Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel on History

Joseph Mccarney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415116961
• eBook ISBN: 9781134817849
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History remains one of the most profound and influential books on the philosophy of history. In clear and cogent terms this book:
* examines the ideas and arguments of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History
* explains key concepts of Hegel's system, a knowledge of which is essential for fully understanding his philosophy of history
* assesses the continuing relevance of Hegel to the contemporary debate about the nature of history.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart and died, of cholera, on 14 November 1831 in Berlin. He led a relatively uneventful life in an eventful time, a time of what have to be called, in the language of his philosophy of history, ‘world historical’ events. In particular, there was the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. Hegel is supposed to have hailed the first of these events as a young student by participating in the planting of a tree of liberty. Although he came to deplore, and to give in his Phenomenology of Spirit a profound analysis of, the excesses of the Revolution, he never ceased to regard it as having a positive historical significance. It always remained for him a vital moment in the realisation of human freedom, a view symbolised in his reported habit of raising a celebra-tory glass each year on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Napoleon, the child of the Revolution, was to figure for Hegel as the central example in the modern world of those he terms the ‘world historical individuals’. His attitude is captured vividly in a letter that reports on the sight of the Emperor, ‘this world-soul’, riding out of the city of Jena after his victory in battle there: ‘It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it’ (HL: 114). The note of awe and reverence is struck again when, nearly ten years later, Napoleon came to fulfil the tragic destiny characteristic of the world historical individual. It is, Hegel observes, ‘a frightful spectacle to see a great genius destroy himself’, allowing ‘the entire mass of mediocrity’ to bring him down (HL: 307).

Hegel's response to such public events sheds, one might suggest, more light on his thought than do any details of his private life. This is not simply because of the uneventful nature of that life. It has also to do with the somewhat uncanny objectivity he cultivated or found natural, his determination not to allow the merely personal and particular to intrude into philosophy. With this in mind, it should suffice for the purposes of the present inquiry if the circumstance of his life are recounted in broad outline.

Life and influence

Hegel was the oldest of three children of a minor public official in the service of the Duchy of Württemberg and his wife. He attended school in Stuttgart and, from 1788, the Stift or seminary at Tübingen, an institution primarily intended for training pastors of the Lutheran Church. It was in his time an extraordinary cradle of achievement, for there he formed close friendships with Friedrich Hölderlin, later to become one of the greatest German poets, and with the celebrated philosopher to be, Friedrich Schelling. These relationships were not sustained in later years, in the one case because of Hölderlin's mental collapse and withdrawal from the world, and in the other because of intellectual and personal estrangement. On graduating from the Stift, Hegel spent some eight years as a tutor in families in Bern and Frankfurt am Main, before becoming a Privatdozent or unsalaried lecturer, and, briefly, a salaried lecturer at the University of Jena. On 5 February 1807 his landlady in Jena, Johanna Burkhardt, born Fischer, gave birth to his illegitimate son, apparently the third child born to her out of wedlock. Hegel's conduct in this, the most dramatic episode of his private life has been interpreted with varying degrees of sympathy. He may at least be said to have behaved with minimal decency in ensuring that the child, who was given the name Ludwig Fischer, was cared for, and in 1817, after his marriage, in taking him into his own household. It may well be, however, that Ludwig did not receive the same affection or consideration as the children of the marriage, being, for instance, frustrated in his desire for a medical career. At any rate the letters, written some years later, before his departure overseas in Dutch military service, in which he complains of his treatment and declares his devotion to his sister, the daughter of Johanna, are among the most moving items in the mass of documentation relating to Hegel. Ludwig died of fever in Djakarta on 28 August 1831, though the news did not reach Berlin before his father's death later that year.

