UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 14
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 14 Hegel, Prussia, and the not-so-Absolute

A number of years ago, when I first wrote this section as a part of my blog, I stated that this may possibly be the last segment of the series. By the time I was done with it, I began to realize how far off I was with that expectation.

Hegel is frequently vilified for his support of the Kingdom of Prussia, and even worse, along with Nietzsche, as one of the fountainheads of Nazi ideology. Clearly, the accusation of being a "proto-Nazi" is by far the worse of the two, but also the one that is not backed up by any facts. I shall take it up after I have directed myself to the more moderate version that accuses Hegel of being reactionary in his laudatory comments on the Prussian kingdom. In fact, if the more moderate, Prussian-kingdom, version does not work, the more extreme one, Hegel as "proto-Nazi," will have no chance at all. 

Howevere, we cannot ignore the constant harping by critics on Hegel's view of the Prussian state, which he admittedly thought to be the last expression of the Absolute in human society (so far). Hegel believed that a government should protect and enhance human freedom with the goal of recognizing that a person is free simply by virtue of being human, and he considered the Prussian kingdom to be the best embodiment of this concept to date. Now, in many people's minds, the word "Prussian" immediately conjures up images of blue-clad robotic soldiers marching in lock-step, mindlessly obeying the government's every command. Thus, these critics make Hegel out to be the epitome of a right-wing reactionary philosopher, putting his efforts into the service of an authoritarian and oppressive regime (which did become true for the Nazi collaborator Martin Heidegger about a century later). Here are some problems with the pseudo-criticisms of Hegel's political views:

With regard to German philosophers, the Nazis were in a bind. Their own philosophy was a mystical pantheism focusing on a divine force running through the blood and soil of the so-called Aryans, which manifested itself particularly in the Germanic hero figure. They preferred the Vedas and Nordic mythology to the Bible and declared that Jesus was was a "hero-figure" who was not Jewish but part of an isolated Aryan group sequestered in Galilee, fighting against Judaism. The official Nazi idealogue, Alfred Rosenberg, advocated slowly eliminating Christianity by fostering a revival of German paganism and in the meantime replacing the present negative, Jewish-oriented Christianity with a positive Aryan-centered "Christianity."

Rosenberg had nothing good to say about Hegel. However, it would not do for the Nazis to ignore the outstanding philosophers of Germany, even though their thought ran totally counter to their own ideals. A nationalist ideology cannot claim that its culture is superior to all others and then spit on the cultural heritage of its own people. The Nazis recognized that the mature Hegel's over-arching principle for political matters was that all human beings were free simply because they were human, and that there was no way in which they could turn him into a proto-Nazi without distorting his writings.

Let me continue with this theme for a moment by including Friedrich Nietzsche who posed as much of a problem for the Nazis as Hegel did. He created the idea of the "superman," Übermensch —"overman" according to Walter Kaufmann —whose powers surpass those of present-day humanity, and whose morals are no longer bound by the old distinction between good and evil. How convenient it would have been to turn him into the prototype of Hitler's supposed Aryan master race if only Nietzsche's text had allowed such an interpretation! Unfortunately for the Nazi idealogues, a basic reading of Nietzsche reveals that, if there was one thing that he disliked more than nationalism in general, it was German nationalism. Furthermore, these attitudes, at the core of Nazi ideology, did not fare well under the tip of Nietzsche's pen as he was composing his aphorisms. It is the reason why Nietzsche broke off his earlier friendship with Richard Wagner, who glorified Norse mythology with his operas in the name of Germanic superiority. The Übermensch was an individual, never an ethnic group, let alone a whole nation, and--purely hypothetically--if Nietzsche would have been forced to pick one nation as the one most likely to produce the Übermensch, Germany would probably have been at the bottom of his list. He was German by DNA, but no patriot, let alone a nationalist. In his case as well, the Nazis knew that there was no way in which they could turn him into a proto-Nazi without doing violence to his writings.

Still, since that was the Nazi's only option, they violated Hegel's and Nietzsche's writings. They simply could not repudiate prior German culture, which would have created an unwanted image; so, they forced both Hegel's and Nietzsche's philosophies into compliance with theirs. There's an interesting contrast here with the various Communist regimes of the twentieth century. A part of Communist theory is that the people must break with the bourgeois culture of the past; thus, you get such events as China's "Cultural Revolution," which criminalized everything from wearing the traditional braided hair to invoking Confucian ideals. But on the Fascist side, you can't drop dung on the same culture you're glorifying.

Consequently, the Nazis did what totalitarians always do; they rewrote history, in this case intellectual history, and published especially "redacted" excerpts from the great German philosophers, twisted to fit their ideology. And then, of course, they prohibited anyone from expressing an opinion that contradicted the views published in their misappropriated versions.

