negative, but the break¬ down (aufheben) of this subjective concept is the affirmation that the Absolute is not one-sided, subjective, and negative. Reason, which is merely finite, is thus at once cancelled as ultimate and restored in truth. The Ab¬ solute is present in this self-transcendence of the finite mind, which is also not self-transcendent. Being and thought are inseparably united as well as distinguished in one actuality. Dualism only reflects on the difference: Concept is one thing, Being is another. . . The absolute identity of Being and intelligibility, or Concept, has always been at the core of all and every philosophy. Being is logically one with itself, which is the Concept; Concept exists actually and individually. Either side has the same ontological status. Plato, Aristotle, and all their predecessors, assumed this identity. Des¬ cartes and Spinoza presupposed this identity of being and intelligibility or Concept by definition or as axiom; they also illustrated it in the forms of intellectual intuition, faith, or immediate certainty. Objectivity is actual in subjects; subjectivity is objectively real. The dialectical identity of these subject-objects is an eternal process. It is both immediately present and certain; it is also mediation and critique of all immediate certainties. In this process, the Concept is and knows all determinations of Being as concurrently its own determinations. It produces itself in necessary, uni¬ versal, original partition of itself (Ur-Teil), and in inclusive conclusiveness (Schluss) in which reason also is preserved in its abstracting function. The term for this total process comprehending itself is Idea.90 Without the ontological proof of the Absolute there would be no truth in religion. Those who find fault with philosophy for thinking religion, for stating religion in terms of thought, don’t know what they want. Hatred and vanity here come directly into play under the outward guise of humility. cannot be conceived is in the mind only, then that than which a greater can not be conceived is that than which a greater can be conceived. But certainly this can not be so. 90 Enc., 141-143. I I I

MUELLER

True humility consists in having the spirit absorbed in the truth, in losing ourselves in what is most inward, in having within us the absolute content. Thus anything subjective which may still be present in feeling disappears. We have to consider the Idea from the purely speculative point of view and to justify its claims against reason and against reason s hostility to all con¬ tent of religion whatsoever. This content is called a mystery, because it is something hidden from reason, . . . and thus it is that everything specu¬ lative, everything philosophical, is for reason a mystery.91 For philosophical comprehension and for religion of the absolute spirit this mystery is evident, open {offenbar) and revealed {offenbart).92 This was Hegel’s last public statement before his sudden death. s1 XVI, 367. 92Samtliche Werke, ed. Lasson (Leipzig, 1927), XIII {Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Religion. 2. Teil: Die Bestimmte Religion), 93, and M XIV, 69.

I 12

Of Structure and Symbol: The Significance of Hegel s Phenomenology for Literary Criticism

HELMUT REHDER

Of Structure and Symbol: The Significance of Hegel’s Phenomenology for Literary Criticism One of the most elusive concepts used in literary criticism

is that of structure, or form. As a morphological concept, structure is derived from phenomena in space or events in time, and it can be demonstrated within these dimensions. Literature, on the other hand, operates in imagined rather than actual space and time dimensions. Therefore, whenever in analogy to the natural sciences the concept of structure is applied to literature, this imaginative element is sufficient to blur distinct morphological perception. There are other difficulties sur¬ rounding structural analysis. Literary structure is determined in part by the material with which literature operates—language; in part, by the content which it seeks to communicate—meaning. Accordingly, the discovery of “structure” in literature is obscured by the intrusion of con¬ tent symbolism, which demands interpretation and divination where one would expect demonstration and proof. For this reason, the dis¬ covery of structure in a literary work is often subject to the temptation of premature generalization, as in any other discipline involving judg¬ ment. People are prone to generalize when they estimate the merits of a book or work of art, evaluate an individual or a trend, or judge and interpret the manifold tendencies of their time. Midway between error and prejudice, generalization is a weakness of criticism which ventures

REHDER

a judgment before all evidence is sifted, and it escapes into the vague¬ ness of slogan and cliche where personal avowal is expected. Possibly, generalization is a weakness of our mind, which, exhausted from the restless current of thinking, suddenly jumps ashore to take a rest, un¬ easily clinging to what appears like an object of security. There is no science which teaches us the dangers of premature generalization—un¬ less it is philosophy. The earnestness with which Hegel, in the preface to his Phanomenologie des Geistes, pursues the problem of the forma¬ tion of judgments, even to the extent of raising it to the rank of a science, has led me to examine some of the assumptions with which literary criticism operates. This inquiry suggests a procedure which alternately seeks enlightenment in the analysis of literary form and figu¬ ration and in the description of Hegel’s mode of conceptual reasoning. In a concluding example, these opposite approaches may be seen to merge in the interpretation of one of the most fantastic and yet most rational pieces of German literature, which in itself appears transparent and self-elucidating except that in the moment of synthesis the literary structure is enveloped in a veil of symbolism. Such a procedure may be no more than an experiment; like any experiment, it contains the liberty of choice and the risk of error, but it may also yield information con¬ cerning the nature of the ingredients—poetic form and conceptual rea¬ soning. i The Search for Form

To begin with, “form” in literature is one of the most obvious and, at the same time, most concealed elements to observe. On the printed page, for example, the “form” of a poem or a play may present itself visibly in the stanzaic and metrical arrangement, the prime pattern, the recurrence or juxtaposition of significant words, concepts, or images; or in the division into acts and scenes, the use of prose or poetic style, the appearance and grouping of characters, the balancing of situations. By the same token, it is considerably more difficult to determine the “form” of prose fiction or essayistic prose, particularly when the text does not appear grouped into distinct units such as chapters, sections, para¬ graphs. Nevertheless, even where such formal features are lacking, it

