3
Hegel and politics
Por lo general, los esquemas deterministas dejan huellas de escape
implícitas convenientes para sus creadores y defensores,
que de alguna manera son capaces de elevarse por encima del determinismo de hierro que aflige al resto de nosotros.
Hegel no era diferente, salvo que sus escotillas de escape
eran demasiado explícitas.
While God and the absolute refer to man
Mientras que Dios y lo absoluto se refieren al hombre como un organismo colectivo más que a sus insignificantes y despreciables miembros individuales,
e vez en cuando surgen grandes individuos, hombres 'históricos del mundo',
que son capaces de encarnar atributos del absoluto más que otros, y actúan como agentes significativos
en el próximo gran Aufhebung histórico
-el próximo gran avance hacia el hombre- el avance de Dios o del alma del mundo en su "autoconocimiento"..
Así, durante un tiempo cuando la mayoría de los prusianos patriótitas
reaccionaban violentamente contra las conquistas imperiales de Napoleón,
y movilizando sus fuerzas contra él,
Hegel reaccionó de manera muy diferente.
Hegel escribió a un amigo en éxtasis por haber visto personalmente a Napoleón cabalgando por la calle de la ciudad:
"El Emperador - esta alma del mundo - cabalgando a caballo por la ciudad para la revisión de sus tropas
- es realmente una sensación maravillosa ver a un hombre así".
Hegel estaba entusiasmado con Napoleón
debido a su función histórica mundial de llevar el Estado fuerte a Alemania y al resto de Europa.
Así como la escatología y la dialéctica fundamentales de Hegel prefiguraron el marxismo,
también lo hizo su filosofía de la historia, más directamente política.
Así, siguiendo al escritor romántico Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, en un ensayo en 1795,
afirmaba que el equivalente del comunismo temprano o primitivo era la Grecia antigua.
Schiller y Hegel elogiaron a Grecia por la supuesta homogeneidad,
unidad y "armonía" de su polis,
que ambos autores consideraron erróneamente como libre de toda división del trabajo.
The consequent Aufhebung disrupted this wonderful unity and fragmented man,
but - the good side of the new historical stage -
it did lead to the growth of commerce, living standards, and individualism.
For Hegel, moreover, the coming stage,
heralded by Hegel's philosophy,
would bring about a reintegration of man and the State.
Before 1796, Hegel, like many other young intellectuals throughout Europe,
was enchanted by the French Revolution, individualism, radical democracy, liberty and the rights of man.
Soon, however, again like many European intellectuals,
Hegel, disillusioned in the French Revolution,
turned toward reactionary State absolutism.
In particular, Hegel was greatly influenced by the Scottish statist, Sir James Steuart,
a Jacobite exile in Germany for a large part of his life,
whose Inquiry into the Principies of Political Economy (1767)
had been greatly influenced by the ultra-statist Germán eighteenth century mercantilists,
the cameralists.
Hegel read the Germán translation of Steuart's Principies (which had been published from 1769-72),
from 1797 to 1799, and took extensive notes.
Hegel was influenced in particular by two aspects of Steuart's Outlook.
One held that history proceeded in stages,
deterministically 'evolving' from one stage (nomadic, agricultural, exchange, etc.) to the next.
The other influential theme was that massive State intervention and control
were necessary to maintain an exchange economy.
It comes as no surprise that Hegel's main disillusion in the French Revolution
carne from its individualism and lack of unity under the State.
Again foreshadowing Marx, it became particularly important for man
(the collective organism)
surmount unconscious blind fate, and 'consciously' to take control of 'his' fate via the State.
And so Hegel was a great admirer not only of Napoleón the mighty world-conqueror,
but also Napoleón the detailed regulator of the French economy.
Hegel made quite evident that what the new, developing strong State really needed
was a comprehensive philosophy, contributed by a Great Philosopher
to give its mighty rule coherence and legitimacy.
Otherwise, as Professor Plant explains, 'such a State, devoid of philosophical comprehension,
would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition
of the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interest'.
We need make only one guess as to what that philosophy,
or who that Great Philosopher, was supposed to be.
And then, armed with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel himself as its fountainhead and great leader,
'this alien aspect of the Progressive modern State would disappear
and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness.
By regulating and codifying many aspects of social practice,
it gives to the modern world a rationality and a predictability which it would not otherwise possess...'.
Armed with such a philosophy and with such a philosopher,
the modern State would take its divinely appointed stand at the height of history and civilization,
as God on earth.
Thus: 'The modern State, proving the reality of political community,
when comprehended philosophically,
could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit, or God in the contemporary world'.
The State, then, is 'a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world',
and, 'the State stands above all;
it is Spirit which knows itself as the universal essence and reality';
and, 'The State is the reality of the kingdom of heaven'. And finally: 'The State is God's Will.'
Of the various forms of State, monarchy is best,
since it permits 'all' subjects to be 'free' (in the Hegelian sense)
by submerging their being into the divine substance,
which is the authoritarian, monarchical State.
The people are only 'free' when they are insignificant particles of this unitary divine substance.
As Tucker writes, 'Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the word.
