Chapter 12: Hegel and the New Tribalism
The philosophy of Hegel, then, was... a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was for the most part unintelligible. . .
-- J. H. Stirling.
I
Hegel, the source of all contemporary historicism, was a direct follower of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Hegel achieved the most miraculous things. A master logician, it was child's play for his powerful dialectical methods to draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical silk-hats. Thus, starting from Plato's Timaeus and its number-mysticism, Hegel succeeded in 'proving' by purely philosophical methods (114 years after Newton's Principia) that the planets must move according to Kepler's laws. He even accomplished [1] the deduction of the actual position of the planets, thereby proving that no planet could be situated between Mars and Jupiter (unfortunately, it had escaped his notice that such a planet had been discovered a few months earlier). Similarly, he proved that magnetizing iron means increasing its weight, that Newton's theories of inertia and of gravity contradict each other (of course, he could not foresee that Einstein would show the identity of inert and gravitating mass), and many other things of this kind. That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus [2], 'would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia'. Hegel's fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced 'barren formal logic'. Hegel's success was the beginning of the 'age of dishonesty' (as Schopenhauer [3] described the period of German Idealism) and of the 'age of irresponsibility' (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon.
In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel's bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel's Philosophy of Nature [4] as faithfully as possible; he writes: '§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; — merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e. — heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.' There are some who still believe in Hegel's sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence — the only intelligible one — of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: 'The heating up of sounding bodies ... is heat ... together with sound.' The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: 'I have had too much to do ... with mathematics ... differential calculus, chemistry', Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), 'to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact . . . and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.' This is a very fair characterization of Schelling 's method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.
In spite of all this it seems improbable that Hegel would ever have become the most influential figure in German philosophy without the authority of the Prussian state behind him. As it happened, he became the first official philosopher of Prussianism, appointed in the period of feudal 'restoration' after the Napoleonic wars. Later, the state also backed his pupils (Germany had, and still has, only state-controlled Universities), and they in their turn backed one another. And although Hegelianism was officially renounced by most of them, Hegelianizing philosophers have dominated philosophical teaching and thereby indirectly even the secondary schools of Germany ever since. (Of German-speaking Universities, those of Roman Catholic Austria remained fairly unmolested, like islands in a flood.)
The most devastating oligarchical attack on the republican spirit, however, was led by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in Berlin, who is proven by "check-stubs" to have been a paid agent of Austria's Metternich against the Prussian state, and was therefore working directly for the sinister reaction of the Holy Alliance. It is a sad commentary on the level of our universities, that the holy aura surrounding Hegel has remained intact down to the present day.
When one considers that Hegel finished his Phenomenology of Mind in the year 1806, in the midst of the intellectual climate of the Weimar classics, we can only conclude that his ostensibly dialectical method was nothing but a Jesuitical distortion of the Socratic method so gloriously evident in the dramas of Friedrich Schiller. Hegel's idea of the world-historical individual was indeed drawn from the classics; his "philosopher kings" or "philosophical minds," however, tended to degenerate into mere power-mongers (Napoleon, for Hegel, was the World Spirit on horseback!), and were much closer to the master-race concept of Nietzsche and Hitler. Worst of all, toward the end of his teaching career Hegel not only engaged in the corrupt practice of blocking or spoiling the studies of many young and hopeful students, but also -- in his Philosophy of Right -- he provided the perfect justification for the totalitarian state, which served as source material for Europe's reactionary oligarchical circles, as it did later for the Third Reich.
We could name many more figures and fields which were involved in the Conservative Revolution's attempt to reshape the population's conscious values. In all these cases it can be proven, often in great detail, that these were not "sociological phenomena" or mysterious transformations in the Zeitgeist, but were developments initiated or financed by the oligarchy.
-- The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
When Constant moved to Maffliers in September 1803 De Staël went to see him and let Napoleon know she would be wise and careful. Immediately the house became very popular among her friends, but Napoleon, informed by Madame de Genlis suspected a conspiracy. "Her extensive network of connections - which included foreign diplomats and known political opponents, as well as members of the government and of Bonaparte's own family - was in itself a source of suspicion and alarm for the government." Her protection of Jean Gabriel Peltier - who wished the death of Napoleon - influenced his decision on 13 October 1803 to exile her without a trial. For ten years De Staël was not allowed to settle within a distance of 40 leagues (almost 200 km) from Paris. She accused Napoleon of "persecuting a woman and her children". On 23 October she left for Germany "out of pride", in the hope to gain attention and to be able to return as soon as possible. With her children and Constant she stopped off in Metz, met with Kant's translator Charles de Villers....