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

must be realized that anything that “exists” in the literary medium must exist in a specific form or structure. It is obvious that the “visible” form of a literary construct merely represents a substitute for something less perceptible though no less per¬ vading. Insofar as the material through which literature—or poetic art in general—manifests itself is language, structure in literature to a large extent is determined by linguistic structure. But it is not identical with linguistic structure. Since language is only one among several com¬ ponents of the literary work—the others pertaining to consciousness, imagination, Vorstellung—the question arises whether “structure” in literature can be demonstrated objectively as long as some of its com¬ ponents defy direct and complete description. For this reason, literary criticism, in spite of periodic efforts at self-orientation, lacks that as¬ surance of proof and that certainty of a consistent method which dis¬ tinguish the inquiries in the more objective and experimental sciences. To be sure, this restriction does not seriously interfere with the perform¬ ance of literary criticism wherever the latter is engaged solely in exegesis and interpretation, that is to say, with meaning. In this respect, criticism follows the footsteps of its venerable precursor—theology. This manner of criticism often aims at “content” or “meaning” without heeding the “form” in which the content is transmitted. It stands to reason, how¬ ever, that a more circumspect and universal mode of interpretation might be attained, if criticism, holding the quest for meaning in abey¬ ance, restricted itself to an examination of the linguistic components and attempted to reconstruct the verbal pattern of any given literary composition. However, even a program of “complete” description does not reach beyond certain limited, individual aspects and therefore does not fully protect one from the charge of subjectivism; in fact, it some¬ times gets the critics only more deeply involved in the conflict of mere opinion. Still this source of apparent weakness, subjectivism, turns out to be the very' element of strength. The critical analysis of works of literature is a discipline—perhaps the only discipline-—in which consideration of the individual phenomenon receives priority over classification in a system of established categories or norms. To amplify this statement, judging a person’s behavior in a given social surrounding, judging his responses to certain stimuli, or his speech in relation to that of others,

117

REHDER

amounts to a methodological procedure in which the norm, the general category, is of principal importance, while the individual only serves the purpose of modification or limitation. Compared with this procedure, the critical analysis of a work of art, literary or otherwise, considers the work of art itself the principal factor, its uniqueness, its individualness, the fact that essentially it cannot be repeated, duplicated, or replaced. This singularity of value or quality the individual work of art has in common with the human individual whom we likewise regard as irre¬ placeable and, for this very reason, indefinable. That the individual cannot be fully expressed, that its intrinsic and characteristic essence is beyond the pale of comprehension and communication, has been a familiar complaint since Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Leibniz. There is another mode of singularity distinguishing the work of liter¬ ature: its literary or stylistic form—whatever difficulty we may en¬ counter in defining “form.” Assuming that the uniqueness of quality and content (Gehalt) in each work calls for a diversity of form in all, we find ourselves surprised by the relatively few levels of linguistic ex¬ pression on which the term “form” can be applied. For our purposes it may be expedient to review briefly the four main categories of “form” in poetic usage. Concerning the basic genres of literary expression—lyrics, prose fic¬ tion, drama, (to be consistent, a fourth genre, often overlooked, should be added, namely the essay)—we find that throughout the ages they have been cultivated with an astonishing degree of uniformity and con¬ stancy of practice so that Goethe could refer to them as the “nature forms of poetry,” “Naturformen der Dichtung.” The structural differ¬ ences among these genres are fundamental and distinctive; they concern modes and aspects of linguistic expression, but in such a general way that they contribute little or nothing at all to the uniqueness of the in¬ dividual work of literature. This function is served much more strikingly by the form categories of “style” and “composition,” both of which permit and even demand a blending of general and traditional linguistic features with usages of highly personal though still repeatable and imitable character. Whether by style we understand certain linguistic forms and practices dictated by historical standards of rhetoric and taste (e.g. “Naturalism,” “Symbol¬ ism,” “Renaissance Style,” etc.) or personal habits in the use of syntax 118

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

and imagery, in either case we observe the merging of the public and the private, the nameless and the personal, of language and speech, of the general and the specific. The formal aspects of composition—the judicious arrangement of parts into a meaningful whole, or the lack of it, the significant distribution of linguistic elements on the basis of non-linguistic considerations—these aspects presuppose an empirical skill of discovery in which linguistic and aesthetic experience have joined hands. It is this aspect of “form” of which Goethe could say: “The subject matter in front of him everyone can recognize; content only he can find who has something to add to it; and form is a mystery to most.”1 It is evident that “form” in the sense of composition, even though it may be imitated and thereby deteriorate into a cliche, is one of the (subjective) factors that may raise a work of literature to the point of uniqueness and singularity. However, in placing a poem, a novel, a play, into a wider frame of reference, for example a “school,” a period, a certain style of art, the general concept becomes fruitful only when it results in pointing up individual and distinctive features that set the work apart from the general trend. Statements which merely aim to prove that a work of literature is a “typical” example of ro¬ manticism or realism or Marxism or any other kind of -ism fail to comprehend that work on its own premises and thereby become sub¬ ject to premature generalization or educated name-calling. By the same token, any work suggesting adherence to a general trend to the detri¬ ment of its own substance and authenticity may become suspect of having surrendered its freedom and singularity to the emptiness of gen¬ eral representation. Finally, there is another aspect of form which, though difficult to trace, owes little allegiance to the style of a historical period or taste and may even transcend the criterion of composition. This aspect of form may be perceived in the vestiges of individual rhythm, in the choice of specific symbols and particular characters, in the use of sound and pitch which, like the timbre of a voice, the sweep of a handwriting, or the curves of a fingerprint, testify to the presence, the doing, the existence of a specific agent, the author, although no more may be discernible 1 “Den Stoff sieht jedermann vor sich, den Gehalt findet nur der, der etwas dazu zu tun hat, und die Form ist ein Geheimnis den meisten.”

