Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-n7pht Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-12T01:54:07.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Building the Temple of Memory: Hegel's Aesthetic Narrative of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Joshua Foa Dienstag
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This article examines Hegel's philosophy of history with the intention of once again rendering it strange. Hegel's “historicism” has been accepted for so long that the actual terms of his history are rarely examined afresh. But his account of the past, it is argued here, is best understood through the vocabulary of art and beauty that he develops in the Aesthetics. Historical forms cannot be wholly grasped through the vocabulary of dialectical reason, but ought to be seen as “shapes” in a strong sense. Two principle conclusions follow from this reassessment: The first is that the Philosophy of History is best understood neither as an optimistic account of rational progress, nor as a tale of the “end of history” in liberal democracy, but as an attempt to “seduce us to life”—that is, an attempt to reconcile us to the world through the beauty of history. The second conclusion is that this attempt must fail. It fails because, in his effort to discern beauty in the past, Hegel imposes a completeness upon time that excludes the possibility of a future. Whether intentionally or not, Hegel's pessimism about art is transmitted to his philosophy of history. The Temple of Memory that Hegel builds to shelter our souls ends up imprisoning them instead.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , Fall 1994 , pp. 697 - 726
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

I wish to thank George Kateb, Alexander Nehamas, Alan Ryan, Amy Gutmann, David Steiner, Dante Germino, George Klosko, Jennifer Mnookin and the participants at the University of Virginia's Political Philosophy Colloquium as well as the anonymous referees of the Review of Politics for their comments on various versions of this article.

1. See, e.g., Singer, Peter, Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chap. 2Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), chap. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Findlay, J. N., The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Macmillan Co., 1958), p. 334Google Scholar; Kojeve, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 130 ff.Google Scholar Hegel's teleology has both inspired Marxists and embarrassed many of his liberal and communitarian inheritors. The latter have often tried to jettison Hegel's historicism while arguing that the rest of his philosophy can stand on its own, or perhaps with a little help, as a defensible model of social organization. (See, e.g. Smith, Steven, Hegel's Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989]Google Scholar; and Taylor, Charles, Hegel and Modern Society [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979]Google Scholar. The former have attempted to invigorate the teleology with a radicalized politics. See, e.g., Marcuse, Herbert, Reason and Revolution [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941]Google Scholar; and, of course, Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto” [Part I] and “The German Ideology” [Part I]).

2. The analysis that typifies this view is probably that of Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 223ff.Google Scholar; see also O'brien, George Dennis, Hegel on Reason and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975)Google Scholar, for a defense of a “weak” version of the progress thesis. But I am thinking less of sophisticated treatments of Hegel than of the way in which the term “philosophy of history” is used, with Hegel in mind, as an intellectual placeholder for a state-centered view of inevitable progress—an evaluation which has survived even as much of Popper's work has fallen into disrepute. This situation necessitates that anyone using the term dissociate themselves from this meaning even though they no longer identify it with any particular author (e.g., Carr, David, Time, Narrative and History [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986], p. 1).Google Scholar

3. Throughout the article, Hegel's texts will be noted as follows: The Philosophy of History, PH; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Introduction), IPH; Aesthetics, AE; numbers following these designations refer to page numbers of the Sibree, Nisbet and Knox translations respectively. Phenomenology of Spirit, PS; Philosophy of Right, PR; and Encyclopedia Logic (Lesser), LG; will be followed by numbers indicating paragraphs in the Miller, Knox and Wallace translations. The numbers may be followed by “A” or “n” to indicate an addition or note to Hegel's main text.

4. Anne-Marie Gethmann-Siefert has also recently attempted to connect and rehabilitate Hegel's aesthetics and history (Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte [Bouvier Verlag, 1984]).Google Scholar She does so, however, by reading these texts through the lectures of the Jena period and by jettisoning some of Hegel's more difficult positions about the “end of art.” It is precisely these positions that I will be taking most seriously.

5. As Jean Hyppolite has shown, this depiction of social organization as a work of art dates from Hegel's Jena period (Introduction a la philosophie de I'histoire de Hegel [Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1983], p. 19ff., p. 89).Google Scholar But since Hyppolite's focus is an interpretation of the Phenomenology, he considers this theme's subsidiary role there and neglects its reemergence in the later lectures on art and history.

6. Gestalt (“shape”) is the German word that Hegel uses most often in this context, though he occasionally uses Form (“form”) or Bild (“image”). Though “shape” is the best translation of Gestalt, it is also the word that usually stands in contrast to the German term for “content” (Gehalt). It has as well the subsidiary sense of “whole” or “character” which, while perfectly in accord with Hegel's usage, would later be emphasized by the psychoanalytic community to a degree that is not evident in Hegel. While the terms do not mean precisely the same thing, I have not been able to identify any way in which Hegel, in his usage, consistently differentiates them.

7. Nietzsche discusses the “seduction to existence” and life in the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals in decidedly ambivalent terms. On the one hand he condemns the pain and distortion that the propagation of the “ascetic ideal” as a seduction to life has caused. On the other hand, he recognizes the necessity and benefits of such a project—a project he himself is engaged in. In making use of this concept here, I share Nietzsche's uneasiness with it and, as will be clear from what follows, hardly endorse it.

