Introduction
My aim in this chapter will be threefold: a) to give a more elaborate synopsis of Hegel‘s claims on the nature of history and a similar more elaborate analysis of the Kierkegaardian concept of history drawing on my conclusions from the previous three chapters, b) to argue in favour of a synthesis of their points of view rather than view them only as direct philosophical opponents or treating their philosophies on history as totally and utterly incompatible, and c) to explain and analyse the reasons that make me believe that all the past positions regarding their relations are either partly or totally flawed.
While I have focused in my previous chapters on Hegel‘s philosophy of history (chapter one) and on Kierkegaard‘s concept of history (chapters two and three), I intend in this chapter to deepen and enrich my analysis of both of them by a) presenting further argumentation in regard with their approach to history and the historical and b) by comparing their views on history.122
122
The reason why new material is presented here on their approaches to history when I have already analysed their views in previous chapters is a practical one: the need to structure my thesis in a way that would allow me to proceed in my analysis step by step. My first steps were to present as clear and as precise as possible Hegel‘s and Kierkegaard‘s approaches to history. Now that I intend to compare Hegel‘s approach to Kierkegaard‘s approach I have to complete my analysis by giving the fullest possible picture of their views. (This is quite similar to a composition of a musical piece. We can start by giving first the two basic melodies and then, while we bring (and mix) together these melodies, we present some fresh nuances of these melodies with the specific purpose of pointing out their full musicality.)
As the title of this chapter indicates, I will not simply try to compare their views to each other. I will proceed rather at a synthesis of their approaches. I will argue that this synthesis can give us a better understanding of their views on history while at the same time it can provide us with a deeper and fuller grasp of the nature of history and the historical.
The most usual views on the relations between Hegel and Kierkegaard consider their philosophies as either directly opposite to each other or as incompatible. Niels Thulstrup in his Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel is the main adherent of the first view and Jon Stewart in his Kierkegaard’s Relations
to Hegel Reconsidered of the latter view.
I will analyse their theories regarding the relation between Hegel and Kierkegaard and I will argue that both of these views fail to fully capture the complex relations of Hegel and Kierkegaard.123
I will conclude this chapter by giving two specific quotations from Hegel and Kierkegaard. I will do so because in these quotations both Hegel and Kierkegaard reveal to us their ambivalent and ambiguous relation to philosophy and faith.
I will start by giving a (deeper and richer) synopsis of Hegel‘s philosophy of history. I will continue by giving a (deeper and richer) synopsis of Kierkegaard‘s approach to history. I will go on first to a comparison of their views and then to a synthesis of their approaches. I will then proceed to examine Thulstrup‘s and Stewart‘s view on the relations between Hegel and Kierkegaard, and I will also examine similar approaches.
123My comparison however will stay only in Hegel‘s and Kierkegaard‘s approaches to history
and the historical while both Thulstrup and Stewart examine Hegel‘s and Kierkegaard‘s overall philosophical views.
A quotation from Hegel‘s Early Theological Writings and one quotation from Kierkegaard‘s Prefaces will conclude my chapter by giving us a clear example of why we cannot view either Hegel or Kierkegaard as absolutely ‗one- dimensional‘ thinkers, devoted either to pure speculation or to absolute faith.
Hegelian claims on history
In the first chapter Hegel‘s philosophy of history was synoptically examined. It was argued there that we can detect two main Hegelian claims about history: a) a metaphysical claim that in history we can find in work reason‘s necessity and b) an epistemological claim that we can fully understand and know our past history.
Reason
Reason‘s nature was defined as a holistic and purposeful activity of the spirit. The nature of the spirit was depicted as an equivalent to the nature of ‗God‘; it was further stated however, that this ‗spirit‘ exists within history in both nature and human beings. In this way Hegel appears to put ‗God‘ within this spatio- temporal world of ours. Reason refers directly to an activity that has as its purpose to enable universal spirit to understand fully its nature through history.124
Reason‘s necessity is something different from logical necessity. Hegelian necessity refers directly to the (necessary) actualisation of universal spirit‘s self-understanding. Hegel also declares that this actualisation can lead history
124Hegel‘s ‗Reason‘ is not a static logical activity. As Arthur Berndtson argues: ‗…reason for
Hegel is not fixed and detached; it is an immanent process, which creates the logic, nature and mind.‘ Arthur Berndtson, ‗Hegel, Reason and Reality‘, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 20, No. 1) Sep., 1959), p.44.
