The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (30 page)

Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia
would perhaps be the most influential scientific book written by an American. For it invited the Old World to the opportunities of the new. First published anonymously (at Jefferson’s own expense) in Paris, in an edition of only two hundred copies in 1784, it was soon widely translated. French liberals were impressed by Jefferson’s description of free republican institutions and inspired by his vision.

For Jefferson, America was not only a pristine continent to be discovered but a laboratory of new meanings and purposes for society. When thirty years later, as president, he sent his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark on their exploring expedition (1804-1806) into the American West, the narrative of their travels would provide, in an adventure story, a similar inventory of the vast continental territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. Again, a priceless resource for seeking the meaning of civilization for a new nation on an unexplored continent. Jefferson, the president, would energetically explore these distinctly American possibilities. And he foresaw still more to come. “So we have gone on, and so we shall go on,” he wrote to John Adams in 1812, “puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.”

This theme of the new American nation as a place for seeking the future possibilities of civilization would resound in the eloquence of political leaders. And would be declared again and again even before the great influx of adventuring immigrants and refugees from the Old World. The seeking spirit resounds in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—affirming that the history of this “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” was a “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Hegel’s Turn to “The Divine Idea on Earth”

There is no more surprising or ironic episode in Western thought than the story of how the threads of the Enlightenment and Western Europe’s quest for freedom were brought together by G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) into dogmas that would be used to justify the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were an era of emerging modern nations when the communal search for meaning and purpose would find forms arising out of the peculiar history and experience of each nation. The vortex of Italian city-states had led to the quest for a nation that provided Machiavelli with the experience and precedents for his search for an Italian nation and his prescriptions for nation making. The English experience provided Locke and his followers with a theory of limits—limits of knowledge and of government. Voltaire and his companions of the French Enlightenment saw civilization—human renewal everywhere—foreshadowed in the culture of France and the promise of its Revolution. So, too, the trials and travails of numerous small contesting German states and principalities would include a quest for national unity. Perhaps this would have to be a kind of coherence not yet seen in history or on earth. This distinctively German quest was expressed in the miraculously abstract ideas of Hegel, which would have an uncanny appeal across the world in later centuries.

The appeal of idealism, which Hegel gave its most influential political expression, is understandable in a land of peoples speaking a common language but fragmented into many small communities. While the emerging new nations of Western Europe were unified into governments that could be restrained by constitutions and influenced by public opinion, in eighteenth-century Germany there was yet no central government that could be influenced by debate or revolution. Political power was diffused into warring small communities—sometimes loosely confederated, but not organized into a nation. Since there was not yet a central government to be influenced by public opinion, unlike the age of Voltaire and Rousseau in France and Pitt and Burke in England, it is not remarkable that no comparable shapers of public opinion appeared in a diffuse Germany.

Thinkers in these numerous small competing German communities took refuge in abstraction and introspection—idealizing their thought and the state. So it was that in the late eighteenth century Germans were coming to think of their land as the refuge of philosophy and poetry. For this idea there was ample evidence in the bright constellation of German writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Winckelmann (1717-1768), a leader in the rediscovery of Greek art; the critic and dramatist Lessing (1729-1781), librarian to the Duke of Brunswick; Schiller (1759-1805), poet and playwright, who led the
Sturm und Drang
movement, a revolt against convention inspired by Rousseau; and the lyric poet and critic Heine (1797-1856). The great figure of German literary awakening was, of course, Goethe (1749-1832), who spent most of his life under the patronage of the Duke of Weimar, and directed the ducal theater there.

It was Hegel who gave an appealing new form to the idealism of the period that would shape thinking about the communal quest. Hegel’s ideas were built on those of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), founder of German idealism. Kant, who spent all his life in and around Königsberg in Prussia, was the prototype of the obsessed and focused philosopher. His neighbors would set their watches by his daily walks. An early sympathizer with the French Revolution of 1789 (until the Reign of Terror), Kant admired Rousseau’s works, and was so engrossed in
Émile
that he allowed reading it to disrupt his rigorous schedule.

Kant is commonly considered the greatest modern philosopher, but his works are difficult to grasp and their influence is most visible through his followers, among whom Hegel is conspicuous. His copious, involuted works do not bear concise summary and should be explored in the histories of modern philosophy. But the influence of Kant’s leading ways of thought appears in the writings of Hegel. The axiom of Kant’s ethical system—that every man must be treated as an end in himself and not as a means—has sometimes been considered a form of the French Revolutionary doctrine of the Rights of Man. His own concept of freedom was that every man must legislate for himself. Which led him to believe “that there can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another.” For Kant, then, freedom did not mean mere personal whim, but was the highest realization of law in the universe. His “categorical imperative” is widely known even to those who have not read his philosophy: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Adapting the natural rights doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to his new critical idealist philosophy, Kant separated the natural laws of the physical world from the laws of society. So he created his own philosophic universe in which the “noumenal” world of the intellect was opposed to the “phenomenal” world of the senses. And this opened the way to his definition of freedom.