The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being,
or in Hegel's own words must elevate itself to
"a self- comprehending totality", in order to achieve the consciousness of freedom.
Anything short of this spells alienation and the sorrow of finitude'.
According to Hegel, the final development of the man-God,
the final break-through into totality and infinity, was at hand.
The most highly developed state in the history of the world was now in place
the existing Prussian monarchy under King Friedrich Wilhelm III.
It so happened that Hegel's apotheosis of the existing Prussian monarchy
neatly coincided with the needs of that monarch.
When King Friedrich Wilhelm III established the new University of Berlín in 1818 to assist in supporting,
to assist in supporting, and propagandizing for, his absolute power,
what better person for the chair of philosophy than Friedrich Hegel the divinizer of State power?
The king and his absolutist party needed an official philosopher
to defend the State from the hated revolutionary ideáis of the French Revolution,
and to justify his purge of the reformers and classical liberáis who had helped him defeat Napoleón.
As Karl Popper puts it: Hegel was appointed to meet this demand,
and he did so by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society
[especially Heraclitus and Plato]
... Hegel rediscovered the Platonic Ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason.
Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism...
[Hegel] is the 'missing link', as it were, between Plato and the módem forms of totalitarianism.
Most of the modern totalitarians,...know of their indebtedness to Hegel,
and all of them have been brought up in the ciose atmosphere of Hegelianism.
They have been taught to worship the State, history, and the nation.
On Hegel's worship of the State, Popper cites chilling and revealing passages:
The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth...
We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth...
The State is the march of God through the world...
The State must be comprehended as an organism...
To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought.
The State knows what it wills... The State...exists for its own sake...
The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.
All this rant is well characterized by Popper as 'bombastic and hysterical Platonism'.
Much of this was inspired by Hegel's friends and immediate philosophical predecessors,
men like the later Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, Schiller, Herder and Schleiermacher.
But it was Hegel's particular task to turn his murky doctrines
to the job of weaving apologetics for the absolute power of the extant Prussian State.
Thus Hegel's admiring disciple, F.J.C. Schwegler, revealed the following in his History of Philosophy:
The fullness of his [Hegel's] fame and activity, however, properly dates only from his cali to Berlín in 1818.
Here there rose up around him a numerous, widely extended, and...exceedingly active school;
here too, he acquired, from his connections with the Prussian bureaucracy,
political recognition of his System as the official philosophy;
not always to the advantage of the inner freedom of his philosophy, or of its moral worth.
With Prussia as the central focus, Hegelianism was able to sweep German philosophy during the nineteenth century,
dominating in all but the Catholic areas of Southern Germany and Austria.
As Popper put it, 'having thus be- come a tremendous success on the continent,
Hegelianism could hardly fail
to obtain support in Britain from those who [felt] that such a powerful movement
must after all have something to offer...'
Indeed, the man who first introduced Hegel to English readers, Dr. J. Hutchinson Stirling,
admiringly remarked, the year after Prussia's lightning victory over Austria,
'Is it not indeed to Hegel, and especially his philosophy of ethics and politics,
that Prussia owes that mighty life and organization she is now rapidly developing?
Finally Hegel's contemporary and acquaintance, Arthur Schopenhauer,
denounced the state-philosophy alliance that drove Hegelianism
into becoming a powerful force in social thought:
"Philosophy is misused, from the side of the State as a tool, from the other side as a means of gain...
Who can really believe that truth also will thereby come to light, just as a by product?
...Governments made of philosophy a means of serving their State interests, and scholars made of it a trade..."
In addition to the political influence, Popper offers a complementary explanation
for the otherwise puzzling widespread influence of G.W.E Hegel:
the attraction of philosophers to high-sounding jargon and gibberish
almost for its own sake, followed by the gullibility of a credulous public.
Thus Popper cites a statement by the English Hegelian Stirling:
'The philosophy of Hegel, then, was...
a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was for the most part unintelligible'.
Profound for its very unintelligibility!
Lack of clarity as virtue and proof of profundity! Popper adds:
philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of the atmosphere of the magician.
Philosophy is considered a strange and abstruse kind of thing,
dealing with those things with which religión deals,
but not in a way which can be 'revealed unto babes' or to common people;
it is considered to be too profound for that,
and to be the religión and the theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise.
Hegelianism fits these views admirably;
it is exactly what this popular superstition supposes philosophy to be.
4. Hegel and the Romantic Age
G.W.F. Hegel, unfortunately, was not a bizarre aberrant force in European thought.
He was only one, of the most influential and the most convoluted and hypertrophic,
of what must be considered the dominant paradigm of his age, the celebrated Age of Romanticism.
In different variants and in different ways, the Romantic writers of the first half of the nineteenth century,
especially in Germany and Great Britain,
poets and novelists as well as philosophers,
were dominated by a similar creatology and eschatology.
It might be termed the 'alienation and return' or 'reabsorption' myth.
God created the universe out of imperfection and felt need,
thereby tragically cutting man, the organic species, off from his (its?) pre-creation unity with God.
While this transcendence, this Aufhebung, of creation has permitted God and man,
or God-man, to develop their (its?) faculties and to progress, tragic alienation will continue,
until that day, inevitable and determined,
in which God and man will be fused into one cosmic blob.