Pretending she had emigrated to the US, de Staël was given permission to re-enter France. Looking around in Chaumont-sur-Loire de Staël moved into the Château de Chaumont (1810) which she rented from James Le Ray, and then onto Fossé and Vendôme. She was determined to publish De l'Allemagne in France, a book in which she called French political structures into question, so indirectly criticising Napoleon while promoting French culture and theatre. Constrained by censorship, she wrote the emperor a somewhat provocative and perhaps undignified letter. Anne Jean Marie René Savary had emphatically forbidden the publication of her book as being “un-French" and she again set sail on a boat as she had earlier pretended. In October 1810 de Staël was exiled again and had to leave France within three days. Then August Schlegel was ordered to leave Swiss Confederation as an enemy of the French literature. She found consolation in a wounded officer named Albert de Rocca, twenty-three years her junior, to whom she got engaged privately in 1811 and subsequently married publicly in 1816.
The operations of the French imperial police in regard to Mme de Staël are rather obscure. She was at first left undisturbed, but by degrees the chateau itself became a source of suspicion, and her visitors found themselves heavily punished. François-Emmanuel Guignard, De Montmorency and Mme Récamier were exiled for the crime of visiting her. She remained at home during the winter of 1811, planning to escape to England or Sweden with the manuscript. On 23 May 1812 she left Coppet almost secretly, and journeyed through Bern, Innsbruck and Salzburg on her way to Vienna, where she met with Metternich. There she obtained an Austrian passport up to the frontier, and after some trepidation and trouble, received a Russian passport in Brody.
-- Germaine de Staël, by Wikipedia
Having thus become a tremendous success on the continent, Hegelianism could hardly fail to obtain support in Britain from those who, feeling that such a powerful movement must after all have something to offer, began to search for what Stirling called The Secret of Hegel. They were attracted, of course, by Hegel's 'higher' idealism and by his claims to 'higher' morality, and they were also somewhat afraid of being branded as immoral by the chorus of the disciples; for even the more modest Hegelians claimed [5] of their doctrines that 'they are acquisitions which must ... ever be reconquered in the face of assault from the powers eternally hostile to spiritual and moral values'. Some really brilliant men (I am thinking mainly of McTaggart) made great efforts in constructive idealistic thought, well above the level of Hegel; but they did not get very far beyond providing targets for equally brilliant critics. And one can say that outside the continent of Europe, especially in the last twenty years, the interest of philosophers in Hegel has slowly been vanishing.
But if that is so, why worry any more about Hegel? The answer is that Hegel's influence has remained a most powerful force, in spite of the fact that scientists never took him seriously, and that (apart from the 'evolutionists' [6]) many philosophers are beginning to lose interest in him. Hegel's influence, and especially that of his cant, is still very powerful in moral and social philosophy and in the social and political sciences (with the sole exception of economics). Especially the philosophers of history, of politics, and of education are still to a very large extent under its sway. In politics, this is shown most drastically by the fact that the Marxist extreme left wing, as well as the conservative centre, and the fascist extreme right, all base their political philosophies on Hegel; the left wing replaces the war of nations which appears in Hegel's historicist scheme by the war of classes, the extreme right replaces it by the war of races; but both follow him more or less consciously. (The conservative centre is as a rule less conscious of its indebtedness to Hegel.)
How can this immense influence be explained? My main intention is not so much to explain this phenomenon as to combat it. But I may make a few explanatory suggestions. For some reason, philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of the atmosphere of the magician. Philosophy is considered as a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those mysteries with which religion 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 religion and theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise. Hegelianism fits these views admirably; it is exactly what this kind of popular superstition supposes philosophy to be. It knows all about everything. It has a ready answer to every question. And indeed, who can be sure that the answer is not true?
But this is not the main reason for Hegel's success. His influence, and the need to combat it, can perhaps be better understood if we briefly consider the general historical situation.