8. The use of a building to symbolize human history is not Hegel's invention. He was undoubtedly drawing on Kant's remarks in the “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent”: “It remains perplexing that earlier generations seem to do their laborious work for the sake of later generations, in order to provide a foundation from which the latter can advance the building which nature has intended. Only later generations will have the good fortune to live in the building” (The Philosophy of Kant [New York: Modern Library, 1949], 119).Google Scholar Hegel extends this view of Kant's considerably and puts significantly greater weight on it than Kant would have thought possible. (See, e.g. IPH 12)

9. Of course, in Hegel's quasi-platonic idealism, the highest degree of “reality” is reserved for thoughts of “the Idea.” My point, though, is that the shapes of history have as much reality as all other objects which fall short of this pinnacle. This is what allows Hegel to speak of art and history in the same breath.

10. At PS 808 he writes that the passage is slow “just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance.” But this is really no answer at all. Why are we to think that this process must be a slow one? Is there supposed to be something ontologically fundamental about the speed of human thought?

11. I think this image derives mostly from Marx's reading of Hegel, a reading popular among Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Indeed, it may even be more popular among the latter since it conveniently implicates Hegel in Marx's approach to history.

12. Gadamer, Hans-georg, Hegel's Dialectic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 36.Google Scholar

13. Such a conclusion must of course be somewhat provisional pending the arrival of the new edition of the Philosophy of History, which will contain much more material than those previous. But the character of the material that we have makes it seem unlikely to me that the new edition will alter this conclusion.

14. Many commentators take Hegel at his word when he says in the PS and IPH that he has accounted for history in this fashion. Thus Charles Taylor writes that in Hegel's history “the motor force of movement is contradiction” (Hegel, p. 390–91). But the brief summary of this history which follows deals hardly at all with the stages other than the Greek and German and, more importantly, quotes only from the introduction and never from the body of the PH itself—because it would be impossible to prove this view of Hegel's history with reference to that text.

15. Perhaps the simplest interpretation of the work of Marx and his successors is that they have attempted to reintegrate the Hegel of the Philosophy of History with that of the Phenomenology.

16. Kojeve, , Reading of Hegel, p. 20.Google Scholar He finds the Master's role “tragic” (p. 19), but Hegel finds little tragic in the earliest masters like the Persians or the Egyptians. Cooper, in attempting what Kojéve does not, a “Kojévian reading” of the PH only succeeds in reading the Introduction of that work, and distorts the structure of the rest of it when he briefly considers it (Cooper, Barry, The End of History [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], chap. 3, p. 105ff.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. See the Republic, bk. 10.

18. See Desmond, William, “Art, Philosophy, Concreteness,” The Owl of Minerva 16 (1984/1985): 141.Google Scholar

19. Arendt calls this “wish to substitute making for acting in order to bestow upon the realm of human affairs the solidity inherent in work” a “Platonic” wish. This wish is clearly Hegel's as well. Yet it need not be associated with Plato (as Arendt appears to want to do) on account of his hostility towards democracy. (Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], pp. 225, 221Google Scholar). In any case, Plato's and Hegel's accounts of “making” are quite different.

20. What direct knowledge Hegel had of Locke's labor theory is hard to say. In Hegel's, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), III: 295–313)Google Scholar, he discusses Locke's Essay on Human Understanding but not his other works. The edition that Hegel cites, however, does contain almost all of Locke's opus. It is more probable, however, that Hegel absorbed Locke's labor theories through the mediation of Adam Smith and the other classical economists with whom we know Hegel to have been familiar. Though they were certainly more advanced than Locke in technical matters, they took up from him the idea of human labor as the main creator of property and property rights as he articulated it in the second of the Two Treatises of Government. Sabine notes the similarity between Hegel's, and Locke's, accounts of labor in passing (History of Political Thought [Dryden Press, 1973], p. 599).Google Scholar

21. Kojeve is certainly correct to point to the role of labor in the production of culture (Reading of Hegel, p. 52). He is simply wrong to associate the development through labor with the political triumph of the slave.

22. It should be noted that this account of action accords with the Phenomenology in the following way: Hegel also calls action the struggle and dissolution of difference (AE 179). But “difference” has a strictly ontological meaning. Hegel calls it a limit or a boundary. It is the point where a thing ends. It is, then, roughly speaking, the boundary between the “is” and “is not” of the thing. But then the dissolution of this boundary would mean, among other things, the joining of what is with what is not. And this is what Hegel means when he speaks of making the implicit into the explicit—what is is brought in where it previously was not. See PS 3,166ff.