1. In all of his works, not just those specifically aimed at political matters, but religious and philosophical ones as well, we find that Hegel cherished freedom as being an integral aspect of being human.  If I may adapt a wide-spread quotation in search of its original author, "That government governs best which enhances the freedom of the individual." I need to leave it to further debate whether this means that such a government governs the least or whether protecting the freedom of its citizens demands more involvement by the government in its people's lives. I'm simply making use of a paraphrase of this popular saying in order to emphasize Hegel's appreciation of human freedom, a topic to which we need to return in a wider context before this discussion is over.
2. In general, Hegel did not assert that his system was the final word on any one topic in the history of thought, but as every philosopher does—particularly relativists in denial, such as Richard Rorty—he believed that his arguments superseded previous ones in terms of truth and validity, though subject to correction in the future. There's a difference between the "latest" word, the "last" word, and the "final" word. The "last" word could take on the meaning of either, and it may not always be easy to figure out, whether Hegel's intended meaning is "latest" or "final," particularly if one's reading of Hegel is limited to excerpts in an anthology. However, below we're going to talk about the very brittleness of Hegel's Absolute and the system. That fact alone, even without looking at particular sections, should already lead us to recognize that the "latest" is probably the correct meaning that Hegel intended.
3. A similar caveat applies to Hegel's view of the Prussian state. As fond as he may have been of ithe did not think that it could not be improved as history moved on.
4. As I have pointed out numerous times, one must understand Hegel's thought on every subject, including history and government, as extra-large transcendental categories; they are steps on the way to the Absolute. Even though it would be silly not to infer Hegel's own political views from some of the images he uses, it would also be silly to think of them as direct expositions of the subjects, such as political science, rather than as conceptual stages in the service of the system. As Hartmann points out, the problem with the transcendental approach is that it does not lead to a full exposition of a subject. Once we have exposed the negation in a shape of consciousness and discovered a sufficient remedy, the transcendental wheel keeps on turning as we move from stage to stage.
5. Now, consider the world political situation in, say, the 1820's. Prussia certainly was a kingdom that expected compliance with its laws, as governments usually do. A crucial point in favor of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm is that he issued a decree in 1807 that declared equality of all people and abolished serfdom in his land. Whether it was implemented fully is a different matter. Prussia was also the home of some rather emancipated thinkers, such as Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hölderlin, the Schlegels, etc. Now ask yourself which countries exceeded Prussia in the freedom of its residents.
6. Of course, we want to say "The United States offered the most freedom." Well, not yet, not by a long shot as long as there was such a large population of slaves. The freedoms which we cherish and rightly trace back to the founding fathers had not yet been put into practice in many areas. Hegel did point to America as the country of the future, meaning the country that would eventually excel all others in genuine freedom. He was right, but he was also right that these ideals were not yet fully applied during Hegel's lifetime. In contrast with King Friedrich Wilhelm's declaration of 1807, Abraham Lincoln's Declaration of Emancipation came in 1863 and did not result in immediate implementation either.
   • England had not yet abolished slavery either (that happened in 1833, shortly after Hegel's death), and England was spreading itself out all over the world, establishing colonies that deprived the local people of their freedom.
   • France was not even close to being in the running. The French revolution celebrated liberté, but the revolution turned into the reign of terror, followed by the absolutist regime of Napoleon. Hegel admired both the ideals of the revolution and the pivotal role that Napoleon played in history as a hero figure, but he was as realistic as we should be on how non-functional the French government was at the time in promoting human freedom.
   • Surely we can rule out Czarist Russia, and I think that there is not much point in going on.
7. Now, here's the real kicker. There were several movements towards democracy in Germany, and one could ask why Hegel did not identify with them. The answer is that they all had something in common that Hegel found repugnant, namely anti-Semitism, which was definitely not an ideology that recognized all human beings as free. We already mentioned Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) who has been widely recognized and celebrated for his "liberal" views in contrast to Hegel's alleged reactionary ones. He also called for the extermination of all Jews. Hegel preferred a kingdom in which all subjects had equal rights to a so-called democracy that would be built on genocide.
8. In short, Hegel's idea of Prussia as a state that offered freedom and equality is far from absurd, though not as realistic as we would want it to be. To be honest, I'm worried that the question of which country had the most freedom at the time is really too vague and parochial to be entirely meaningful or answerable. However, the burden of finding some clear and objective ground for assessment so as to make a significant response to Hegel, not just based on rhetoric, lies with those who criticize Hegel without having lived in nineteenth-century Prussia, as Hegel did (and, of course, that excludes me as well) and are intent to find fascism in Hegel (or me) where it does not exist.
9. If one allows the question to stand in order to liberate oneself from the goofy stereotype of Prussia, Hegel's conclusions surely are not without some important insights.
10. In the original post, I did not address the proto-Nazi critique because I thought it was too absurd to deserve any bandwidth, but, on second thought, there is still a lot of Hegel-hatred around, based on that conception. In particular, Karl Popper's popular book The Open Society and its Enemies, is filled with sequences of out-of-context quotations scotchtaped together, creating an imaginary authoritarian Hegel. 