Medieval authoritarianism began to dissolve with the Renaissance. But on the Continent, its political counterpart, medieval feudalism, was not seriously threatened before the French Revolution. (The Reformation had only strengthened it.) The fight for the open society began again only with the ideas of 1789; and the feudal monarchies soon experienced the seriousness of this danger. When in 1815 the reactionary party began to resume its power in Prussia, it found itself in dire need of an ideology. Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Just as the French Revolution rediscovered the perennial ideas of the Great Generation and of Christianity, freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of all men, so Hegel rediscovered the Platonic ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism. The historical significance of Hegel may be seen in the fact that he represents the 'missing link', as it were, between Plato and the modern form of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians are quite unaware that their ideas can be traced back to Plato. But many know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation. (My view of Hegel presupposes, of course, that he interpreted Plato's teaching in the same way as I did here, that is to say, as totalitarian, to use this modern label; and indeed, it can be shown [7], from his criticism of Plato in the Philosophy of Law, that Hegel's interpretation agrees with ours.)
In order to give the reader an immediate glimpse of Hegel's Platonizing worship of the state, I shall quote a few passages, even before I begin the analysis of his historicist philosophy. These passages show that Hegel's radical collectivism depends as much on Plato as it depends on Frederick William III, king of Prussia in the critical period during and after the French Revolution. Their doctrine is that the state is everything, and the individual nothing; for he owes everything to the state, his physical as well as his spiritual existence. This is the message of Plato, of Frederick William's Prussianism, and of Hegel. 'The Universal is to be found in the State', Hegel writes [8]. '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, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is infinitely harder to grasp the Essence of the State . . . 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 is real; and ... true reality is necessary. What is real is eternally necessary ... The State ... exists for its own sake ... The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.' This selection of utterances may suffice to show Hegel's Platonism and his insistence upon the absolute moral authority of the state, which overrules all personal morality, all conscience. It is, of course, a bombastic and hysterical Platonism, but this only makes more obvious the fact that it links Platonism with modern totalitarianism.
One could ask whether by these services and by his influence upon history, Hegel has not proved his genius. I do not think this question very important, since it is only part of our romanticism that we think so much in terms of 'genius'; and apart from that, I do not believe that success proves anything, or that history is our judge [9]; these tenets are rather part of Hegelianism. But as far as Hegel is concerned, I do not even think that he was talented. He is an indigestible writer. As even his most ardent apologists must admit [10], his style is 'unquestionably scandalous'. And as far as the content of his writing is concerned, he is supreme only in his outstanding lack of originality. There is nothing in Hegel's writing that has not been said better before him. There is nothing in his apologetic method that is not borrowed from his apologetic forerunners [11]. But he devoted these borrowed thoughts and methods with singleness of purpose, though without a trace of brilliancy, to one aim: to fight against the open society, and thus to serve his employer, Frederick William of Prussia. Hegel's confusion and debasement of reason is partly necessary as a means to this end, partly a more accidental but very natural expression of his state of mind. And the whole story of Hegel would indeed not be worth relating, were it not for its more sinister consequences, which show how easily a clown may be a 'maker of history'. The tragi-comedy of the rise of 'German Idealism', in spite of the hideous crimes to which it has led, resembles a comic opera much more than anything else; and these beginnings may help to explain why it is so hard to decide of its latter- day heroes whether they have escaped from the stage of Wagner's Grand Teutonic Operas or from Offenbach's farces.
My assertion that Hegel's philosophy was inspired by ulterior motives, namely, by his interest in the restoration of the Prussian government of Frederick William III, and that it cannot therefore be taken seriously, is not new. The story was well known to all who knew the political situation, and it was freely told by the few who were independent enough to do so. The best witness is Schopenhauer, himself a Platonic idealist and a conservative if not a reactionary [12], but a man of supreme integrity who cherished truth beyond anything else. There can be no doubt that he was as competent a judge in philosophical matters as could be found at the time. Schopenhauer, who had the pleasure of knowing Hegel personally and who suggested [13] the use of Shakespeare's words, 'such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not', as the motto of Hegel's philosophy, drew the following excellent picture of the master: 'Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.' And in another place, Schopenhauer describes the political game of Hegelianism as follows: 'Philosophy, brought afresh to repute by Kant ... had soon to become a tool of interests; of state interests from above, of personal interests from below ... The driving forces of this movement are, contrary to all these solemn airs and assertions, not ideal; they are very real purposes indeed, namely personal, official, clerical, political, in short, material interests ... Party interests are vehemently agitating the pens of so many pure lovers of wisdom . . . Truth is certainly the last thing they have in mind . . . 