Hegel After Derrida

Stuart Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134696468
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel After Derrida provides a much needed insight not only into the importance of Hegel and the importance of Derrida's work on Hegel, but also the very foundations of postmodern and deconstructionist thought. It will be essential reading for all those engaging with the work of Derrida and Hegel today and anyone seeking insight into some of the basic but neglected themes of deconstruction.

Part I
HEGEL AFTER DERRIDA

1
Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti

Robert Bernasconi

Hegel called world history a court of judgement (Gericht), a world court (Weltgericht),¹ and in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History he took Africans before that court and found them to be barbaric, cannibalistic, preoccupied with fetishes, without history, and without any consciousness of freedom.² Most importantly for him, they lack any ‘integral ingredient of culture (Bildung)’ (VPW 214; LPW 174). Faced with this diatribe, commentators are largely divided between those who regard Hegel’s discussion of Africa as unworthy of philosophical consideration and best forgotten and those who, once having quoted it, seem uncertain as to what more can be said about a text that is so extreme. Both approaches evade the question as to the place of this discussion within both Hegel’s philosophy and the early nineteenth-century discourse about Africa. It is perhaps possible to argue that by excluding Africa from the dialectic of world history, Hegel had in some sense located his own remarks about Africa outside the scope of the system. It would therefore be the decision behind this exclusion that would have to be examined, rather than the specific details of an account whose unphilosophical character had been conceded by Hegel himself. By contrast, I want to engage with the specifics of Hegel’s account. Far from excluding Africa, Hegel devoted a great deal of attention to it. If, as he said, Africa has no ‘historical interest of its own’ (VPW 214; LPW 174), why did Hegel insist on exploring it?

In this paper, after rehearsing some of the more familiar objections to Hegel’s verdict against Africa, I turn the tables and put Hegel on trial. More specifically, given that much of Hegel’s account is directed against the Ashanti, I will use what is known about them and especially what Hegel either did know or should have known, to take him before the court of the Ashanti, where his use of evidence can be interrogated. The results of this examination render all the more pressing the need to give an account of how Hegel applied his system of justice to Africa, which I attempt to do in the second part of the paper. In the third part, I return to the interpretation of Hegel’s statement about Africa as unhistorical and, having restored it to its context in Hegel’s system, show its consequences.³

I

An extensive literature criticizing Hegel’s discussion of Africa has arisen in recent years, but that does not mean that he has not had defenders. One need only recall a note in Duncan Forbes’s Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on The Philosophy of World History, which appeared in 1975. Forbes wrote:

It is also fashionable to display one’s broadmindedness by criticizing Hegel for being arrogantly Europo-centric or Western-orientated. The latest example is W. H. Walsh in Hegel’s Political Philosophy. . . . But isn’t Hegel’s perspective broadly the right one? Or at least should one not wait until world history has shown its hand a bit more clearly?⁴

Leaving aside the huge gap that separates those two questions, it is worth recalling that in the essay to which Forbes referred, Walsh was anything but extreme in his criticism. Walsh described Hegel’s treatment of Africa as ‘to put it mildly, not very sympathetic’ and added that ‘the picture he offers of Negro society in Africa is far from attractive.’⁵ Walsh exonerated Hegel from the charge of being a racist and, ignoring the discussion at the beginning of the Encyclopaedia account of the Philosophy of Spirit, insisted that Hegel has ‘no tendency to divide mankind into superior and inferior races.’⁶ The most that Walsh was prepared to say was that Hegel’s account of history was ‘the success story of modern European man’ and that ‘a less kind way of putting it’ would be to say that Hegel ‘arrogantly assumes the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon protestants.’ The importance of his use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ which Walsh applied to what Hegel would call germanisch, is to suggest precisely what Forbes confirms: that Hegel’s viewpoint is not totally alien or past. However, the problem goes further than that would suggest. Even if, when reading these pages of Hegel, one wants to divorce oneself from the conclusions and attitudes expressed there, one cannot do so simply by a declaration. It is not just a question of turning Walsh’s studious understatement into something more appropriate to what is at stake. Each reader has to see how far he Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti or she is implicated in the discussion. If a certain Eurocentrism is at stake here, then one needs to be aware of how pervasive that Eurocentrism still is.⁷

That the issues are a great deal more complicated than European commentators have hitherto recognized is apparent as soon as one turns to African and African-American critics of Hegel. Most European commentators have tended to accept with little more than raised eyebrows Hegel’s division of Africa into ‘European Africa,’ the coastal region to the north of the Sahara desert, the region of the Nile ‘which is closely connected with Asia,’ and ‘Africa proper (das eigentliche Afrika),’ which lies to the south of the Sahara (VPW 213; LPW 173). Walsh’s word is that it seems ‘odd’ that Egypt belongs to the history of the Persian Empire, rather than to the history of Africa.⁸ It is hardly surprising that critiques written from an African point of view question this way of dividing Africa.⁹ Even though the invention of Africa as a unity is perhaps at least as problematic as other parallel constructions, Africa was certainly a great deal less divided into separate parts than Europeans were inclined to believe. This view was sustained by the fact that Europeans found parts of Africa impenetrable, but even if it had been true that there was no longer any contact between the different parts of Africa (VPW 213; LPW 173), and Hegel knew from the spread of Mohammedanism that it was not (VPW 217; LPW 177), he was almost certainly familiar with the thesis that ancient Egypt had had intimate connections with other parts of Africa.