With the closure of the university as a result of the French occupation of Jena, Hegel became for a year the editor of a newspaper sympathetic to Napoleon in Bamberg, and from 1808 the rector of a boy's secondary school in Nuremberg. In 1811 he married Marie von Tucher, a woman twenty years younger than himself, and three children were born in a happy and enduring relationship. Their daughter, Susanna, died in infancy, but two sons, Karl and Immanuel, enjoyed long lives and successful careers. Karl became a historian and was one of the first editors of his father's lectures on the philosophy of history. In 1816 Hegel became professor of philosophy in the University of Heidelberg, and two years later was called to be professor at Berlin. There he remained until his death, at the pinnacle of his profession and, apparently, snugly placed near the heart of the Prussian establishment. Those years also saw his growing fame as a philosopher and the development of a Hegelian ‘school’. In truth, however, his position was less assured and comfortable than it seemed. This was owing in part to the suspicions aroused by his efforts on behalf of his students and others who were accused of political offences. He was, moreover, subject to persistent charges of religious unorthodoxy by the powerful evangelical faction at court. It was, ironically, his old college friend Schelling who, ten years after his death, was summoned by the new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to take up his chair in Berlin with a commission to root out ‘the dragon-seed of the Hegelian pantheism’.

It remains the case that before Hegel's death he had come to be generally regarded as the greatest German philosopher of his time. For varied and complex reasons the regard in which he was held was shortly thereafter to go into steep decline. This no doubt reflected a familiar cyclical pattern in the natural history of reputations. It also owed something to the fact that the Hegelian school failed to maintain itself for long as a coherent entity. As early as the mid-1830s it began to split into ‘Old’ or ‘Right’ Hegelians, ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians and an embattled ‘Centre’. Although the lines of demarcation were by no means precisely drawn, it was plain that a certain aspect of Hegel's legacy was crucially at stake. This was the degree to which it should be seen as having conservative or radical implications in the sphere of religion on the one hand and of politics on the other. For all the debilitating effects of the conflict, Hegel continued to wield considerable intellectual influence, even at his lowest posthumous ebb. This is most obviously shown by the development of Marxism. Karl Marx's intellectual career began in the Young Hegelian group, and later he declared that at a time when Hegel was being treated as a ‘dead dog’ in Germany, he had openly avowed himself ‘the pupil of that mighty thinker’. In the work of Friedrich Engels there is a still more explicit and methodical recourse to a version of Hegel's thought. Even in academic circles in Germany, Hegel's standing was to revive towards the end of the century. A key figure in the revival was Wilhelm Dilthey, a thinker for whom the strategic philosophical role Hegel gave to history was especially congenial. Elsewhere, important work was being done in this period by philosophers more or less avowedly under Hegel's influence. They include F.H.Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and J.M.E.McTaggart in Britain, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile in Italy and C.S.Peirce and Josiah Royce in the United States.

A particularly striking development of the twentieth century was the upsurge of interest in Hegel from the 1930s onwards in France. It was inspired in large part by Alexandre Kojève's interpretation of the philosophy of history, and flowered creatively in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and, in terms of scholarship, in that of Jean Hyppolite. In Britain Hegel's influence was to decline sharply from its late Victorian and Edwardian heyday under the impact of the rejection by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell of what they took to be his philosophy, and later of the still more fanciful interpretation of it by Karl Popper. From the late 1950s, however, the tide began to turn with a succession of works that have done much to establish a sober and defensible view of his achievement. Taken together with a parallel development in the United States, it has become usual to refer in this connection to a Hegel revival in the Anglophone philosophical world. In Germany he has, as one might expect, continued to maintain a substantial presence in the academy, resulting in many advances in historical and textual scholarship. His exemplary significance as a metaphysician, by way of both warning and inspiration, in the work of the most important German philosopher of the century, Martin Heidegger, should also be remarked. It is a significance intriguingly mediated by the central role that came to be occupied there by the figure of Hölderlin. In all of these ways, and in others that cannot be detailed here, Hegel's influence on intellectual history has been pervasive and profound. The briefest sketch of it will testify to the deep truth in the remark attributed to Kojève's pupil, Jacques Lacan, that it is just when we think we may be moving away from him that he is most likely to be sneaking up behind us.

