LITMIR.BIZ

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In one sense of much abused terms, he is the greatest realist known to philosophy. He might be called a Brutalist. In the inquiry Bourdon carried on in Germany a few years ago (published under the title of the "German Enigma"), he records a conversation with a German who deplores the tendency of the Germans to forsake the solid bone of things in behalf of a romantic shadow. As against this he appeals to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, "in opposition to the idealism which had lifted Germany on wings, arrayed and marshaled the maxims of an unflinching realism. He had formulæ for the justification of facts whatever they might be. That which is, he would say, is reason realized. And what did he teach? That the hour has sounded for the third act in the drama of humanity, and that the German opportunity is not far off. . . . I could show you throughout the nineteenth century the torrent of political and social ideas which had their source here."

      I have said that the essential points of the Fichtean philosophy of history were taken up into the Hegelian system. This assimilation involved, however, a rectification of an inconsistency between the earlier and the later moral theories of Fichte. In his earlier ethical writings, emphasis fell upon conscious moral personality—upon the deliberate identification by the individual will of its career and destiny with the purpose of the Absolute. In his later patriotic philosophy, he asserts that the organized nation is the channel by which a finite ego acquires moral personality, since the nation alone transmits to individuals the generic principle of God working in humanity. At the same time he appeals to the resolute will and consciously chosen self-sacrifice of individuals to overthrow the enemy and re-establish the Prussian state. When Hegel writes that victory has been obtained, the war of Independence has been successfully waged. The necessity of emphasizing individual self-assertion had given way to the need of subordinating the individual to the established state in order to check the disintegrating tendencies of liberalism.

Haym has said that Hegel's "Philosophy of Law" had for its task the exhibition as the perfect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the "practical and political condition existing in Prussia in 1821." This was meant as a hostile attack. But Hegel himself should have been the last to object. With his scorn for an Ideal so impotent that its realization must depend upon the effort of private selves, an Absolute so inconsequential that it must wait upon the accidents of future time for manifestation, he sticks in politics more than elsewhere to the conviction that the actual is the rational. "The task of philosophy is to comprehend that which is, for that which is, is Reason." Alleged philosophies which try to tell what the State should be or even what a state ought in the future to come to be, are idle fantasies. Such attempts come too late. Human wisdom is like "the bird of Minerva which takes its flight only at the close of day."6 It comes, after the issue, to acknowledge what has happened. "The State is the rational in itself and for itself. Its substantial unity is an absolute end in itself. To it belongs supreme right in respect to individuals whose first duty is—just to be members of the State." . . . The State "is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." It is a commonplace of idealistic theism that nature is a manifestation of God. But Hegel says that nature is only an externalized, unconscious and so incomplete expression. The State has more, not less, objective reality than physical nature, for it is a realization of Absolute spirit in the realm of consciousness. The doctrine presents an extreme form of the idea, not of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right of States. "The march of God in history is the cause of the existence of states; their foundation is the power of reason realizing itself as will. Every state, whatever it be, participates in the divine essence. The State is not the work of human art; only Reason could produce it." The State is God on earth.

      His depreciation of the individual as an individual appears in every theme of his Philosophy of Right and History. At first sight, his theory of great world heroes seems inconsistent with his disregard of individuals. While the morality of most men consists simply in assimilating into their own habits the customs already found in the institutions about them, great men initiate new historic epochs. They derive "their purposes and their calling not from the calm regular course of things sanctioned by the existing order, but from a concealed fount, from that inner spirit hidden beneath the surface, which, striking the outer world as a shell, bursts it to pieces." The heroes are thus the exception which proves the rule. They are world characters; while they seem to be seeking personal interests they are really acting as organs of a universal will, of God in his further march. In his identification with the Absolute, the world-hero can have but one aim to which "he is devoted regardless of all else. Such men may even treat other great and sacred interests inconsiderately. . . . But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path." We are not surprised to see that Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon are the characters he prefers to cite. One can only regret that he died before his contemplative piety could behold Bismarck.

      A large part of the intellectual machinery by which Hegel overcame the remnants of individualism found in prior philosophy came from the idea of organic development which had been active in German thought since the time of Herder. In his chief work ("Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity"), written in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Herder holds that history is a progressive education of humanity. This idea, had from Lessing, is combined with the idea of Leibniz that change is evolution, by means of an internal force, of powers originally implicit in existence, and with the idea of Spinoza of an all-comprehensive substance. This idea of organic growth was then applied to language, literature and institutions. It soon obtained reinforcement from the rising science of biology. Long before the days of Darwin or Spencer, the idea of evolution had been a commonplace of German thought with respect to everything concerning the history of humanity. The notion was set in sharp antithesis to the conception of "making" or manufacturing institutions and constitutions, which was treated as one of the fallacies of the French philosophy of the Enlightenment. A combination of this notion of universal organic growth with the technique of prior idealism may fairly be said to have determined Hegel's whole philosophy. While Leibniz and Herder had emphasized the notion of harmony as an essential factor of the working of organic forces, Hegel took from Fichte the notion of a unity or synthesis arrived at by "positing," and overcoming an opposite. Struggle for existence (or realization) was thus an "organic" part of German thinking long before the teaching of Darwin, who, in fact, is usually treated by German writers as giving a rather superficial empirical expression to an idea which they had already grasped in its universal speculative form. It is characteristic of the extent in which Hegel thought in terms of struggle and overcoming that after stating why it was as yet impossible to include the Americas in his philosophy of history, and after saying that in the future the burden of world history will reveal itself there, he surmises that it may take the form of a "contest" between North and South America. No philosopher has ever thought so consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and overcoming as Hegel. When he says the "world history is the world judgment" he means judgment in the sense of assize, and judgment as victory of one and defeat of another—victory being the final proof that the world spirit has now passed from one nation to take up its residence in another. To be defeated in a way which causes the nation to take a secondary position among nations is a sign that divine judgment has been passed upon it. When a recent German writer argues that for Germany to surrender any territory which it has conquered during the present war would be sacrilegious, since it would be to refuse to acknowledge the workings of God in human history, he speaks quite in the Hegelian vein.

      Although the phenomenon of nationalism was very recent when Hegel wrote, indeed practically contemporary with his own day, he writes in nationalistic terms the entire history of humanity. The State is the Individual of history: it is to history what a given man is to biography. History gives us the progressive realization or evolution of the Absolute, moving from one National Individual to another. It is law, the universal, which makes the State a State, for law is reason, not as mere subjective reflection, but in its manifestation as supreme over and in particulars. On this account, Hegel's statement that the fundamental principle of history is the progressive realization of freedom does not mean what an uninstructed English reader would naturally take it to mean. Freedom is always understood in terms of Reason. Its expression in history means that Thought has progressively become conscious of itself; that is, has made itself its own object. Freedom is the consciousness

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