My disagreement with Berndtson however is that Hegel‘s Reason in the way Berndston describes it is so general and abstract that it ends being vague. In my view Reason in Hegel is above everything else a teleological (purposeful) activity of the Spirit.
to one and only one (and thus necessary) conclusion: that all human beings are free.125
Reason thus is par excellence a historical activity which operates within spatio-temporal actuality. Hegel distinguishes understanding (Verstand) from his logic which he calls reason (Vernunft). He further states that we, human beings, can fully know and understand the nature of our history. He grounds this statement in the historical fact of the Incarnation. History then becomes for Hegel the only actual field for his reason. Hegel even more, is interested in thoroughly examining our past history with the philosophical certainty that he can detect and prove reason‘s necessity.126
Hegel‘s metaphysical claim has as its direct philosophical implication the claim that reason, and not human beings, is the ultimate historical agent. Hegel furthermore argues that single human beings cannot really create history. History can be made only by structured communities which can objectify human passions by transcending their individual parts‘ will into objective state laws.127
125Reason then must fulfill this historical task: to direct human communities into a specific
political state that will provide the necessary conditions for the members of these communities to become free. Hegel‘s PR shows emphatically Hegel‘s view on how people can be ‗free‘ and what the exact meaning of their ‗freedom‘ is. As J. A. Leighton states: ‗Freedom is the Idea of Spirit… All the struggles of nations and individuals are stepping-stones by which men rise to freedom. J.A. Leighton, ‗Hegel‘s Conception of God‘, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 5, No. 6 (Nov., 1896), p.611.
Leighton however cannot point out the exact Hegelian use of the word ‗freedom‘. He gives to Hegel‘s freedom a metaphysical dimension which does not accord with Hegel‘s political use of freedom. Hegel in PR again is quite clear about the specific context and the specific meaning of this freedom.
126As Gareth Stedman Jones argues, in Hegel‘s thought: ‗God and the processes of the world
were merged in human history in ascending stages of relation and recognition, until Spirit came to see that reason and reality were identical. The Christian story was thus seen as a symbolic enactment of this process of recognition and merging.‘ Gareth Stedman Jones, ‗Faith in History‘, History Workshop, No. 30 (Autumn, 1990), p. 64.
I disagree with Jones however in that I argue that Hegel uses the Incarnation as the very basis of his philosophy of history.
127
Hegel believes that, if we try to view history purely as an activity of single human beings, we will eventually end in a totally chaotic and meaningless historical universe. Social and ethical institutions and mainly organised states can guarantee us (in Hegel‘s view) the
Knowledge of the past
Hegel‘s epistemological claim has as its direct philosophical implication the claim that we, human beings, should focus our interest upon the knowledge and the understanding of our historical past, because only in this way can we fully comprehend the nature of our history.
The teaching of the concept, which is also history‘s inescapable lesson, is that only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm…The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.128
Hegel here clearly states that: a) the ideal (spirit in the form of human mind) can apprehend the real world (the world of historical existence) and b) this apprehension can refer only to an understanding of what has already past. Hegel thus considers history only as the past which can be apprehended through human mind. In this way, Hegel can be viewed as a proponent of history which is mainly an object of our epistemological concern. History is for human beings only a past that we can know and understand.
Order and meaning in history
Hegel tries to establish an order within historical process. He claims that if we take history to consist only of human actions and individual desires we will find
necessary ‗objectivity‘. S. W. Dyde in ‗Hegel‘s Conception of Freedom‘, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 3, No. 6, (Nov., 1894), p. 664 and Donald J. Maletz in ‗History in Hegel‘s Philosophy of Right‘, The Review of Politics, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Apr., 1983), p. 222, point out the historical primacy of states and nations over single human beings. Both of them however fail to explicitly underline Hegel‘s absolute disregard of the historical importance of single human beings.
128Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
ourselves lost in the abyss of fortuity. Hegel takes individual‘s historical actions to be without consistency. Hegel however cannot take historical contingency to be the real nature of history. He wants two things: a) to find coherence and purposeful agency within history and b) to claim that human beings can totally apprehend this historical coherence.
‗… [W]e have to discover the causes and reasons behind the events.‘ (IPH,
25). ‗… [W]orld history is a rational process.‘ (IPH, 27).
In history, we must look for a general design, the ultimate end of the world, and not a particular end of the subjective spirit or mind; and we must comprehend it by means of reason, which cannot concern itself with particular and finite ends, but only with the absolute…That world history is governed by an ultimate design, that it is a rational process—whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason…Reason is self-sufficient and contains its end within itself; it brings itself into existence and carries itself into effect. (IPH, 28).
If we have to find reason within history we have to be able to find something stable and necessary within historical process, which is impossible if we continue understanding history as something utterly contingent: ‗Everywhere we see a motley confusion which draws us into its interests, and when one thing disappears, another at once takes its place.‘ (IPH, 32).
God’s providence
But how can we prove that in the heart of history lie necessity, purpose and coherence? We can do it only if we believe that God‘s providence is the ultimate agent in history.
The concrete events are the ways of providence, the means it uses, the phenomena in which it manifests itself in history; they are open to our inspection, and we only have to relate them to the general principle referred to above. (IPH, 36).
But we cannot really be sure that this ‗providence‘ can be apprehended by human (and thus finite) beings. In any case God can work in mysterious ways. Hegel then cannot secure the ‗government‘ of reason in history. He has then to take his argumentation even further; he has to claim that God‘s providence: a) is always at work within history without confining itself only in sporadic appearances (miracles); and b) that God works in ways that can be reached by human minds.