Scope of the inquiry

In view of Hegel's long and active life as a philosopher it is perhaps surprising that there are only four large-scale works that he wrote directly for publication and saw through the press himself. They are Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic (issued in successive volumes 1812, 1813 and 1816), Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817, with new editions in 1827 and 1830) and Philosophy of Right (1830). In the various collected editions of his writings approximately half of the material consists of the lecture series on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of religion. This book is in essence a study of and commentary on the text that is referred to in its pages as Introduction; that is to say the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, hereafter referred to as Lectures. It will also pay special attention to the main body of that work. For although it is true that most of what is of theoretical interest in it is to be found in the Introduction, this is not quite true of everything. In any case the outline of world history that follows the Introduction serves indispensably to illustrate, flesh out, develop and apply its themes. Even when taken as a whole Lectures is, however, far from providing all that the student of Hegel's philosophy of history needs to consider.

Most obviously, there is the explicit treatment of the subject elsewhere in his writings, especially in the final volume of the Encyclopaedia and in the Philosophy of Right. Indeed, he commended the relevant portions of the latter work to the students on his philosophy of history course as their nearest approach to a textbook (H, 3: 11; M, 11:1, 3). Where the Phenomenology is concerned it is not necessary to accept entirely Royce's description of it as ‘a sort of freely told philosophy of history’ to hold that it contains much that is indispensable for such a philosophy. In particular, there are arguments that may, as will appear later, be said to have a foundational role. Hegel's logical writings, the Science of Logic and the first volume of the Encyclopaedia, have to be invoked in any attempt to outline his metaphysics.¹ That the philosophy of history must be situated against this metaphysical background is a truth that will emerge decisively only in the course of the discussion. Some pointers to it are, however, visible even now. Hegel is, by express and fixed design, a systematic thinker for whom ‘the true’ is comprehensible only as ‘the whole’. The philosophy of history is indisputably an element of the system, as is straightforwardly shown by its presence in the Encyclopaedia, and in the encyclopaedic prototypes produced earlier in Heidelberg, and, though in still more shadowy form, in Nuremberg. It seems natural to suppose that its grounding and vitality will largely depend on its position there.

The point now at issue does not, however, have to rely on such general considerations. The Introduction makes clear very early on that it presupposes certain theses which have been proved elsewhere by ‘speculative cognition’, and which accordingly figure as the legacy of philosophy to historical understanding (H, 28:27; M, 20–1:9, 11, 12). If the present inquiry is to achieve its object it will have to draw on whatever resources are available in Hegel's work to elucidate and justify these presuppositions. In doing so it seems unavoidable that it should yield just the kind of outline of his metaphysics referred to earlier. Indeed, to pursue his philosophy of history unrestrictedly is, as will be shown, to arrive at the heart of his metaphysical enterprise. For he is, beyond all comparison, the historical philosopher, the one for whom history figures most ambitiously and elaborately as a philosophical category. This, however, is also a claim that must await vindication in the course of this inquiry.

Text of the Introduction

An issue that has to be dealt with in advance of the main discussion is that of the precise status of the text which is its central concern. Hegel delivered his lecture course on the philosophy of history in the University of Berlin on five occasions in all, from the winter semester of 1822–3 at two-yearly intervals until the winter semester of 1830–1. The versions we have of the basic theoretical component of the lecture course, the Introduction, have been compiled partly from his manuscripts and partly from transcripts made by students. No fewer than four editors have worked at the task, each having somewhat different material at their disposal, and each adjusting, arranging, including and omitting in accordance with their own best judgement. They are, with the dates of their editions, Eduard Gans (1837), Karl Hegel (1840), Georg Lasson (1917) and Johannes Hoffmeister (1955). There is much scholarly disagreement over the merits of these alternatives, and, in particular, over the question of which is the most authentic and reliable presentation of what Hegel actually said.² Over-simplifying a little, it may be suggested that in practice the significant choice is between Karl Hegel and Hoffmeister. This is reflected in the pattern of the English translations. Karl Hegel's edition is the basis of that made by J.Sibree, as part of his translation of the Lectures as a whole, and of those by Robert S.Hartman and Leo Rauch, while H.B.Nisbet has translated Hoffmeister.