Hegel, building on Kant, produced his own system, which was an elusive marvel of abstraction and construction. His ideas had wide influence, not merely among philosophers. Academic philosophy, by the end of the nineteenth century, in England and America, would be dominated by Hegelian ideas.

His father was a civil servant when Hegel was born in Stuttgart, and his mother taught him Latin by the time he entered grammar school. Hegel himself led a focused academic life. His family had intended him for the ministry, but he early steered himself to the university. He was never active in politics, but wrote and pursued his interests in classics and philosophy, while making his living as a private tutor or on the faculty at Jena, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and finally at Berlin. Hegel became a patriotic Prussian and loyal civil servant. He was early attracted by the teachings of Kant, and by Kant’s defense of the rationality of the teachings of Jesus. And his faith in reason permeated all his works.

But Hegel soon became preoccupied with history—an interest that distinguished him from Kant, and was expressed in his approach to all subjects. Hegel, obsessed by the wholeness of experience, believed that the separateness of items in the world was illusory. This led him to doubt the reality of time and space—the modes of separation. Hegel expressed the wholeness, unity, and rationality of experience in his elusive idea of “the Absolute,” which was spiritual. And so Hegel’s philosophy, not easy to grasp, was based on his arcane idea that “The Absolute is Pure Being.” In history he saw the Absolute being fulfilled. His great influence was through his simple but abstract triadic scheme of the “dialectic.” This was the progression of “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” later best known for its influence on Karl Marx, who inverted the scheme into his own “dialectical materialism.” And interest in Hegel’s “dialectic” was kept alive in socialist thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a universal illustration of his belief that the real is rational and the rational is real. “Reason,” he observed, “is the conscious certainty of being all reality.”

Into his triadic scheme Hegel forced the whole of world history, which he expounded in his lectures on “The Philosophy of History,” the best popular exposition of his system. In these lectures, published posthumously, we can see Hegel’s genius at oversimplification—at forcing the most disparate and ancient facts into his ideal scheme. Unsympathetic readers like Bertrand Russell, while admiring his cosmic interests, charge that he made his theory (like other historical theories) plausible only by “some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance.” Still, there is no denying that if we can penetrate Hegel’s viscous style (even when translated into readable English), we can sense soaring grandeur in his ideas and an admirable cosmopolitanism in his spirit.

Hegel’s history, as he repeatedly notes, is meant to be “universal.” No part of the human experience on this planet is omitted—however, little may be known (or Hegel may know!) of the facts.

His subject, he explains at the outset, is “the Philosophical History of the World . . . not a collection of general observations . . . but Universal History itself.” The other approaches, which he will not pursue, he briefly explains as “Original History” (e.g., Herodotus and Thucydides) and “Reflective History,” which includes much of historical writing in modern times. But Hegel’s, he explains, is the third kind of history, “the Philosophical”:

The most general definition that can be given is that the Philosophy of History means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it. Thought is, indeed, essential to humanity. It is this that distinguishes us from brutes. In sensation, cognition and intellection, in our instincts and volitions, as far as they are truly human. Thought is an invariable element.

Even this brief passage gives us a clue to the vast and vague generality of Hegel’s doctrines of history, and their soaring suggestiveness. And he goes on with some hints of what he means by Thought, and how he makes it the theme of his Universal History.

The only Thought that Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple concept of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. . . . On the one hand, Reason is the substance of the Universe, viz., that by which and in which all of reality has its being and subsistence. On the other hand it is the Infinite Energy of the Universe; since Reason is not so powerless as to be incapable of producing anything but a mere ideal. . . . It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.

Advancing further and more grandly into the world of abstraction, Hegel gives his own definition of his subject for Universal History. He christens this “the World-Spirit—that Spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds this one nature in the phenomena of the World’s existence . . . the ultimate result of History.”

The vast generality of this “World-Spirit” does not prevent Hegel from dividing it into three phases: the Oriental; the Greek and Roman; and the Germanic. His world-history is divided into the states in which “the Spirit knows itself,” always moving toward an ever-fuller self-consciousness. And with a bold unconcern for troublesome facts, Hegel confidently explains that “the Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such—is free; and because they do not know this they are not free.”

“The consciousness of Freedom,” he writes, “first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans likewise, know only that some are free—not man as such.” And as we might have expected, Hegel defines the climax of man’s discovery of his freedom. “The German nations,” Hegel insists, “under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free: that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence.” Which leads Hegel to one of his more cryptic and arithmetically simple summaries. “The history of the world is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows, only that
One
is free; the Greek and Roman world, that
some
are free; the German world knows that
All
are free.”

The more we read Hegel, the more we are impressed with the truth of Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism: “So convenient a thing it is to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” This insight helps us understand the unlikely climax of Hegel’s doctrine of Freedom in a Prussia struggling toward nationhood, recently (1806) humbled by Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena. For Hegel, a nation is a community in search of its meaning. And Freedom—self-realization—Hegel sees being achieved through the community organized as a state. So, in
The Philosophy of History
Hegel plausibly concluded that “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists in earth. . . . The State is the embodiment of rational freedom realizing and recognizing itself in an objective form. The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom.” For the individual, then, Freedom means the right to obey the law.