REHDER

to us—to use a metaphor—than the imprint of an individual energy upon a certain kind of substance or “matter.” Since the traces of this kind of form are usually concealed under or behind the modes of form described above, they are not easily detected; their presence is ascer¬ tainable like that of the individual rays beyond the limits of the visible spectrum. And since this formative principle seems to apply to and operate within the element of content itself, bestowing upon it the char¬ acteristic mark of unity, I should like to distinguish it by the term inward form, first employed by Goethe in his critical and scientific writ¬ ings and suggested by his Platonist forerunners, Plotinus, Shaftesbury, Hemsterhuis, and Herder. It is interesting to note that the constituent components of this formative principle—rhythm, sound, pitch, configu¬ ration, structure—apply to that same medium which on the previous levels of form-function was identified as the medium of the general —language; on this last level of form, that of the inward form, these general features have been bent to serve the purpose of a singular, de¬ signing intellect.2 2

Some vestige of the “inward form” of a poem appears—we never know it

completely—when we seemingly begin to comprehend its “being thus,” compared with other possible modes of being. For example, several features of wordselection, rhythm, pitch, accentuation, etc., distinguish Goethe’s simple classic “Wandrers Nachtlied” from any “similar” poem or potential “model.” Its verbal uniqueness appears when, at the risk of grotesqueness, we appraise its vocabulary in the light of possible synonymic alternatives. “Uber alien Bergesspitzen ist Stille” “communicates” a content no less than “t)ber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh” —however, such content would be representative of “Lieutenant Bilse” rather than Goethe. It would be fake rather than authentic. To carry on the experiment, replacing any or most of the poem’s twenty-four words by synonyms of approxi¬ mate content would result in abysmal distortion, even if the metrical and rhythmi¬ cal patterns could be retained. The poem’s “uniqueness” becomes manifest when we realize that the poem progresses in a consistent mode of pitch changes running peculiarly parallel to a consistent mode of change in the level of spatial observa¬ tions and intimations, from the highest to the lowest. Beginning with the visual¬ ization of the highest and widest spatial expanse (universe), the poem also employs the highest level of pitch: Uber alien Gipfeln Ist Ruh. Descending to the lower yet still elevated level of the treetops, the poem de¬ mands a drop in pitch as well, reaching almost the level of a normal utterance: 120

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

In reviewing these four aspects of “form,”3 we note a sequence of application which suggests gradual penetration from external or superIn alien Wipfeln Spxirest du Kaum einen Hauch. The middle of the poem denotes a space and pitch level corresponding to that of normal observation and utterance; on the level of the normal human “horizon” one observes individual “things” and proceeds descriptively: Die Voglein schweigen im Walde. The remainder of the poem takes the observer below the level of the “human horizon” (determined by the altitude of the observer’s eye above the relative level of observation), below the trees, down to the ground (and perhaps farther below), while the voice, too, drops to a depth whose lowest point is reached at the conclusion of the poem: Warte nur, balde, Ruhest du auch. While the visualized and imagined reality of nature and life is thus enmeshed in an acoustic pattern of speech, at the same time a “formal” quality of sequence, “arrangement,” order, emerges, which belongs peculiarly to this poem and this poem only. It would be impossible to alter or reverse this consistent sequence of pitch changes. While, of course, different interpreters may have different “images” of the various space levels suggested in the poem, the pitch sequence remains a constant that cannot be altered. It is as characteristic of this poem as a certain fragrance is of a given flower. Denoting this quality as an aspect of “inward form,” it stands to reason that similarly unique and unrepeatable features might be discovered in the analysis of syntactic, rhythmical, or phonemic aspects of the poem.

3

For the following inquiry a two-dimensional graph may help to visualize

logical (and semantic) relationships: Preponderance of the general

Preponderance of the specific

timeless

Genre

Time references required

Style

Composition

timeless

Inward Form

Connective (historical) -—-Descriptive (mathematical)From the general to the specific or from the external to the “inner core.” I2I

REHDER

ficial features to an elusive “inner core.” Or, without the metaphorical trimmings, we note two sets (or pairs) of concepts representing various stages of contrast between the general and the specific (or unique). In the one set, there is one form-concept which reflects almost exclusively the basic criteria of language (manners of discourse, time aspects, etc.)—the concept of literary “genres”—and another form-concept which reflects almost exclusively certain elements pertaining to the speaker—the concept of “inward form.” In between these two range two other form-concepts representing stages of relative synthesis,— “style” and “composition”—of which the former shows a preponder¬ ance of the general, the latter a preponderance of the specific. While “style” and “composition” cannot be examined in the abstract but de¬ mand a literary or historical context, usually a context revealing cul¬ tural or personal standards of taste, “genre” and “inward form” are peculiarly free from any such historical consideration; they operate, as it were, in a timeless vacuum or in the timelessness of the creative moment. To point up the distinction: the relative association with the time element (or the lack of such association) induces us to distinguish between two kinds of form-concept—one kind that is descriptive and mathematical, and another that is connective and historical. In Kant’s terminology, the one corresponds to the constitutive principle of under¬ standing {Verstand), the other to the regulative principle of reason (Vernunft). The formal analysis of a work of literature must therefore occupy itself with both a descriptive and a connective method of procedure. It is descriptive insofar as it seeks to determine the structural and non¬ temporal elements of the artifact, and it is connective insofar as it is sensitive to its symbolical and historical relationships. ii

Hegel’s Mode of Conceptual Reasoning

It is precisely such reflections on the ambivalence of literary analysis which suggest an examination of Hegel’s mode of reasoning, in particu¬ lar, of those features of his method which represent the dynamic, the connective, the integrating element. For Hegel’s concept of integration and synthesis appears eminently fruitful in the further pursuit of the 122

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

problem of form. Unfortunately, access to a fair evaluation of Hegel's position has been obstructed by the myth-like cliche of a mechanically operating dialectic method. The trouble is that Hegel himself has left us with a document which only intensifies the impression of a highly com¬ plex machinery. This machinery may testify to the ingenuity of its builder, but it no longer yields the riches that it produced in the days of its operation. Like an ancient oil pump, it demonstrates the principle that by creating a vacuum one can force Nature to open up her store and provide for a rich flow of “substance,” but it may be too lumbering and not reach deep enough for modern purposes. Hegebs Aesthetic, in its overall outline and down to the smallest de¬ tail, is a masterpiece of consistency in the application of thesis, antith¬ esis, and synthesis. Metaphorically speaking, it may be considered a forerunner of the modern calculating-machine. For it attempts to retrace logically every step that nature or mind has made in the development of any given organism, institution, art-form, or style, in the production of “beauty,” that is in the manifestation of the idea. Three times, accord¬ ing to the requirements of the system, the reader is led through the cycles of philosophical reflection, and three times he swings around the orbits of theoretical, historical, and phenomenological discussion of the arts. If art is interpreted as sensualization of the ideal and, vice versa, as spiritualization of the sensuous, we are shown three stages on which such materialization of the ideal has taken place historically—the sym¬ bolic, the classical, the romantic art-forms (in modem terminology we would speak of ‘oriental and pre-hellenic,’ ‘hellenic,’ and ‘medieval' art) —and an even more refined and subtle system of generic qualifications, until we arrive at a demonstration of the three genres of literature. This result is significant. For not only is it achieved after minute examination of the interrelations between the arts and religion and the moral aspects of cultural phases, but it establishes a hierarchy of values among the various arts themselves. Poetry is considered the highest of the arts since here the sensuous and physical elements have been virtually absorbed by spiritual sublimation. It is evident that in this mode of reasoning, which is dictated by the formalism of dialectics, the emphasis is placed on philosophical content rather than on the forms of expression. Moreover, it appears to vindicate the thinking and the taste of Hegel’s time. Hegel’s process of deduction 123

