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Hegel, Utopia, and the Philosophy of History
Mario Wenning
An engagement with utopian forms of consciousness is in the background of Hegel’s thinking. It influences his reception of the French Revolution, his critique of the Revolution's continuation in German Romanticism, as well as his project of reconciliation (Versöhnung) with the present. Hegel specifically criticizes forms of utopian consciousness in the Philosophy of Right and throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit.[1]Yet, there is a marked ambivalence in Hegel's relationship to utopian reason. By "utopian reason" I mean reason's ability to transcend anything merely given with an eye to itsperfectibility.His relationship is ambivalent because it marks both an appropriation and a critique.It is these conflicting dimensions I hope to disentangle.Hegel criticizes forms of utopian longing as attempts to escape reality, while at the same time incorporating what can be called a "utopian impulse." This impulse is revealed in his conception of spirit as essentially dynamic. By incorporating anti-utopian insights into a philosophy that clearly borrows from the utopian tradition, Hegel sets up a yardstick for any sophisticated self-reflective post-Hegelian form of utopian thinking and normative theory more generally.
On the one hand Hegel is dismissive of utopian consciousness and unmasks it as rooted in an insatiable desire for a beyond, which, as a form of infinite approximation to adistant postulate, can never reach any form of satisfaction in the present. Utopian consciousness is an expression of the all too solitary law of the heart, a vacuous longing, which tries to escape the very reality it nevertheless remains a part of, and thereby espousing an "atheism of the ethical world." If followed through, it leads to fanatic forms of consciousness and totalitarian practices, revealed by the fury of destruction following the French Revolution. The critique of the present from the vantage point of utopian projections in the form of abstract normative ideals or inexpressible feelings has not yet surpassed the stage of Moralitätand inwardness to that of modern Sittlichkeit. Such a critique longs for a paradisical state outside history. As an unbounded subjective imagination it continues to dream the dream of a constantly deferred fresh beginning. Because this beginning never truly begins, it remains an unhappy consciousness, which is incapable of overcoming the forms of alienation(Entzweiung) that characterize modern life and philosophy, be it in the form of mind vs. body (Descartes), transcendental vs. empirical self (Kant), citizen vs. private person (Marx) and so on.[2] Utopian thought is divided between a - usually miserable - here and a superior beyond. Being thus divided it fails to acknowledge the substantive reality of which it nevertheless remains a part. It misunderstands philosophy's role by conceiving of it as having access to a normative realm that has no manifestation in reality. The capriciousness of the utopian eagle at daybreak is thus famously dismissed by Hegel in favour of the wisdom of the owl at dusk.
However, there is also a different side to Hegel. He cannot be understood, I want to argue, without acknowledging a utopian impulse that is at work in his thinking. If we take his authorship to be authentic, already in the "Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism" he calls for the inauguration of a "sensuous religion" of the imagination, a "mythology of reason," for the sake of "exposing the whole miserable human business of state, constitution, government and legislation." This, the programmatic fragment concludes, "will be the last, greatest task of humanity."[3] His engagement with the watershed event of the French Revolution and the demand for a new unity and the emancipation to true, as opposed to merely abstract, forms of freedom are representative of a normative commitment to a not yet (at least not yet fully) realized utopian potential, a form of transcendence that is not of a different world, but reveals itself immanently in this one. Hegel attempts to reveal normative potentials for reconciling the opposing forces of the right of subjectivity and objective spirit:only when our demand for justification and the normativity, which is sedimented in the content of specifically modern socio-historical institutions and practices, can be reconciled can modernity survive.Showing in what sense Hegel is a utopian thinker (and in what sense he is not) brings to light an aspect of his thought, which to my knowledge has not been adequately emphasized.[4] The utopian dimension of Hegel's thought that will emerge consists in a commitment to what I call a genealogy of rational tendencies aiming at reconciliation. Utopia is thus not thought of in terms of some a-historical thought example as in Thomas More's classic or Plato's Republic. Neither is it a rational procedure to determine normative contents as in Habermas's ideal speech situation, or Rawls's original position. It is also not to be confused with the stipulation of a natural state of bliss as in Rousseau or as an imagined future indicative of most modern utopian discourse (e.g. Marx's communist society, Nietzsche's Übermenschetc.). Rather a utopian impulse is at work in Hegel's conception ofthe specific normativity of modernity, Neuzeit, which he characterizes as "a time of birth and transition to a new era," in which"Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence and imagination, and is about to submerge it into the past. It is working on its own transformation."[5]
