I wish to
make some comments on History as a subject of philosophical
reflection – an object of inquiry – first
in Hegel, then in Heidegger, and finally in Jaspers.
By comments I mean observations, not analyses, though
I will also make a few recommendations along the
way regarding the notion of History (and its future)
as a fit topic for pursuit in what will turn out
to be our particular time.(1)
Two claims might be said to dominate
Hegel's view of the relation of philosophy to History,
and we have heard them stated often enough: first,
that philosophy is the child of its time; second,
that philosophy is its time comprehended in thought.
That philosophy is the child
of its time tells us, of course, that philosophy
arises out of and is bounded by historically definable
time periods, what we might call eras. Philosophy
lives within these eras. They define philosophy and
through them philosophy receives its nourishment
and lives its life. In different time periods, it
would follow, philosophy will not only live differently,
but might be something different with respect to
its goals and methods. The notion of philosophy as
a timeless, unchanging or perennial activity must,
thus, lose all but edifying force.
Stepping back for a moment from
Hegel himself – who surely would have been
most uncomfortable with the implications I have so
far drawn from one of his own remarks – let
us consider. Times do change. One era is in fact
succeeded by another, though confirmation of this
occurrence, even an initial judgment that it has
actually happened, usually comes only retrospectively.
But there is a genuine and even today an abiding
mystery surrounding this circumstance. The underlying
movement of time relevant to the transition from
one era to its successor can be measured only externally
by the ticking of the clock or by the flipping of
the calendar. Historical time periods do rise and
fall, come into being and pass away for timely reasons,
but their temporally measurable durations, the durations
of the temporal punctuations between them, and the
proverbial Newtonian time line on which these various
durations are placed, are external to the timeliness
of differing eras and external, also, to the timing
and the nature of the time involved in the transition
from one era to another.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel tells us, following such figures as the brothers
Schlegel and Novalis, "that time ripens slowly
in hidden places." In terms of our normal sense
of time this statement is at best poetic and at worst
silly. But if we think of "time ripening" as "time
periods" (eras or epochs) gestating and then
emerging, declining and then disappearing, we can
make much sense of Hegel's remark. We are usually
well into an age – another term for era or
time period – before we recognize it for what
it is. And though a new era does not hide from us,
it is often hidden from us by activities we engage
in which belong to an era that, usually we say in
retrospect, was soon passing or had essentially already
passed.
What defines Hegel's particular
time for Hegel? The best answer is probably The French
Revolution. For Hegel it had a specific meaning which
he discusses in that section of The Phenomenology
of Spirit entitled "Freedom and Terror." The
main issue is the relation of social, political and
cultural institutions to the needs and legitimate
interests of human beings. Are those needs and interests
being met? If not, might they come to be met through
reform? If not, then revolutionary action is required.
Why? Because humans are meant to be free, and freedom
does not mean being left alone and uninterfered with,
thus allowed to do what you want. This is a notion
of freedom that through Isaiah Berlin is popularly
known as the negative conception of liberty. As we
know, this notion has woven its way through the works
of such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, Constant and Mill,
and forms a significant portion of the fabric of
any contractarian utopia. For Hegel, on the other
hand, and by contrast, freedom means finding your
interests and needs nurtured, reflected, recognized,
acknowledged, responded to and met in the various
institutions that form the milieu in which your life
is led.
The meaning of the French Revolution – which
for Hegel defines his specific time – is thus
freedom itself, positively construed. Therefore,
the meaning of Hegel's very time is itself this same
freedom as just defined: a complementary congruence
between institutional realities and human interests
and needs, individual and social.
As we know, the Hegel of the
Phenomenology is concerned, always, to bring the
meaning of things, which Hegel often calls their
certainty, to their truth, i.e., to bring the purposes
of things to their conceptual completion and actual
fulfillment. So if the meaning of the French Revolution
is freedom, how is this freedom then achieved? In
one sense – and it must be carefully qualified – the
answer is that for Hegel positive freedom is brought
about in part through terror, at least terror is
involved. How so? What we are told in the "Freedom
and Terror" section of the Phenomenology is
that the destruction of an existing order may have
one of three outcomes: continuing chaos, a better
order or a worse order. At that agonizing and often
extended moment of uncertainty regarding the outcome
of an intended and accomplished institutional convulsion,
the honest and appropriate response to the existing
and transitional situation is terror, for the transition
itself as genuine transition is terrifying. Groundlessness
exists. There is no place to stand.
But in Hegel's retrospective
judgment, as we well know and which elicited Marx's
outrage, the transition worked out positively — perhaps
not altogether in France, but in Prussia, where the
purpose of the French Revolution, its "truth" could
have its gains, the achievement of positive freedom,
consolidated by non-revolutionary means. Hegel, thus,
saw his era as the era of freedom, positively defined,
and the purpose of philosophy as reconciliatory,
i.e., as showing how it was the case that various
forms of institutional reality on the one hand, social,
political, and cultural, and the needs and legitimate
interests of individuals on the other hand, coincided
and could be rationally comprehended as harmonized.