REHDER

results in the establishment, or rather the philosophical justification, of the traditional genres of literature without developing any criteria for the relative merit of an individual work, and at first glance it actually appears as if Hegel’s Aesthetik had little room for more than mere appre¬ ciation and analysis of these genres. Disregarding the linguistic differ¬ ences of structure, which sufficiently account for the development of the basic forms of expression and presentation—the narrative, the lyrical, the dramatic, the reflective—Hegel associates these genre forms with the degree to which the idea has absorbed the externalities of substance, of subject matter. If it can be concluded that a drama, qua drama, ranks above a poem, and in turn a poem excels a novel, simply because a novel seems to make greater concessions to the world of daily reality and subjective purposes, then it appears that the most general aspect of form (literary^ genre) is not a sufficient criterion in the interpretation of a unique masterpiece. Possibly, this shortcoming—if it is a short¬ coming—may be attributed to the fact that Hegel’s Aesthetik was post¬ humously compiled from lecture notes of his students, who were im¬ pressed with the formalism rather than the piercing intentness of Hegel’s thought in direct personal delivery. Posterity might have been served better if Hegel’s Aesthetik had been handed down, as in the case of Aristotle or Heraclitus, in the form of fragments but was still capable of completion in the spirit of Hegel’s own intellectual effort. If it were possible to remove temporarily the obstacle of the generalizing dialectic mechanism, Hegel’s very concept of the “Begriff”—“comprehension” —might allow us enlightening glimpses of his concept of “form.’l If the analysis of literature is occupied with the individual phenomenon, how does Hegel justify such an interpretation in the light of his theory of knowledge and of the self-evolution of the Spirit? In particular, how does Hegel reconcile the concept of form, as it emerged in the foregoing reflections, with that of dynamic change? ^ The citation of Hegel creates a feeling of embarrassment. The ques¬ tion of his significance for the methodological reinforcement of criticism has been a matter of dispute and contradiction. There are those who consider Hegel’s contribution a relapse into older rationalistic attitudes and concepts, and those who regard his dialectic interpretation of history the sign of a new departure in critical research. Some are tempted to align him with the great system builders of Western civilization—Aris-

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

totle, Thomas Aquinas; others recognize him as the originator of modem historical relativism. Each of these perspectives contains some measure of truth; Hegel’s metaphysical system seems to be spacious enough to afford a multitude of vantage points. In one respect, Hegel appears to represent a conclusion and an end—the conclusion of the 18th centum and the age of reason—in as much as his ambition drove him to unite, as Leibniz had united, the diversified, specialized, and encyclopedic knowledge of his age under the roof of one system and the formula of one process, the self-manifestation of the absolute Spirit. In another respect, Hegel stands at the portal of modern thinking, at the point where the specialized sciences, in all earnestness and deter¬ mination, emancipated themselves from philosophy, from “speculation,” and its pretensions to intellectual leadership. With the death of Hegel the breach between the experimental and the historical sciences became final, and philosophy, in spite of Mill and Spencer, in spite of Schopen¬ hauer and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, has never been quite successful enough to regain the position of authority it possessed in the days of Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. In fact, the loss of prestige which philosophy incurred during the last century may be credited to the legacy of Hegel himself, who in his incessant and grinding effort at comprehending the nature of Being found himself thwarted by the limitations of linguistic expression. Stretching language to the limits of elasticity, he had to accept the charge of unintelligibility. As a conse¬ quence, more than any other philosopher in receqt centuries, Hegel has had to suffer from the injustice of generalizations. In order to determine Hegel’s share in the rise and the formulation of literary theory, it might be rewarding to project the stature and scope of his work onto the intellectual background of the age that produced him. This was the age that first established, at least in incipient form, the foundations, the concepts, and the perspectives, with which the critical analysis of literature has been operating ever since: the phe¬ nomenological description of poetic forms in Lessing, the pattern of historical development in Herder, ironic detachment in Wieland and Sterne, the analysis of fancy and imagination in Wordsworth and Cole¬ ridge, of polarity and structural morphology in Goethe, philosophical orientation in Schiller, individual characterization in the Schlegels. If we hesitate to assign to this age a uniform physiognomy, it is because 125