If God is placed beyond the reach of our rational consciousness, we are no longer obliged to trouble ourselves about his nature, or indeed to look for reason in world history; the way is then open for any arbitrary hypotheses. (IPH, 37).
In this way, Hegel can continue to argue about the existence of reason within history only if he bases his arguments on two (absolutely) necessary preconditions: a) God‘s providence exists and it is always at work within historical process and b) human beings can rationally know this. ‗When God reveals himself to man, he reveals himself essentially through man‘s rational faculties;‘ (IPH, 39). Hegel argues that Christianity gave us the possibility to be sure about both of his above mentioned preconditions:
Christianity is the religion which has revealed the nature and being of God to man. Thus we know as Christians that God is; God is no longer an unknown quantity: and if we continue to say that he is,
we are not Christians. Christianity demands that humility to which we have already referred, a humility which makes us seek to know God not through our own unaided efforts but with the help of divine knowledge and wisdom. Christians, then, are initiated into the mysteries of God, and this also supplies us with the key to world history. For we have a definite knowledge of providence and its plan. It is one of the central doctrines of Christianity that providence has ruled and continues to rule the world, and that everything which happens in the world is determined by and commensurate with the divine government. (IPH, 41).
Hegel cannot claim that we can have a ‗definite knowledge‘ of history without first taking as an absolute secure fact the existence of God‘s providence. This ‗supplies us with the key to world history.‘
Incarnation and history
Christianity cannot exist without the historical fact of Jesus as the God who lived among us, as the God who lived within history. Incarnation thus becomes the corner-stone of Hegel‘s argumentation on the nature of history. Even Hegel‘s notorious statement that: ‗What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.‘ (PR, 10), is explained by Knox in this way:
Hegel‘s philosophy as a whole might be regarded as an attempt to justify his identification of rationality with actuality and vice versa, but his doctrine depends ultimately on his faith in God‘s Providence, his conviction that history is the working out of His rational purpose. That purpose, as the purpose of the Almighty, is not so impotent as to remain a mere ideal or aspiration, and
conversely, what is genuinely actual or effective in the world is simply the working of that purpose.‘ (PR, 302).
In my first chapter I argued that Hegel‘s view on the hidden necessity of history is based on his interpretation of Incarnation. His argument is based on his belief that Incarnation is a historical fact that has brought God within temporality. From there Hegel goes on arguing that we (human beings) can understand this historical fact precisely because it is something that occurred within temporality. The natural outcome of my interpretation is that Hegel here makes two specific claims: a) a metaphysical one that there is a necessity within the progress of history and b) an epistemological claim that we can know this necessity.129
Hegel‘s metaphysical claim first brings God within our spatio-temporal world, and then makes God fully accessible through reason. His epistemological claim is wholly based on his metaphysical claim. If there is a hidden necessity of reason (God‘s Providence) within historical progress, then human beings (because they participate in Spirit) can and should know this necessity. But they can know it only if the historical fact has already occurred. We can have knowledge only of our historical past, not of our historical present or of our historical future. As Hegel underlines in PS: ‗But recollection, the inwardizing,
of that experience, has preserved it…‘ (PS, 492).
129As Richard Kroner states it in his introduction to Hegel‘s
Early Theological Writings: It is true that Hegel believed in the historical process as divinely ordained…History is shaped by Providence, and Providence is Reason and can therefore be understood by the
speculative dialectic of the philosopher. From this conviction a certain quietism resulted, satisfaction with actual conditions, and submissiveness to the universal will—not of the state but of the world…Not party politics nor class prejudice, but metaphysical fervor determines his views. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, translated by T. M. Knox, with an
Introduction, and Fragments translated by Richard Kroner, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 65.
I disagree however with Kroner in that I argue that Hegel‘s arguments about the Incarnation are not ‗metaphysical‘ but historical. For Hegel, the Incarnation is a historical event that ontologically grounds humans‘ capacity to know their past history.
This ‗recollection‘ is nothing but the knowledge of the past. This ‗inwardizing‘ is nothing but human capacity to fully know, understand and explain this historical past. ‗The teaching of the concept…is also history‘s inescapable lesson…‘ (PR, 13). History‘s ‗inescapability‘ is also history‘s ‗necessity‘ and
this necessity can and should be apprehended by human beings.
Hegelian freedom and necessity
History cannot be the field of a ‗blind destiny‘.130 Mind is ‗reason‘, reason also
governs history, so world history is the ‗necessary development‘ of mind‘s (and thus of reason‘s) freedom:
Further, world history is not the verdict of mere might, i.e. the abstract and non-rational inevitability of a blind destiny. On the contrary, since mind is implicitly and actually reason, and reason is explicit to itself in mind as knowledge, world history is the necessary development, out of the concept of mind's freedom alone, of the moments of reason and so of the self-consciousness