23. Hegel rehabilitates the poets by finding that “art is the middle term” between “pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous and transient” (AE 8,163). And Hegel means by this that such thought should be presented in art “not in its universality as such” but in a form which has been “sensuously particularized” (AE 51). This means that individual works of art cannot represent concepts like “Justice” or “Love” or “Man” in the abstract but must show them through individual examples. This is the meeting of universal and particular. To simply take reality as it is found would be to leave the individual untouched by the ideal. If a portrait is too accurate, Hegel thinks, it will be “disgustingly like” (AE 43). But the ideal cannot be directly represented. So, for example, Raphael's Madonnas (one of Hegel's favorite examples), “show us forms of expression, cheeks, eyes, nose, mouth, which, as forms, are appropriate to the radiance, joy, piety, and also the humility of a mother's love” (AE 156). A representation of an individual here communicates a universal idea (c.f. AE 38,70,223,227). Hegel also uses the language of the middle term to describe history as well. For each of the cultures that Hegel describes in his history is also a shape that mediates between the ideal realm and the particular. Thus, the middle term can also be “the system of structured shapes assumed by consciousness as a self-systematizing whole of the life of Spirit... which has its objective existence as world-history” (PS 295). Indeed, following the account of actuality above, it is more toward history than toward art that we would expect the account of the “middle term” to lead. The parallel between the two becomes more pronounced when considered through this lens of Hegel's logic. Beauty, in fact, makes its appearance through the logic. It is the quality which characterizes that middle term which performs its mediating function well. “[I]t is precisely the unity of the Concept with the individual appearance which is the essence of the beautiful” (AE 101; c.f. 22). As such, it is the perfect category with which to evaluate the products of labor known as the actual. The “middle term” is thus the minor premise in the three-line syllogism which is the foundation of Hegel's logic.

24. The only heroes clearly mentioned are Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and (though it's rarely noted), the Persian Emperor Cyrus (PH 187). None of these stand between epochs but rather at the center of them. They do not see the future, they merely see the present more clearly than their contemporaries; indeed, they embody that present. This even applies to Cyrus who, in the perfection of his despotism, is said to typify the Oriental stage.

25. The battle that freed Greece from the threat of domination by the Persian Empire.

26. Lest anyone suffer under the illusion that the Sphinx is itself a sculpture, Hegel assures us that it has “a completely architectural character” (AE 644). He allows at other points that it may represent a transition between architecture and sculpture, but that, of course, dovetails neatly with its position in the story here.

27. Not to mention the fact that Hegel has to twist the pattern of history in order to make it fit his scheme. Despite the fact that the Egypt of the Pharaohs existed half a millennium earlier, Hegel places it within his section on the Persian empire. The excuse for this is that, much later, Egypt was occupied by the Persians, but the real reason is that Hegel needs Egypt and the Sphinx to represent the “oriental” spirit that was overcome by the Greeks in their defeat of the Persians. It's all rather arbitrary (IPH 200–1). “The inward or ideal transition, from Egypt to Greece is as just exhibited. But Egypt became a province of the great Persian kingdom, and the historical transition takes place when the Persian world comes into contact with the Greek” (PH 221). This distinction between “ideal” and “historical” transitions occurs nowhere else in Hegel that I am aware of.

28. To the reply that the selection is not arbitrary but paradigmatic (as Hegel no doubt believed) the response can only be that the text does not make their paradigmatic status compelling. Hegel does not really discuss, for example, why Shakespeare's characters are more perfectly modern than those of Moliere, or for that matter, of DaVinci or ElGreco. He merely repeatedly asserts the centrality of the former.

29. Among his favorites are the Elgin marbles and a bust of Zeus attributed to Phidias. But since, as with the Pyramids, he considered the sculpture as a product of an entire culture, individual authorship is not important to him.

30. What I have in mind here are both the state of the Romantic stage, and the Temple of Mnemosyne as a whole. Both are discussed below.

31. Hegel maintains that this is so because sculpture represents the human shape best of all art (though not perfectly). Architecture and paintings or poetry, though they represent something about humanity fairly well, do not mimic the human form, nor the idea of humanity relevant to that stage of history, as exactly. See below for a discussion of “the Romantic arts.”

32. This is Nietzsche's phrase. To him, it was a compliment.

33. Of course, Jesus is the real Oedipus figure here. Where Oedipus proclaimed the age of “man,” Hegel calls Jesus “man as man,” that is, man-whois-aware-of-himself-as-man (PH 328).

34. R. G. Collingwood (and others) have tried to excuse Hegel's lack of future on the grounds that, in Hegel's view, the future could not be examined “philosophically” in the way the past could be, because it had not yet occurred (The Idea of History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956], p. 113ff.Google Scholar). But Collingwood does not come to grips with the way Hegel declares history complete in the present. Hegel does not merely plead that he cannot go further—he says there is nowhere else to go.

35. For this reason, it seems to me that when, for example, Hegel says that America is “the land of the future,” he does not mean that he expects that a new form of man or of government will appear there, but rather that (the final form having worked itself out in Europe) the activity of the future will be its working itself out in America. But this does not really involve any addition to “history”; it is merely the geographic spread of the final historical moment. The “congregation,” as it were, will get larger; but it will not change in character.

36. Here Hegel is playing on the contrast between the words fahl (“pale”) and frisch which means “fresh” but also “ruddy” or “healthy” of face.