REHDER

our preoccupation with Rousseauism and sentimentalism, with the cult of originality and the primitive levels of human consciousness—in other words, the emphasis on irrationalism—has somewhat blunted our aware¬ ness of the intensely rational efforts during that period to describe and to probe the operations of the human mind. It is also possible that the mere label of “Romanticism” has made us somewhat cautious and reserved toward the antics of poetic experimentation by which some writers of this period distinguished themselves. We gain the impression that each of them labored to detect and formulate the universal principle that gave its imprint to an entire age. Manifold were the attempts—an acute case of premature generalization—to reduce the variety of dy¬ namic physical and cultural phenomena to a single and universal prin¬ ciple, whether this was accomplished under such labels as the naturalist Blumenbach’s concept of the ‘formative drive,’ Bildungstrieb, or the theologian Lavater’s physiognomic experiments at a universal science of human character, Menschenkenntnis; whether it was attempted in the name of the newly discovered energy of magnetism and static elec¬ tricity, as in the galvanistic adventures of Novalis and Ritter, or by the speculative equation of nature and mind, as in the philosophy of Schelling. Clearly the fault with these theories was that they universalized a particular aspect, useful and enlightening though this aspect may have been at the time. Doubtless the discovery of electricity, with its principle of contrast, tension, polarity, and synthesis, and with its terminology of the positive and the negative, encouraged the assumption that human reason was just at the threshold of the formula which would unlock the mystery of the union between matter and energy—not dissimilar to the discovery, in our age, of atomic fission and fusion. More significant was the assumption that the human mind was capable of comprehending the nature of the “whole,” “das Gauze” whether this concept of totality or completion was applied to or sought for in processes or things, in works of art, in human individuals, or in the universe. It was Hegel’s objective to furnish an answer to this hypothetical proposition. For his purpose he seemed well qualified, for he was wit¬ nessing the romantic spectacle all around him without participating in it. However, he was also steeped in the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which had seriously concerned itself with the problem of the “whole,” either in the form of a metaphysical postulate—the 126

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

famous pre-established harmony—or in the form of mathematical in¬ tegration. But how empty those concepts were, pre-established harmony and mathematical integration!—how general and abstract, and how little suited to strike even a small spark of personal excitement and inspiration! Hegel’s intellectual roots lay in the schools of rationalism; here he sharpened his observation, here he fought to satisfy his craving for detailed, tangible knowledge of facts—a tendency generally over¬ looked in the intellectual make-up of the alleged producer of dialectic constructions; and from here he derived a twofold heritage: on the one hand, the model and the incentive to conceive of the world of phenom¬ ena in terms of a system of reason, on the other, the skeptical attitude of the nil admirari. Unromantic in an age of romanticism, he coolly set out to analyze the movements of thinking as he observed them in the comprehension of objectivity and substance, in the coming-about of cog¬ nition, the formation of judgments, in the evolution of relative stages of consciousness, in the emergence of knowledge, and in the various levels of objective self-realization of the human mind. Taking his cue from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Hegel was primarily concerned with the effort of tracing and describing the formative principle of the human mind which Kant had called “Geist, das belebende Prinzip im Gemiite,” in the different areas of mental activity. Geist, “Spirit,” was the faculty that knows how to cast many observations into a whole, that correlates the thinking with the thought, the growing with the grown, the creative with that which has been created. But while Kant had restricted himself in the application of this formative principle to but two areas, nature and art—both of which significantly presuppose judg¬ ment in terms of “wholeness” and organic unity—, Hegel expanded the scope of application to such a degree that it included science, morality, law, history, religion, and philosophy as well. Nor did he confine him¬ self, as Kant had done, to an analysis in the abstract of the formative principle of judgment (Geist), but he projected it, in ever-widening circles, into a time dimension extending from the earliest manifestations of human consciousness down to his own present. The student of late eighteenth-century German literature is struck by the frequency with which eminent writers, within the limits of scarcely one decade, attempted to furnish an overall critical evaluation of the intellectual tendencies of their own age. Beginning with Schiller’s Brief e 127

REHDER

iiber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1796) down to Arndt’s Geist der Zeit (1806), we see Friedrich Schlegel, Daniel Jenisch, Wil¬ helm von Humboldt, Fichte, and others, express their concern over the maintenance of cultural effort in their time and the appropriate method of comprehending its “structure,” its “Geist.” Of course, the content and scope of these books vary with the creed and the vantage point of their authors. What unites them is the physiognomic perspective and tech¬ nique, the effort to perceive the elements and the configuration of a totality in a historical situation. Hegel’s Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807) serves as last and conclusive variation on a given theme. Also his book was undertaken in the professed consciousness of his time as a period of transition and rebirth. But it fundamentally differs from the other writings in the relationship between substance and form. Here the objective, essayistic, or intuitive approach has given way to a manner of description in which the linguistic expression is ostensibly tailored to fit the philosophical substance, and the philosophical substance was the structure and the history of consciousness. “The force of the spirit,” Hegel says, “is only as great as its outer manifestation, its depth only as deep as the spirit—in its development and self-interpretation (Auslegung)■—dares to spread out and lose itself.”4 Accordingly, the notoriously obscure style of the Phanomenologie calls for simultaneous reading on two levels which constantly intermingle: a level of literalness and a level of suggestion and approximation. Never¬ theless, in spite of ambiguities of expression, the reader never feels that he is being tricked into assuming the unexpected. Rather a tenor of log¬ ical strictness and seriousness and uncompromising sobriety accompanies him as he proceeds from a statement of general validity, through steps of restriction, modification, and negation, to a level of specific meaning which, in turn, furnishes the basis of renewed logical effort. This is what Hegel seems to mean when he demands the “effort of comprehension”— “die Anstrengung des Begriffs”—as the sine qua non of philosophical activity. For he conceives of thinking as a process in which knowledge and the denial of knowledge have an equal share. He exhibits on the one hand the desire of the human mind to penetrate through the de¬ ceptive impressions of experience to a level of self-evident, indisputable, 4

“Die Kraft des Geistes ist nur so groB als ihre AuBerung, seine Tiefe nur so

tief, als er in seiner Auslegung sich auszubreiten und sich zu verlieren getraut.” 128