Popper was an Austrian Jew, who in his university days identified with Marxism, but vigorously renounced it after some of his comrades were killed for their views. Popper and his wife moved to New Zealand in 1937, rightly fearing the imminent annexation by the German Nazis (Anschluß, 1938). He published The Open Society in 1945, and shortly thereafter moved to England. He claimed that Hegel advocated totalitarianism, and that his philosophy constituted one of the main intellectual pillars of Nazism. Popper, who was a logician and philosopher of science par excellence, apparently vented his anger against all-things-German in the chapter on Hegel, most likely having no idea that he was attacking someone who actually took his side.

In Alasdair MacIntyre's anthology, Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, you will find several essays that seek to put this distortion to rest. For a good analysis of Hegel's position on anti-Semitism see Shlomo Avineri, "Hegel Revisited," and for a specific critique of Popper see Walter Kaufmann, "The Hegel Myth and its Method."  Popper's citations of Hegel are for the most part from an English anthology, which is already a problem because the source material inevitably has been subject to the choice of the translator and editor. But then Popper chopped off even more context from the texts he chose to cite and often conflated these quotations, at times skipping multiple pages between two quoted segments. By that method, one can prove anything from any author. Popper also used some paraphrased material attributed to Hegel and at times felt free to paraphrase it further without any warrant other than his own preference. One can understand Popper's negative attitude toward Germany, but using the methods of totalitarianism in fighting totalitarianism is counterproductive.  

This is an important matter that goes far beyond the quality of Hegel-scholarship. There is something invidious in the mentality behind a work such as Popper's. Here is an extremely competent scholars doing shoddy work for the sake of making an ideological point. This is hard for me to understand, particularly since Popper could have made his point in so many other ways rather than misrepresenting Hegel.

Now let me return to the question of the whole point of Hegel's Absolute, particularly in light of the fact that the Absolute was not nearly as Absolute as the name might suggest. Be prepared for a little surprise now. I have maintained throughout this series of entries that Hegel needs to be understood as a transcendental philosopher expanding on the thought of Immanuel Kant. Hegel continued to raise Kant's transcendental question: "What are the conditions that make knowledge possible and certain?" But he believed that Kant did not provide a conceptual structure that permitted certainty, and so Hegel, just as Fichte and Schelling, set up an idealist system that would improve on Kant. I'm not about to retract any of that, but I need to make a serious qualification now. I emphasized when I first introduced Kant that a critique of him that involved asking for knowledge apart from the mind's mechanisms for knowledge was confused because to do so would involve asking for something impossible. However, I'm afraid that Hegel was guilty of making precisely that absurd demand on Kant and faulting Kant for not being able to provide an impossible kind of knowledge-beyond-knowledge. Not that Hegel could do so any more than Kant--or any other human being--could.

We need to get back to a section of the Phenomenology that we had skipped before. We talked about the preface and then launched into a summary of the first three chapters, but there's also an "Introduction" wedged in between the two. Hegel began this introduction by calling our attention to what he considered a natural conception of knowledge, namely that it is "a 'means' of appropriating the absolute." If that definition is news to you, I'm happy to reassure you that it is also foreign to me. But we don't need the word "absolute" in order to make this line of thought intelligible. In this instance, Hegel could simply have said that, when we commonly think of knowledge, we assume that it constitutes an objective acquaintance with reality.

Even though Hegel did not mention Kant by name here, it is clear that he had Kant in mind as he proceeded with his argument. There would be nothing gained by saying that he was only targeting Kant's disciples (similarly to the way he tried to soft-pedal his critique of Schelling) since the apparent problem he brought up is precisely the standard misunderstanding of Kant. The apparent flaw that he exposed is that the processes of knowledge appear to intervene with objective knowledge. Hegel gives us two options with which to look at this complication, either one of which makes his point. The first idea is that knowledge is a tool with which we attempt to appropriate the essence of the absolute. But we realize that "using a tool on an object never leaves the object as it was by itself, but brings about deformation and change." Alternatively, one can look at knowledge as a passive medium through which one attempts to receive the "light of truth." The truth never reaches us "as it is, but only as it is in and through the medium."

It does no good to plead the possibility of partial knowledge, says Hegel. If the "absolute alone is true, and the truth alone is absolute," there can be no such possibility. We can only measure the extent to which our knowledge of the absolute is partial if we know the absolute as a whole first, but this is precisely the issue in question.

We know that Hegel's solution was to question the presupposition that there is a gap between the knower and the object of knowledge. As we saw in his system, he wound up arguing that the knower, the object of knowledge, and the instrument for acquiring knowledge are all three aspects of our own self-consciousness. So, then, we have an answer to our question of what the point of the whole quest for Hegel's Absolute was, no matter how ephemeral (and thus non-absolute) the Absolute might turn out to be. For that magic moment when we have attained the Absolute, at least, Hegel believed that he had overcome the perceived deficiency in Kant's philosophy so that not only would knowledge be possible, but that it would also provide certainty, which Kant's epistemology could not give us.

But did Hegel really make good on that promise?