Or, rather, being pantheists as was Hegel, until man discovers that he is man-God,
and the alienation of man from man, man from nature, and man from God will be ended
as all is fused into one big blob,
the discovery of the reality of and therefore the merger into, cosmic Oneness.
History, which has been predetermined towards this goal, will then come to an end.
In the Romantic metaphor, man,
the generic 'organism' of course, not the individual, will at last 'return home'.
History is therefore an 'upward spiral' towards Man's determined destination,
a return home,
but on a far higher level than the original unity, or home, with God in the pre-creation epoch.
The domination of the Romantic writers
by this paradigm has been expounded brilliantly by the leading literary critic of Romanticism, M.H. Abrams,
who points to this leading strain in English literature stretching from Wordsworth to D.H. Lawrence.
Wordsworth, Abrams emphasizes, dedicated virtually his entire output
to a 'heroic' or 'high Romantic argument',
to an attempt to counter and transcend Milton's epochal poem of an orthodox Christian view of man and God.
To counter Milton's Christian view of Heaven and Hell as alternatives for individual souls,
and of Jesus's Second Advent as putting an end to history and returning man to paradise,
Wordsworth, in his own 'argument',
counterpoises his pantheist visión of the upward spiral of history
into cosmic unification and man's consequent return home from alienation
The eventual eschaton, the Kingdom of God,
is taken from its Christian placement in Heaven and brought down to earth,
thereby as always when the eschaton is immanentized, creating spectacularly grave
ideological social, and political problems.
Or, to use a concept of Abrams, the Romantic visión constituted the secularization of theology.
Greek and Roman epics, Wordsworth asserted,
sang of 'arms and the man', 'hitherto the only Argument heroic deemed'.
In contrast, at the beginning of his great Paradise Lost, Milton declares:
'That to the height of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to man'.
Wordsworth now proclaimed that his own Argument surpassing Milton's
was instilled in him by God's 'holy powers and faculties',
enabling him (presaging Marx's yearnings) to create his own world, even though he realized,
in an unwonted flash of realism, that 'some call'd it madness'.
For there 'passed within' him 'Genius, Power, Creation, and Divinity itself'.
Wordsworth concluded that 'This is, in truth, heroic argument', an 'argument not less
but more Heroic than the wrath of stern Achilles'.
Other Englishmen steeped in the Wordsworthian paradigm were his worshipful follower
Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and even Blake,
who, however, tried to blend Christianity and pantheism.
All these writers had been steeped in Christian doctrine,
from which they could spin off on their own heretical, pantheistic versión of millennialism.
Wordsworth himself had been trained to become an Anglican priest.
Coleridge was a philosopher and a lay preacher,
had been on the edge of becoming a imitarían minister,
and was steeped in neoplatonism and the works of Jacob Boehme,
Keats was an explicit disciple of the Wordsworthian programme,
which he called a means toward secular salvation.
And Shelley, though an explicit atheist, idolized the 'sacred' Milton
above all other poets, and was constantly steeped in study of the Bible.
It should also be noted that Wordsworth, like Hegel, was a youthful enthusiast for the French Revolution
and its liberal ideáis and later,
disillusioned, turned to conservative statism and the pantheist versión of inevitable redemption through history.
The Germán Romantics were even more immersed in religión and mysticism than were their English counterparts.
Hegel, Friedrich von Schelling, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Hólderlin,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, were all theology students,
most of them with Hegel at the University of Tübingen.
All of them tried explicitly to apply religious doctrine to their philosophy.
Novalis was immersed in the Bible. Furthermore, Hegel devoted a great deal of favourable attention to Boehme
in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy,
and Schelling called Boehme a 'miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind'.
Moreover, it was Friedrich Schiller, Hegel's mentor, who was influenced by the Scot Adam Ferguson
to denounce specialization and the división of labour as alienating and fragmenting man,
and it was Schiller who influenced Hegel in the 1790s by coining the explicit concept of Aufhebung and the dialectic.
In England, several decades later, the tempestuous conservative statist writer Thomas Carlyle
paid tribute to Friedrich Schiller by writing a biography of that Romantic writer in 1825.
From then on, Carlyle's writings were permeated with the Hegelian visión.
Unity is good, and diversity or separateness is evil and diseased.
Science as well as individualism is división and dismemberment.
Selfhood, Carlyle ranted, is alienation from nature, from others, and from oneself.
But one day there will come the breakthrough, the spiritual rebirth, led by world-historical figures ('great men')
by which man will return home to a friendly world by means of the utter cancellation,
the 'annihilation of self' (Selbst-todtung).
Finally, in Past and Present (1843),
Carlyle applied his profoundly anti- individualist
(and, one might add, anti-human) visión to economic affairs.
He denounced egoism, material greed and laissez-faire, which,
by fostering the severance of men from each other,
had led to a world 'which has become a lifeless other,
and in severance also from other human beings within a social order in which 'cash payment is...
the solé nexus of man with man".'
In opposition to this metaphysically evil 'cash nexus'
lay the familial relation with nature and fellow-men, the relation of 'love'.
The stage was set for Karl Marx.
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