I. The Normative Problem raised by the French Revolution
Hegel's engagement with utopian reason needs to be understood as emerging out of his reception of the French Revolution. This event initially seemed to be the realization of utopia. By way of trying to institute universal and equal rights it promised the realization of the essential ideals and aspirations of Enlightenment reason. In principle everybody from now on could appeal to be recognized and treated as a free and equal person with a sense of human dignity. What the course of the revolutionary events also revealed was the failure of realizing these universal aspirations through a radical overthrow. For the contemporaries it revealed the inherent impossibility of every revolution to come. The post-revolutionary time-consciousness radically changed through the revolutionary experience in that the belief in inevitable progress, which had replaced the medieval belief in a recurring history, was again shaken in its foundation. The revolution devoured its children (strikingly depicted in Büchner's Danton's Death) and reverted to the very acts of violence it had before criticized. To alter the metaphor, the institution of universal norms had devoured the particular content of what they were initially designed for: the claims, passions, and interests of particular individuals. The Revolution did thus not only result in political despair but posed a troubling normative problem. On the one hand it was necessary, but on the other hand it showed itself to be impossible. Joachim Ritter's now classic article "Hegel and the French Revolution"[6] emphasizes this Janus-faced character and its consequences for Hegel’s thinking. Ritter shows that despite Hegel's criticism of its excesses he remained a defender of the revolution and is said to have celebrated the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille every year. The revolution brought the history of the reign of particular interests to an end and started a new history in the name of universal human rights and freedom. Yet, Hegel observed that by way of denying the historical substance (which it relied on at least by contrasting itself to it as a prehistory to be ended), the revolution lacked the normative resources to be recognized and recognize itself as authoritative. Continuity could not be born out of an event, which understood itself to be utterly discontinuous. Hegel thought the only way possible to overcome this dilemma would be by way of legitimating the historical rupture that the revolution embodied by providing it with a prehistory. Doing so he hoped to reconcile the revolutionary aspirations with the historical substance necessary to legitimize and stabilize the claims set up by the revolution to prevent its relapse to forms of pre-revolutionary absolutism, arbitrariness, and violence. The normative problem of instituting universal rights thus necessitates a turn to the philosophy of history.
I will not address Hegel’s genealogical Bildungsroman of the emergence of universal norms, in particular freedom, from its "Oriental" childhood through its Greek and Roman youth, continuing in its Christian maturity and finally culminating in the French Revolution. Instead, the focus is on the methodological idea of a historical genealogy and its guiding normative ideal of reconciling the revolutionary prehistory with its revolutionary present to secure for the realization of its potential.[7]
The philosophical historiography to fulfil this task is based on the "simple thought of reason" (einfacher Gedanke der Vernunft) according to which "reason guides the world and hence that world history has as well proceeded reasonably."[8] It is the thought of reason in the double sense of being a thought of reason and also a thought reflecting on reason as it is manifested in history. The presupposition of reason is the constitutive principle of investigating world history. Although philosophical historiography presupposes the assumption or thought of the existence of reason without truly justifying its validity, the efficacy and thus "correctness" (Richtigkeit) of this assumption is redeemed by way of the performative success of such a form of historiography: "who looks at the world with reason is in turn also looked at with reason, both are reciprocal determinations,"[9] Hegel writes.
The speculative idea that reason guides history sounds at least awkward, if not downright apologetic. To make it intelligible it is necessary to first dismiss the misunderstanding according to which reason is some form of author of history in the sense of actually ruling history according to trans-historical intentions. To assume that there is reason in history is not an ontological statement about the fabric of history, nor does it presuppose a magnificent mind which operates "behind the backs" of historical events. Drawing on Anaxagoras who is accredited to first have conceived of the necessity to assume reason in history, Hegel distinguishes the guiding idea of reason from the assumption that a "self conscious reason" or a "spirit as such" governs the world. Reason, rather than mere contingency, becomes manifest in the world through the unfolding of historical or natural events without the necessity of a conscious subject steering and understanding this development, just as the solar movements are rule-governed without the necessity of self-conscious stars and planets.