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

permanent insight—the level of logical abstraction and definition which has survived the grueling test of contradiction and causality—and he is equally aware of the tendency of the human mind to objectify its own ambition in a notion or an image and to accept the temptation of pre¬ mature generalization in the form of the concept, the definition itself. Yet neither the aspect of the concept nor that of the process alone is “true” knowledge. As Hegel stated in the introduction to his Phanomenologie, “the true is the whole,” “das Wahre ist das Ganze.” Thus he raised the idea of the whole from a concept connoting the sum-total of discernible steps to one suggesting the unbroken act of reasoning; that is to say, he considered the whole, or unity, to be not only the result toward which the movement of thinking is directed, but the cause as well through which it is determined. Hegel’s concept of the whole con¬ tains both a causal and a final aspect; it combines the mathematical and the historical mode of reasoning. Objectively, the whole represents a configuration in which the process of development has left its imprint —the integral which supersedes differentiation and in which differenti¬ ation remains suspended. Subjectively, it is a directional concept which guides observation from one discovery to the next and beyond. In the sphere of thinking it thus represents the principle of complementation, which in the analytic sciences is expressed by the concept of structure, in the aesthetic sphere by the concept of symbol. “Totality,” Hegel says, “is the dynamic interpenetration of the individual and the general.”5 It is the idea of synthesis. However, totality and synthesis cannot be achieved without the con¬ sideration of contrast, opposition, negation. Any definition of one thing means the exclusion of others; a single, unique phenomenon possesses possible truth only insofar as it negates, or is itself limited by, the whole. The concept of negativity virtually assumes the function of prime mover in Hegel’s mode of philosophical reasoning. Negativity is the gap and the tension between the subject and the object, the vacuum that elicits motion; it is the difference between the individual and the general, and the reason for their relation and reconciliation. Negativity is the motivat¬ ing force of differentiation and integration, the one function which 5

“Das Ganze ist die sich bewegende Durchdringung der Individualist und des

Allgemeinen.” 129

REHDER

mathematical and historical reasoning have in common. Philosophy will deteriorate, Hegel says, it will become merely edifying and even insipid, if it lacks “the earnestness, the pains, the patience, and the labor of negativity.” In his Philosophy of Religion Hegel once described the function of negativity in Heraclitean terms: Thinking, I rise above all finiteness to the absolute, and I am infinite con¬ sciousness—and yet I am finite self-consciousness, in full accordance with all my empirical limitations. Both sides seek and flee each other. I am, and there is within me (as far as I am concerned) this antagonism and this reconciliation. I am the feeling, the perception, the notion of this resolu¬ tion and of this antagonism, and the junction of the antagonists; I am the effort of joining and the labor of the mind to master this antagonism. I am the struggle. I am not one of the struggling, but I am both, and I am the struggle itself. I am the fire and the water that touch each other, and I am the contact and the unity of those that everlastingly flee each other. We can scarcely interpret these words as the expression of an indi¬ vidual who, inwardly tom like Heine, sees a mark of distinction in his own psychological discord. Sober and unimpressed as Hegel was, these words testify to the one objective with which he was concerned—the “Anstrengung des Begriffs”—and the one method with which he was certain to accomplish his aim: the most detailed description of thought movements whipped into activity by the dynamic analysis of “the other element” or “the other side” in the ingenious conception of negativity. While the philosophers and scientists of the eighteenth century under¬ took to describe the wide and bewildering variety of physical phe¬ nomena in their fields of study and to subject them to the order of a scientific system—one need only refer to the incipient systems of classi¬ fication in botany or geology or entomology—Hegel stepped, as it were, one step further back and, observing the mind in its operation, at¬ tempted to subject the ordering principle itself, Geist, to the absolute order of a philosophical system. And this leads us back to the meaning of the dialectical method itself. Just as Life, in each of its kingdoms and species, is more than the infinite number of observable stages of develop¬ ment and growth, more than the continuous process of growing, so is Thinking, which seeks to comprehend life, more than the infinite 130

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

number of stages of consciousness, and more than a continuous process of reasoning. Dialectics is the complement of life in the medium of thought. As the one proceeds and unfolds in a circular movement in which origin and destination coincide, so does the other. “The process of life,” we read in the Phanomenologie, “is just as much the act of forming as it is the dissolution and suspension of form. This whole orbit, this revolving in circles, constitutes life—not that which is first apprehended and expressed, the immediate continuity and substance, nor the existing form in its separate discreteness, nor even the process itself, nor the synopsis of all these moments, but the totality that unfolds and dissolves in its unfolding and preserves itself in this motion as the uniform and identical Whole.” The process of life, then, is that factual¬ ity, that Wirklichkeit, in which no single thing or event is ever “forgot¬ ten,” because it has been substantiated and suspended in the course of events. Similarly, thinking, the “Anstrengung des Begriffs,” evolves in the dialectical circle in which the tension of negativity, the attraction of the opposite, and even the temporary stop of premature generaliza¬ tion, have been resolved. It is an “effort” indeed, since that which was once comprehended and rendered intrinsic, erinnert, is never “forgot¬ ten.” This implies that the single concept—Be griff—as much as the single living phenomenon—Leibniz’ monad-—represents a reflection of the whole, inasmuch as each participates in the dynamic process; both concept and monad are manifestations of “energy”; the one in the “effort of comprehension,” the other in the dynamics of change and growth. The obvious analogy, characterizing Hegel’s mode of reasoning at this point, the analogy between the laws of thinking and those of biological existence, suggests the influence of Aristotle, and Hegel does not hesitate to acknowledge this influence. It was Aristotle who defined the nature of life as Energeia, activity within itself, which is manifest both in organic existence and in conceptual reasoning. And it was Aristotle who demonstrated the individual as the point where both coincide—being and activity, state and motion—in the concept of unique structural form. Here the pattern of organization is ever re¬ peated without ever being quite the same. By coining the term “entelechy” for this configurational concept Aristotle conceived of a prin¬ ciple of “inward form” and directional purpose which determines the

REHDER

f

character and the destination of the individual being in the pattern things. Returning to the specific problem of literary form and structure, it

becomes evident that the concept of literary genre, which received ex¬ tensive attention in Hegel’s Aesthetik, actually possesses little more than preliminary, orientational significance in a system aiming at the ma¬ terialization of the ideal on a grand scale. More significant for our purpose seems to be what Hegel had to say about the intellectual effort at demonstrating the idea of the whole, even within the limited confines of the individual work of art. If the discrete “form” of the literary artifact at all represents a whole, such a statement indicated more than merely a pantheistic analogy incapable of proof. For such a “form” is never any one thing or object that can be considered fully apart from its content or material. Nor is it ever “style” or “composition” or “in¬ ward form” alone. Taken separately, each one of these levels or steps may be just one aspect of, and as such succumb to, the danger of premature generalization. As stated above, in his philosophical enter¬ prise Hegel attempted to retrace logically every step that nature or mind has made in the development of any given organism, institution, art-form, or style, in the manifestation of the idea. In this enterprise, being and comprehension, natural process and logical concept, comple¬ ment each other, but in such a manner that neither side alone—neither the aspect of concept nor that of process—ever yields “true” knowledge. The principle of negativity demands that the general and the specific, the descriptive and the historical, remain mutually alert and interde¬ pendent. ) in Poetic Synthesis