It will not be possible to lay out in full and adjudicate the issues at stake in this debate, nor is it necessary for present purposes to do so. The differences between Karl Hegel and Hoffmeister and, hence, their translators, seem reducible to no simple formula that would disclose their underlying principle. All that can be said in general is that there is, as one would expect, very substantial overlapping of content, especially for the manuscript material, with variations in the order of presentation. Hence it is that formulations which occur at a particular point in the one will often appear in an unexpectedly different setting in the other. In addition, Nisbet, following Hoffmeister, offers the more substantial text, containing material not to be found elsewhere. He also confers on the reader, again following Hoffmeister and, ultimately, the example set by Lasson, the benefit of distinguishing typographically between manuscript and transcript sources, with the former in italics. All of the English translations are, however, in current use, and for that reason, if no other, none may be set aside in a work such as is undertaken here. A policy of neutrality will be adopted towards them, as towards their parent editions, and page references will be given, wherever possible, to each of these sources. This should enable users of all the English versions to find their bearings. The translations from the Introduction, and indeed the Lectures as a whole, that are used in the present work are, however, by its author. This seemed to accord best with the spirit of neutrality. It was in any case required to ensure consistency, a matter of obvious importance where terms with any theoretical weight are concerned.³

It is plain that our central concern is with what an earlier commentator on Hegel's philosophy of history has called an ‘impure text’ (Wilkins 1974:18). A reasoned case can, nevertheless, be made for taking the text we have seriously, in its two main versions and with all its impurity, and for according it a substantial authority. Readers who do not see the need for such a case, or who would be uninterested in its detail and are willing to accept its conclusion, may, however, wish to omit the rest of this section and go directly to the next. A point to be made by way of background here is that the situation with regard to the philosophy of history is by no means unique in Hegel's work. Much of our information about his thinking in aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy is similarly derived from published lecture series, also reconstructed from his manuscripts and student transcripts. Yet they are routinely cited and relied on in the secondary literature and without them serious discussion of his views in these areas would be virtually impossible. That would be a high price to pay for an ideal of textual purity, especially if, as will be argued here for the philosophy of history case, it is unnecessary. A further reassuring, if unsurprising, point may be made by way of preliminary. It is that Hegel took very seriously the task of preparing his lecture course and expended his best efforts on it, as his correspondence shows:

I greatly exerted myself this winter. My lectures on the philosophy of world history have taken up my time and reflection day and night, so that in the end I found my stomach quite upset and my mind quite exhausted.

(HL: 603)

This cry from the heart must tend to confirm the significance of the lectures in Hegel's output and enhance the respect they are due, provided, of course, that we possess a satisfactory statement of their content. To that crucial issue the argument should now turn.

The first step is to note that Hegel's seriousness is reflected in that of his student transcribers in their concern to produce an accurate record. Hence, there are grounds for reposing confidence in the basic transcript material. Lasson's verdict on the notes made by Gustav von Griesheim for the 1822–3 series, the series referred to in Hegel's letter, gives an indication of how things stand in this respect: ‘His notes, already used by the first editors, fill two volumes; they are a most painstakingly written, extremely neat and legible fair copy, every line of which bears witness to the diligence of the copyist’ (H, 274:223).

This judgement is endorsed by the editors of the recently published student transcripts for the 1822–3 series. They regard, however, the verbatim record made by Heinrich Hotho even more highly, as being ‘more exact and comprehensive in the reproduction of the philosophical train of thought’ (VPW: 527). The notes by Friedrich von Kehler are much less detailed, but they too are said to share in the ‘surprisingly large measure of agreement’ that prevails among the sources (VPW: 528). In the case of von Griesheim and Hotho in particular, the recent editors find a ‘wid...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1: PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS
• INTERVAL
• Part 2: The COURSE OF HISTORY
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index