Hegel’s self-serving exclusion of what would otherwise have been clear counterexamples to his discussion of Africa is certainly of importance in any assessment of his work, as well as in any history of the European understanding of Africa. However, a study of Hegel’s use of his sources is even more revealing. The following questions need to be posed. First, what sources did Hegel use and how faithfully does his account reflect them? This would serve to address the question as to whether there is any evidence of distortion, perhaps even systematic distortion, in Hegel’s presentation of Africa.¹⁰ One must also ask, of course, whether there were other important sources that Hegel might reasonably have used and that he failed to use. This is not only a question about whether Hegel’s account reflected the best knowledge of the day but also a question of the principle of selection, both of his sources and his chief objects of interest. Second, what information is now available to us that might allow us to correct the version presented by both Hegel and his contemporaries? The question of the reliability of Hegel’s account is important because, given the widespread ignorance about African history, there must always be a question about the extent to which the story Hegel and his contemporaries told about Africa still remains intact. In other words, there must always be a reflexive moment in which the reader of Hegel, as of the travel diaries on which Hegel based his account, must ask him- or herself about the extent that he or she remains captive to this account, not only in maintaining a certain image of Africa, but also in retaining a conceptuality about Europe and about history that is more closely tied to that image than one is aware until the question is asked.

There has not yet been a systematic study of Hegel’s use of his sources. One commentator, Shlomo Avinieri, in the course of claiming that Hegel was one of the first European thinkers to incorporate the Asian world into the schema of Europe and so emancipate the non-European world from ‘its historiosophical marginality,’ noted that ‘there are also a few passages about Africa, which bear witness to Hegel’s astonishingly wide range of reading, but these are of a very rudimentary nature.’¹¹ If Avinieri’s remark about Asia fails to do justice to the extent to which the project of Universal History had already prior to Hegel ceased to be a history of salvation and had become a record of what was known about the world, albeit told unashamedly from a European point of view, then surely his assessment of the extent of Hegel’s reading about Africa is also exaggerated. The travel diaries of missionaries, explorers, and government officials had become a source of popular entertainment among the educated public. Although it is not entirely clear how much Hegel read about Africa, my own ongoing and highly provisional investigations suggest that it was much less than Avinieri thought, and far from astonishing by the standards of his day. Hegel was fulsome in his praise of the volume on Africa written by his colleague at the University of Berlin, Karl Ritter, but it seems to have been a source only for the initial geographical division of Africa, and not for the details that follow (VPW 212–3; LPW 173).¹² Hegel clearly relied heavily on Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba, Angola from the seventeenth century.¹³ There can also be little doubt that Hegel read T. E. Bowdich’sMission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, probably in English.¹⁴ Discussion of fetishism was sufficiently widespread and uniform for it to be unclear what Hegel’s sources were on this subject. So far as I know there is no clear evidence that Hegel read either the main theoretical discussion of fetishism, Charles de Brosses’s Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches or Bosman’s Description of the Coast of Guinea, which was one of de Brosses’s own main sources.¹⁵ It is sometimes suggested that Hegel consulted Tuckey’s Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire, because he tried to obtain it from the Berlin Royal Library, but it is not clear if he succeeded, and if he read it at all it made little impact on his account¹⁶ The story that the King of Eyio (sic) learns that his reign is at an end when he is presented with three parrot’s eggs and told that he is in need of rest (GPW 230; LPW 187) came from Archibald Dalzel’s The History of Dahomey.¹⁷ Hegel repeated from James Bruce’s famous account of his attempt to find the source of the Nile the account of the people of Senaar, where there is a special officer among whose duties is to execute the king when the council decrees that it is to the advantage of the state to do so (VPW 210; LPW 187), but Hegel seems to have taken little else from this book.¹⁸ Hegel also knew Herodotus’ account of Africa, from which he quoted the remark that everyone in Africa is a sorcerer (VPW 220; LPW 179).¹⁹ It is quite possible that there are other sources of Hegel’s discussions. There were at that time numerous compilation volumes summarizing travellers’ reports, as well as extensive reviews of the travel literature.²⁰ It is even possible that some of the information came to Hegel by word of mouth, a possibility made all the more likely because of the enthusiasm for this kind of information in Europe at that time. Nevertheless, it seems that, discounting the discussion of fetishism, the books by Ritter, Cavazzi, Bowdich, and Dalzel cover virtually all of the ground dealt with by Hegel in both the Philosophy of History and the Philosophy of Religion.²¹ The only difficulty is that, although these are the likely sources of Hegel’s account of Africa, in many cases they fail to support his descriptions.