It may be no more than philological coincidence that Hegel, in com¬ bining Kant’s formative principle of Geist with Aristotle’s concept of dialectics, approached the position of Goethe who had become keenly attuned to the problem of “structure” through his intense interest in the morphology of natural and literary phenomena. Hegel’s relation to Goethe would need no additional study, were it not for the fact that the Hegelian perspective furnishes us with a rarely noticed key to the Faust poem. The piece in question is the enigmatic sequence of scenes 132

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

from the Second Part known as the “Classical Walpurgis Night.” These scenes were planned by Goethe as preparation for the actual appearance “in person” of Helen of Troy and her subsequent union with Faust, who at this stage appears in no particular calling or occu¬ pation but simply as a seeker of life, beauty, and truth. Since the action of these four scenes is ostensibly extraneous to the main plot and is carried by fabulous and grotesquely composite figures such as griffins, sphinxes, sirens, cranes, giant ants, pygmies, mermaids, Cabiri, and other demons of the lower pantheon, it has sometimes been considered the product of a decline in Goethe’s imagination and generally omitted from performances of the play. As in length it occupies nearly oneeighth of the entire work, it may well require more attention than a mere ornamental interlude or caprice would deserve. The reader is confounded by an apparent lack of horizon in space and time by which he might orient himself. The mere idea that Faust should find ‘his element” and the impersonation of life in a carnival of mythological spectres supposedly gathering on the battlefield of Pharsalus on the anniversary of the encounter between Caesar and Pompey is baffling. Only gradually does the reader realize that the bat¬ tle of Pharsalus indeed signified an important “crisis” in the history of man: the separation between the old and the new, the dividing point between an ancient, instinctive mode of behavior and an extremely “modem” way of rational planning. However, the grotesqueness of scenery and characters which require a seemingly unnecessary amount of useless mythological knowledge, their rapid shift and erratic succes¬ sion, the mixture of seriousness and mockery, satire and sobriety, rib¬ aldry and rapture, have an exceedingly confusing effect—as the “world” would have on any human mind that is deposited in its midst without any sort of preparation. All this demands from the reader an alertness of adjustment that is not easily achieved amidst all the croak¬ ing, snarling, whistling, shrieking, talking, and singing sounds, which envelop the speeches of the three main participants in these demoniacal festivities. If it were nothing else, this Walpurgis Night might be con¬ sidered a phenomenology of emerging language, embracing the whole scale of expression from primitive sounds to the most intricate forms of speech and chant. The chaos of faintly familiar and totally anomalous shapes calls for a pattern of organization. 133

REHDER

Human consciousness, Bewusstsein, is therefore called upon to estab¬ lish such a pattern of organization, and it does so from the immediate evidence presented, not knowing that the creatures it encounters in the present have in reality been conditioned and determined by the exigen¬ cies of existence nearly two thousand years ago. The Classical Walpurgis Night unfolds in the moment in which the three unequal air-borne travelers—Faust, Mephistopheles, Homunculus—come in for a landing on Grecian soil, not without circling wide over the fields of Pharsalus. Each is to pursue his particular purpose: Homunculus, the sublimated little man in the test-tube, is to find the body that will complete his ex¬ istence; Faust is to discover the archetype of beauty, Helena, on whom his existence unconditionally depends, and Mephistopheles is to acquire the mask of supreme ugliness. In four scenes, of which the second and the third must be considered simultaneous (and therefore juxtaposed to one another in a higher dialectical scheme), the search moves from the Pharsalean fields and the barren reaches of the upper Peneios river down through the luxuriant lowlands and out to the Aegean Sea. The meaning of the river as a symbol of human life, so frequent in Goethe’s writings, needs no commentary; nor do the desert plains, the fertile fields of the lowlands, or the exuberant rites of Eros on the sea, when we notice that successively each scene is associated with or dominated by Mephistopheles, Faust, and Homunculus, respectively. Chaos and barrenness, fertility and imaginativeness, sublimation and enthusiasm, follow one another in a necessary dialectical sequence. In the end, how¬ ever, we do not know whether the three aims have been achieved. We actually see only Mephistopheles attain his mask of ugliness. We see Faust, like a second Orpheus (creator of culture), enter the gateway to the netherworld to plead for the release of Helena from the realm of shades, but we do not know whether he is successful. And we lose sight of Homunclus as, in fulfilment of his yearning, he bursts his crystal prison and is diffused in the element of the sea in an immense display of radiance and rapture. When in the next scene Helena actually appears on the stage in per¬ son, we do not know how the Classical Walpurgis Night—the “Antezedenzien der Helena,” as Goethe laconically called these scenes—has in any way contributed causally or logically to her emergence. We can 134

