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?