Every historical investigation "brings its categories"[10] to the table. In the ThirdCritique Kant shows that we necessarily apply regulative ideals to our investigation of nature in order to understand organic life as more than dead matter adhering to the laws of mechanical causation. The necessity to adopt a regulative idea, Hegel argues, extends to the philosophical investigation of history as well. To investigate history cannot mean to passively record information concerning past events. The goal is rather to concretely trace the manifestation of reason in the world.[11]
The presupposition of reason in history is initially a heuristic assumption. Contrary to an abstract faith in religious providence (Vorsehung), which remains empty because it does not concretely uncover reason in apparent disorder or the simplistic equation of reason and history, critical philosophical historiography reinterprets the religious belief concerning the revelation of divinity in concrete ways. It steers its path between the Scylla of a superficial faith in divine providence governing the course of the world and the Charybdis of taking reason to be merely otherworldly. The expressed goal is to present a "concrete theodicy" in order to "reconcile thinking spirit with evil."[12] History is designated as the most important and most difficult domain to achieve this project. Most important because it is the essential part of the overall attempt of providing the resources for reconciling the pre-revolutionary past with the revolutionary present, our demands for justification with the historically situated (and thus historically justifiable) institutions of Sittlichkeit. It is the most difficult task, because history appears to be anything but reasonable or open to reconciliation. "This reconciliation," Hegel contends, "can only be achieved through an understanding of the affirmative in which the negative vanishes to the level of something subordinated and overcome."[13]
Contrary to a common legend of Hegel, however, he does not dismiss or even ignore the horrors of history. Reconciliation is a critical task in that it becomes effective only through a concrete understanding of the unfolding of reason in rational tendencies. Measured against these tendencies, certain negative characteristics, injustices, dissatisfactions and sufferings first appear as unnecessary and thus objectionable. In order to achieve such a critical understanding, we first have to understand what is meant by "reason." In order to understand what reason in history is, Hegel claims, we necessarily have to answer the question of what is the "absolute aim of the world" (der Endzweck der Welt). This step is necessary in order to be able to contrast and place different historical events and tendencies into a common history, to distinguish rational from irrational tendencies rather than treating everything as a matter of mere contingency. In contemporary terms we need to reveal the normative basis of such a critical philosophy of history. This normative basis has to be shown to be somehow manifest rather than a mere imposition to its object. Only then does it become clear that it is not just the case that every "ought" must be translatable into a "can" but, more importantly, that every "ought" is to a certain extent already existing in tendencies and is thus logically connected to an "is," which then translates into further "oughts." The "final end" is thus not realized, verwirklicht, at the end of a historical development. It is more appropriate to translate Verwirklichung (sometimes Hegel also uses the term Vollführung) as "becoming effective" rather than "realization" and translate Endzweck as "absolute aim" rather than "final end" to emphasize the dynamic character implied by Hegel’s idiosyncratic reinterpretation of the idea of providence. The absolute aim is not a static entity outside or at the end of history, but the becoming-effective of freedom in history. Contrary to signalling a quasi-eschatological end to history as the utopian tradition has done, Hegel interprets the idea of providence as the inner-worldy becoming effective and unfolding of stages of the "development in the consciousness of freedom," the ability to say yes and no to whatever is given based on self-reflective reasoning and evaluation.
While the pre-revolutionary thinkers Lessing and Kant believed that the education of humankind or the progress to eternal peace would take thousands, if not indefinitely many years, the post-revolutionary Hegel believed that there has been sufficient normative achievement. Then the task is to trace the emergence of freedom and its manifestation in different constitutions, philosophical systems, and practices and use these normative achievements as yardsticks. These yardsticks are not derived from abstract claims but from historically specific and effective tendencies from which it is no longer possible or at least not desirable to retreat.[14] That the Endzweck is not a final but an absolute aim that guides the philosophical investigation of history is supported by the claim that in some sense it was present all along, if only latently. However, only when the manifestation or actualization of reason’s becoming self-conscious by way of historical actors increasingly understanding themselves as free is "the absolute aim" manifesting itself. In this sense "world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom."[15]
The secularization of the idea of providence by Hegel also means that it is no longer justified for serious scientific investigation (Wissenschaft) to make predictions or even educated guesses about the future. Although the strong normative content of strong evaluative terms such as "freedom," "equality," "right," or "the idea of the state" bear a utopian excess in that they never find full realization in any specific historical tokens, this content is never detached from forms of historical manifestation and potentials of realization. In those few passages where Hegel oversteps the limits he erects for himself by making predictions, which anticipated among other things the rise of Russia and the conflict between North and South America, usually are qualified by statements that really (eigentlich) prediction is not the business of the serious philosophical scientist who has to stay agnostic with regard to potential future developments of spirit. The only access to the normative potential the future holds is through an investigation of progressivetendencies we find in history and the present.
This agnosticism with regard to the future does not get acknowledged when Hegel’s concept of the necessary development of reason is criticized as an overflow of panlogism. All that the term "necessary" means is that it is possible to trace the development of stages of cultural development post factum. It is premised on the assumption that a "universal" narrative, which situates the present in a historical development, can be constructed retrospectively. Just as the first measure of a symphony does not allow the prediction of what is to follow, we speak with good reasons about a "necessary" progression of chords and a necessary development of motifs when analyzing music. We might form expectations with regard to the continuing "progression" of the melody, but we also know from (at least good) music that its "success" consists precisely in often "disappointing" set expectations. Effective experiences of music open ourselves up to new possibilities without putting us into a position of being able to predict in advance how they will play out. Similarly normative theory understood as a critical genealogy of rational tendencies traces the emergence of norms and values such as freedom, justice, and solidarity in their different historical shapes and treats them at the same time not as fully given or realized, but as essentially incomplete.
Let us return to the question of the way in which Hegel connects the idea of a philosophical historiography with his critique of utopian thinking. The infamous proposition from the preface to the Philosophy of Right "what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational"[16] (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig)perhaps best expresses Hegel’s ambiguous stand with regard to utopia. It comes with no surprise that Hegel’s immediate successors have regarded the first part of the proposition as expressing the need of reason to be manifest, of reason to become actual, as much as the second part sounds apologetic in assigning to actuality the status of exhibiting reason.