From this distance, it is not always easy to tell precisely how reliable Hegel’s sources were.²² Hegel was certainly justified in criticizing the travel literature of his day for tantalizing readers by appearing ‘incredible’ and lacking ‘a determinate image or principle’ (VPW 217; LPW 176), but the manner in which he himself used that literature opens him to the charge of sensationalism as well. The accusation is sustained by the evidence of major and widespread distortion in his use of his sources.²³ I shall here focus on Hegel’s use of Bowdich’sMission,which was his main source for his knowledge of the Ashanti. The first part of Bowdich’s book is an account of how he took over the leadership of the mission and conducted the negotiations; the second part is more of a description and includes the diary of Hutchison, who is mistakenly referred to in Hegel’s text (VPW 232 and 271; LPW 188 and 220) and by all subsequent commentators as Hutchinson.²⁴ Although there were a number of controversies surrounding the mission at the time, the most serious emerged only later when it came to light that the copy of the treaty that Bowdich negotiated with the Ashanti was different from that which he deposited on his return.²⁵ It turns out that Hegel himself was no more reliable a copyist than Bowdich. To begin with a relatively straight forward example, whereas Bowdich recorded that ‘The King is heir to the gold of every subject from the highest to the lowest,’²⁶ Hegel reported that ‘Among the Ashanti, the king inherits all the property left by his deceased subjects’ (VPW 229; LPW187).²⁷ More seriously, Hegel took from Hutchison the detail that the king of the Ashanti washed the bones of his dead mother. But whereas Hegel said that the bones were washed in human blood, Hutchison specified rum and water.²⁸ The problem is even more acute in other cases where there was a predisposition on the part of travellers to tell of practices that would feed the curiosity and prejudices of the reading public at home.²⁹ The desire of travellers to find tales of exotic behaviour were, once communicated to the local population, all too likely to be satisfied. This is particularly the case with the accusation of cannibalism.

The observation of Thomas Winterbottom in 1803 on cannibalism is relevant here: That this horrid practice does not exist in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone; nor for many hundred leagues along the coast to the northward and southward of that place, may be asserted with the utmost confidence; nor is there any tradition among the natives which can prove that it ever was the custom: on the contrary, they appear struck with horror when they are questioned individually on the subject; though at the same time they make no scruple of accusing other nations at a distance, and whom they barely know by name, of cannibalism.³⁰

Bowdich accused the Ashanti of cannibalism only with reference to ceremonies that took place after a battle. Those who had never killed an enemy ate a portion of a mixture, one of the constituents of which was hearts taken from the enemy.³¹ Whether Bowdich had seen this taking place is also unlikely, as most of the remarks made in association with the practice are third hand. In any case, Hegel embellished the story to the point where Ashanti chiefs were said to have ‘torn their enemies’ hearts from their bodies and eaten them while they were still warm and bleeding’ (VPW 271; LPW 220). Nor did Bowdich provide Hegel with the story that at the end of public festivals hosted by the king of the Ashanti, ‘a human being is torn to pieces; his flesh is cast to the multitude and greedily eaten by all who can lay hands on it’ (VPW 271; LPW 220). If there is a basis for this story, and without an exhaustive list of every book that Hegel read about Africa one cannot be sure that there is none, my research suggests that it does not refer to the Ashanti. The point is important because these are not just anecdotes. They provide the basis on which Hegel rejected the idea of instinct and respect as a universal human characteristic (VPW 224; LPW 182–3).

If Bowdich, unlike Hegel, failed to satisfy those of his readers who wanted to be told that Africans were cannibals, he was more obliging when it came to stories of the ritual slaughters that accompanied funeral services.

The kings, caboceers, and the higher class, are believed to dwell with the superior Deity after death, enjoying an eternal renewal of the state and luxury they possessed on earth. It is with this impression, that they kill a certain number of both sexes at the funeral customs, to accompany the deceased, to announce his distinction, and to administer to his pleasures.³²

Later in the book, Bowdich described the process whereby on the death of an important person the slaves would run from the house to avoid being sacrificed, but apart from noting that one or two slaves would be sacrificed at the door, he gave no indication of the large numbers suggested by Hegel.³³ There is little here to justify Hegel’s description, clearly given in the context of a discussion of the Ashanti, which reads:

And it is much the same at funerals, where everything bears the mark of frenzy and dementedness. The slaves of the deceased man are slaughtered and it is decreed that their heads belong to the fetish and their bodies to the relatives who duly devour them.

(VPW 232; LPW 189)

Similar problems arise when one turns to Hegel’s account of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Hegel after Derrida
• Part II: After Hegel after Derrida
• PART III: Reading Glas
• Notes
• Select Bibliography