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 make of philosophy a means of serving their state interests, and scholars make of it a trade ...' Schopenhauer's view of Hegel's status as the paid agent of the Prussian government is, to mention only one example, corroborated by Schwegler, an admiring disciple [14] of Hegel. Schwegler says of Hegel: 'The fullness of his fame and activity, however, properly dates only from his call to Berlin 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 influence for himself as well as the 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.' Schwegler's editor, J. H. Stirling [15], the first British apostle of Hegelianism, of course defends Hegel against Schwegler by warning his readers not to take too literally 'the little hint of Schwegler's against ... the philosophy of Hegel as a state-philosophy'. But a few pages later, Stirling quite unintentionally confirms Schwegler's representation of the facts as well as the view that Hegel himself was aware of the party- political and apologetic function of his philosophy. (The evidence quoted [16] by Stirling shows that Hegel expressed himself rather cynically on this function of his philosophy.) And a little later, Stirling unwittingly gives away the 'secret of Hegel' when he proceeds to the following poetic as well as prophetic revelations [17], alluding to the lightning attack made by Prussia on Austria in 1866, the year before he wrote: '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? Is it not indeed the grim Hegel that is the centre of that organization which, maturing counsel in an invisible brain, strikes, lightning-like, with a hand that is weighted from the mass? But as regards the value of this organization, it will be more palpable to many, should I say, that, while in constitutional England, Preference-holders and Debenture-holders are ruined by the prevailing commercial immorality, the ordinary owners of Stock in Prussian Railways can depend on a safe average of 8.33 per cent. This, surely, is saying something for Hegel at last!
'The fundamental outlines of Hegel must now, I think, be evident to every reader. I have gained much from Hegel . . . ' Stirling continues his eulogy. I too hope that Hegel's outlines are now evident, and I trust that what Stirling had gained was saved from the menace of the commercial immorality prevailing in an un-Hegelian and constitutional England.
(Who could resist mentioning in this context the fact that Marxist philosophers, always ready to point out how an opponent's theory is affected by his class interest, habitually fail to apply this method to Hegel? Instead of denouncing him as an apologist for Prussian absolutism, they regret [18] that the works of the originator of dialectics, and especially his works on logic, are not more widely read in Britain — in contrast to Russia, where the merits of Hegel's philosophy in general, and of his logic in particular, are officially recognized.)
Returning to the problem of Hegel's political motives, we have, I think, more than sufficient reason to suspect that his philosophy was influenced by the interests of the Prussian government by which he was employed. But under the absolutism of Frederick William III, such an influence implied more than Schopenhauer or Schwegler could know; for only in the last decades have the documents been published that show the clarity and consistency with which this king insisted upon the complete subordination of all learning to state interest. 'Abstract sciences', we read in his educational programme [19], 'that touch only the academic world, and serve only to enlighten this group, are of course without value to the welfare of the State; it would be foolish to restrict them entirely, but it is healthy to keep them within proper limits.' Hegel's call to Berlin in 1818 came during the high tide of reaction, during the period which began with the king's purging his government of the reformers and national liberals who had contributed so much to his success in the 'War of Liberation'. Considering this fact, we may ask whether Hegel's appointment was not a move to 'keep philosophy within proper limits', so as to enable her to be healthy and to serve 'the welfare of the State', that is to say, of Frederick William and his absolute rule. The same question is suggested to us when we read what a great admirer says [20] of Hegel: 'And in Berlin he remained till his death in 1831, the acknowledged dictator of one of the most powerful philosophic schools in the history of thought.' (I think we should substitute 'lack of thought' for 'thought', because I cannot see what a dictator could possibly have to do with the history of thought, even if he were a dictator of philosophy. But otherwise, this revealing passage is only too true. For example, the concerted efforts of this powerful school succeeded, by a conspiracy of silence, in concealing from the world for forty years the very fact of Schopenhauer's existence.) We see that Hegel may indeed have had the power to 'keep philosophy within proper limits', so that our question may be quite to the point. In what follows, I shall try to show that Hegel's whole philosophy can be interpreted as an emphatic answer to this question; an answer in the affirmative, of course. And I shall try to show how much light is thrown upon Hegelianism if we interpret it in this way, that is to say, as an apology for Prussianism. My analysis will be divided into three parts, to be treated in sections II, III, and IV of this chapter. Section II deals with Hegel's historicism and moral positivism, together with the rather abstruse theoretical background of these doctrines, his dialectic method and his so-called philosophy of identity. Section III deals with the rise of nationalism. In section IV, a few words will be said on Hegel's relation to Burke. And section V deals with the dependence of modern totalitarianism upon the doctrines of Hegel.