Recall that for Hegel,
spirit is the engine of world history. Spirit actualizes itself
throughout the course of historical events. In the reading for today,
we get a really interesting articulation of this, which
is the idea that spirit does this--it serves as the engine
of world history--through self-estrangement. Basically, by
alienating itself. Hegel says that spirit
stands in opposition to itself, presenting its
own hindrance to itself. And it must overcome
itself throughout the course of world history. And this is weirdly
paradoxical, right? Hegel talks about this on the
bottom of 59 and on page 60. He says that spirit
only makes itself into what it is implicitly. And yet the development of
spirit is immanent within world history itself. So it's not as if spirit
is sort of standing apart like an all-knowing God who
has the course of history charted out in advance. It's not like that. It's actually this weird
motion, this principle of creating something. Like the way that an oak tree
starts off as a seed and it has everything that it needs
in order to develop, right, under the right conditions. But we can't say that the
seed itself is already the oak tree, right? It is the oak tree implicitly. Spirit's self-actualization
is implicit within itself, but needs the course of
human history through human activity and subjective will,
or passion, to realize itself. The highest achievement
of spirit is ultimately to know itself, Hegel says on page 75. Spirit wants to be
self-conscious of itself by taking itself
as its own object. And it can only do so
through thinking itself. So spirit's movement is this
process of 1) externalizing itself in different
formations, 2) reflecting on itself, and then sort of 3)
overcoming that formation, that relationship, and 4)
creating a new reflection. This is what's
known as dialectic. Hegel is known for
a dialectical method of philosophy. And so if what I've
been saying so far is sort of challenging to
grasp--understandable! Hegel is famously
difficult to grasp. So let me give you a useful
heuristic that a lot of people use while teaching Hegel,
but with the caveat that this particular schema is
somewhat oversimplified, and you're not going to find it
that often in Hegel himself. This is the schema of
dialectics known as the thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis. According to Hegel, history
is driven by opposites. You have a thesis A and
antithesis B, and those things are mutually incompatible. What happens is that, because
of that incompatibility, a tension arises that
ultimately leads to the collapse of that opposition. But when the opposition
collapses, it's not as if that thesis and
antithesis just fall away. Rather, their moment of
collapse is sort of preserved at a higher level, which is
the synthesis, the Aufhebung in German, or the sublation. This word sublation
basically implies that something is superseded,
it's moved beyond, but it's preserved at the same time. So for Hegel, all of the
past moments and oppositions of world history are in a
sense present in the present moment, but they are present
as having been superseded. So an example that Hegel
gives is in terms of structures of government. He talks about despotic
monarchy, where one person is ruling, as
being a kind of thesis. That's a first moment
of state formation. And then that despotic
monarchy gets opposed by a different kind of government,
which is democracy, where the people are ruling rather
than one person ruling. So we have this opposition
between monarchy and democracy, but monarchy
and democracy not only are in tension with each
other, but they're also internally in tension. According to Hegel,
monarchy is in tension with itself because it relies
on the obedience of the people, but it doesn't
give the people a voice. And he says that democracy
is in tension with itself because, by letting people
rule themselves, passion and caprice run free. They're not appropriately
guided by reason. So we have a thesis of
despotic monarchy, and an antithesis of democracy. And Hegel says that these
collapse because they're both in tension with
themselves and in tension with each other and lead
to constitutional monarchy, which is basically Hegel's
ideal of government here. He thinks we have the rule
of the people through a constitution, but then we also
have a single person ruling who is paradoxically, by
virtue of being an individual, representing everybody. And that's the monarch. This is far from the
only example of a thesis-antithesis-synthesis
structure, but it is one that comes up in
the reading for today. We'll talk a little bit
more about this when we get to Marx as well. Hegel summarizes his
dialectical view on page 60. Here, he says about three
quarters of the way down the page, that the process
of history appears to be an advance from the imperfect
to the more perfect. There we have the
developmental progressive view of history we've
been talking about. But, in this transition
from the imperfect to the more perfect, Hegel says
that the imperfect stage is to be grasped as having
the perfect within itself. The imperfect stages of
history are internally driven by having a perfect stage
of history implicit within them, in the same way that the
seed of the oak tree has the oak tree implicit within it. And this sublation
or synthesis is kind of a funny concept
because it can mean both preservation and negation. So the tension between
opposites is negated, right? It collapses, as we said,
but it also is preserved. It had a partial truth
to it that persists into the present. On page 60, Hegel talks
about stages in the development of spirit. And he says that we first
go from the immersion of spirit in natural life. Right? So spirit is just completely
implicit within nature, to a second stage where
spirit emerges into consciousness and freedom. But even that second stage
emerging into consciousness and freedom, gaining a
certain reflective dimension, right--spirit is able
to reflect on itself-- is not the end goal. Ultimately, these two
moments, which we can even think about as the thesis
and antithesis, get sublated into a third stage, which is
spirit in its universality and self-consciousness. Here, spirit unifies the
subjective with the objective and becomes fully free. Now here's where it
gets pretty colonialist. Hegel talks about
the Volksgeist. Remember, that's one of the
principles that I mentioned in my video for last week. The Volksgeist is the
spirit of a people. Hegel says that spirit works
through individual peoples at individual moments of
time such that certain civilizations have a world
historical role to play before then passing away. So for instance, the rise
and fall of the Roman empire. The Roman empire had a
historical role to play on the slaughterbench of
history and its increasing self-actualization of
spirit into the idea, but then eventually,
its time was up and it decayed and then was gone. The Volksgeist, or national
spirit, spirit of a people, is only a particular
phase of world spirit, Hegel says on page 82. Individual civilizations
culminate in a particular thought or notion, right? A particular civilization
has a kind of lifespan according to Hegel. It's born, it reaches
maturity, and then it dies. And whatever essential
thought or contribution the civilization had to make
becomes the kernel of rebirth for the next civilization. Hegel likens this to the
image of the phoenix. And he says that the image
of the phoenix comes from Asia, but, because Hegel
is extremely Eurocentric. He thinks that like literally
the culmination of world history is in Prussia in
his time of living, he says a Western version
of the phoenix is better. Because it's not just that
the phoenix is reborn, but the phoenix is reborn as a
pure and more spiritual being. Page 76. For Hegel, what brings about the decline
or death of a people is habit. Habit, or activity without
opposition, just kind of going through the motions are the
first sign according to him that a people is in decline. And I'll just say that
this progressivist view of history that Hegel offers,
including its notion that history is forwarded by
individual peoples, has a long and quite fraught legacy
in subsequent philosophy. So for instance, you can
hear resonances here of what will later become
National Socialist rhetoric in Germany, right? The idea that the German
people have a world historical mission to play. And then on the other
side of things, there's somebody like W.E.B. DuBois, who, in the early
20th century in America, says that black people in the US
are now the world-historical people that Hegel envisioned. What do you think about
this Hegelian legacy and his focus on the way that
world spirit gets actualized through individual people? And what in general of the
progressivist or teleological notion of history that
things are always getting better due to an immanent
intrinsic law within material conditions of the world?