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

only suspect that her actual appearance has been potentially prepared for by a sequence of scenes that reflect the structurally creative workings of human imagination. Critics have been accustomed to interpret these scenes as flatly allegorical of the rites of Eros, as an immense tableau in which every detail “stands for” something else and the sum-total of the meanings adds up to an intuitive presentation of an abstract idea. Whether allegorical or not, the Classical Walpurgis Night represents a series of actions in which the imaginative process (and the biological process of growth as well) follows a distinct pattern of organization leading to the anticipation of beauty from a threefold source: yearning for perfection (Faust), materialization in bodily existence (Homuncu¬ lus), and the necessity of limitation (Mephistopheles). Whereas in ancient mythology a concept, a “Be griff,” was visualized as taking the form of an image, Goethe reversed this assumption and created an image which, in turn, suggests the dynamics of thought, the “Anstrengung des Begriffs,” which seeks to comprehend life through the medium of the totally alien. This is symbolism. Goethe himself described his intentions as “highly symbolical,” “hochsymbolisch intentioniert.” And this is where the Hegelian perspective becomes fruitful. Throughout the Walpurgis Night the significance of Mephistopheles as the impersona¬ tion of the spirit of negativity remains apparent. If anything, Mephisto represents the principle of destruction which, in life or in thought, in nature or in the cultural enterprise of man, tends to arrest, to reduce, to obliterate, the will for being by holding out the possibility of Nothing¬ ness, Nichtsein. In this scheme of things, Faust and Homunculus become figures that are opposed and yet complementary to one another—the one, the image of human consciousness that is inclined to accept its own conceptions and objectives as “objectivity” in a process of premature generalization (Faust), and the other, the image of “Geist, das belebende Prinzip im Gemiite,” which never is but always wants to be (Homunculus), a sort of pre-existent structural concept preceding the act of materialization. In this perspective, even the sequence and ar¬ rangement of scenes assumes the pattern of Hegelian dialectics. And keyed to this pattern, the sensitive reader will not overlook the many instances where the ambiguity of Hegel’s philosophical terminology has become the target of Goethe’s superior poetic irony. Goethe’s relations to Hegel show a peculiar mixture of approval and 135

REHDER

reservation. Hegel’s philosophical writings appeared unclear and ab¬ struse to Goethe, whereas in the intimacy of personal conversation he discovered fundamental agreement. Devoted to his morphological stud¬ ies of nature, Goethe rejected Hegel’s method of self-reflection and speculation, but he had high esteem for Hegel’s grasp of mathematical and historical problems. They agreed in regard to the dynamic view¬ point ; in regard to its formulation Goethe gave preference to a symbolic manner of expression. “I have become convinced,” Goethe wrote,” that only poetry will succeed in expressing such mysteries; when expressed in prose, they will appear absurd because in prose they can only be stated in contradictions which the human mind hesitates to accept.” Returning to this point in the composition of his Walpurgis Night, he wrote: “It is an old proverb that Nature does nothing in vain. She is everlastingly creative, lavish, and extravagant, in order that the Infinite may always be present, because nothing can remain unchanged. With this view, I believe, I have approached that of Hegelian philosophy which otherwise both attracts and repels me; may the Genius be gra¬ cious to all of us!” The Walpurgis Night reveals Goethe’s fundamental belief in the ideas of polarity, graduation, metamorphosis, and growth, Steigerung. Out of a vision of empty space and time there arises an image of life on this earth which is driven as much by the desire for individual ex¬ istence as it is checked by the forces of limitation and negation, the wily schemes of Mephistopheles. This is pure metaphysics. Even before it assumes materialization in a distinct “body,” consciousness projects it¬ self into the configuration of incipient structure. The Classical Walpur¬ gis Night deals with the problem of the materialization of energy; it is a Phanomenologie des Geistes in poetic form. Organized into a con¬ sistent pattern of contrast and synthesis, the composite figures of myth¬ ology—the first testimony of creative human imagination—follow one another as variations and combinations of separate form elements which since primitive times human fear or fancy has ascribed to natural ele¬ ments and processes. Dull, elemental indifference is elevated to the most spirited forms of worship, enthusiasm, and religious devotion, not with¬ out having gone through the vagaries of superstition, and an unfulfilled desire for completion ultimately empties out into the rites of Eros, not 136

OF STRUCTURE AND SYMBOL

without having gone through the worship of the Cabiri, the phallic symbol. This process is unfolded in three immense cycles which complement each other without being strictly succcessive to one another. In regard to the philosophy of nature we witness a coming to life of all creation, extending from empty space and mere duration through the polarities of gravity and attraction to the articulation of a formative drive—or from the state of inert matter through the crystallization of “structure” to the evolution of the highest ideals in art and religion. In regard to the philosophy of art, we witness a similar coming to life, from a state of unconsciousness through the stages of dreams and primordial myth¬ ology to a state of radiant individuation and self-manifestation of the intellect in the work of art. And in regard to metaphysics, or Goethe’s fundamental beliefs, we witness a presentation of Werden, “Becom¬ ing,” on a grand scale—the yearning of the universal for self-realization in the state of individual existence and the return from this state of in¬ dividuation into the realm of universality, or the whole. If any conclusion can be drawn from the premises of Hegel’s philo¬ sophical and Goethe’s mythopceic thought, then it may be the insight that no single concept, whether it be that of organism, symbol, structure, or form, can yield more than temporary knowledge unless it is projected into the perspective of “dynamic” relationships. For “the true is the whole”—but the whole itself can never become the object of investiga¬ tion; it lies beyond the ever-widening limits of our horizon.

137

Notes on Contributors

Carl J. Friedrich is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University. He is the author, among many other publications, of a comprehensive introduction and of translations in the Modem Li¬ brary’s Philosophy of Hegel as well as in its Philosophy of Kant, both of which he edited, and he is also the editor of the Dover edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Sidney Hook is Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of From Hegel to Marx, among numerous other publications. Helmut Motekat is Professor of German Literature at the University of Munich, and he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at The University of Texas during the spring of 1960. His publications have been chiefly concerned with the interpretation of German literature of the 20th Century. Gustav E. Mueller is Research Professor of Philosophy at The University of Oklahoma. His publications include Hegel, Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen and an interpretive translation of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His essay is part of a new book, Hegel and the Crisis of Christianity, to be published by Open Court in 1963. Helmut Rehder is Professor of Germanic Languages and director of graduate studies in German literature at The University of Texas. His publications have been largely concerned with the understanding of literature in the light of the general history of ideas. The frontispiece reproduces a pencil drawing that Wilhelm Hensel made of Hegel during the last decade of his life when he was Professor of Phi¬ losophy at the University of Berlin.

139

B 2948 T7 1962

Travis. Don Carlos, 1911A Hegel symposium

0

010101 000

63 0209124 8 TRENT UNIVERSITY

B29U8

.T7

1962

Travis, Don Carlos A Hegel symposium DATE

n / / /-

ISSUED

/

/

-?" \ 1

71

^

Y*

OL \J

i

Si

-T-A

TO

y . /t v-2

113437

o - ^ Cc^v 10 s