Often noted, and rightly I believe,
is that Hegel cheats in multiple ways. Since many
of these bear on senses of History that succeed Hegel's,
a few of them deserve mention. First, Hegel's time
periods, the eras of central concern to Hegel, are
essentially Western. The narrative that constitutes
their sequence works its way through Athens, Rome,
Jerusalem, and Florence to Prussia, albeit with various
useful detours and pit stops along the way. Second,
what first appeared to be somewhat separated, if
not separate time periods, turn out through a rationally
retrospective lens to give sequential rise to one
another, with each successor accumulating the essential
components of its predecessor. Assumed is that there
are essential components, that they unfold in an
historical sequence, and that they can be comprehensively
preserved, appreciated, and made institutionally
accessible in the present. Thus, though Hegel does
say, and is often so quoted, that philosophy is the
child of its time, he does not actually quite mean
it. Hegel only means it, if we accept the qualifying
claim, not so covert in Hegel, that Hegel's time
is comprehensive and consummatory.
If these – and a few other – assumptions
are granted, History, of course, has been completed.
Not only is it completed in the sense that all of
the essential components of previous time periods
have been accumulated into the present, but it is
completed in the sense of now being over. History
for Hegel is now over in that: (a) freedom in the
positive sense has been recognized and, if not fully
achieved, at least mapped in extensive outline and
catalogued with respect to its specifics within an
affirmative and reassuring categorical system. And
(b) all essential human possibilities have been made
institutionally and individually available in a co-respondent
and mutually reinforcing way. And (c) all that could
happen subsequently comes to be construed either
as a falling away from or a failure to achieve these
circumstances. "Falling away," presumably,
would be a nearly uniquely Prussian possibility,
whereas "failing to achieve" might occur
nearly anywhere else and certainly outside of Europe
for some time to come.
Note once more that on this account
philosophy, construed first as reconciliation of
thought with the world but then soon as the articulate
recognition that this reconciliation has already
taken place, becomes less the child of its time,
than the adult for all times. It becomes this adult
because all times get construed as living not just
in the past but, in their humanly essential components,
in the present, in Hegel's time.
Note still once more, for it
is critical to Hegel's account of History, that progress
is assumed, but that complete accumulation is claimed
as well. Perhaps the best single term for this sense
of History is History as Preservation. Clearly Hegel
saw this as one of his very major bequests to posterity,
a bequest first made possible through his historical
acquisition of those ideas which define the philosophical
West. For Hegel this acquisition had been made fully
and convincingly possible through the further and
extraordinarily happy circumstance that the full
sequence of relevant ideas had reached their completion
only, but also definitively in Hegel's own time.
Proof of their definitiveness could be found, Hegel
was in turn convinced, through Hegel's and then our
Hegelianly indebted capacity to comprehend these
ideas within and as a system. If anyone were to doubt
this strong strain in Hegel's philosophy of History,
they need only read the last page of his Phenomenology
of Spirit. Here he more or less states it, and through
making the claim guides us toward seeing the whole
of the Phenomenology of Spirit as the preface to
his subsequent philosophical writing.
The essential historical period
for Hegel, thus, is the present. But in another sense
History itself has now collapsed. It has collapsed
as something past, for what matters of the past is
now fully found in the present. And History has collapsed
as future as well, for the future is only possible
as the further discovery, recapitulation and/or recapture
of this present. What might be "future" can
only be further detail, latent in a present, Hegel's
present and ours, already essentially and comprehensively – though
not thereby exhaustively – articulated.
Hegel's celebration of History
is simultaneously its extinction and wake. All the
essential sounds of History are symphonized in the
present, Hegel's present. Moving "forward" in
calendar time, after Hegel, all that is possible
are re-soundings — perhaps themselves resounding.
Otherwise there can only be disharmony, atonality,
muted sound, possibly just noise, or silence.
I will return to the notion of
silence in a few moments, for, as I will soon suggest,
it is within that silence which is offered through
Hegel as an unattractive and therefore implausible
alternative to Hegel's own philosophy of History
that a deeply disharmonious and discordant, if nonetheless
poignant and even somewhat appealing Heidegger finally
comes to live.
But first a footnote to what
I have said regarding Hegel. Hegel not only said
that philosophy was the child of its time. He also
said that philosophy was its time comprehended in
thought. Hegel could not only say this, but also
believe that the project of comprehending his time
fully in thought was possible, because he unwaveringly – dialectical
machinations notwithstanding – distinguished
the essential from the accidental. It was this distinction
that not only drove his account of History, but gave
him the confidence to believe that he had comprehended
History, had comprehended History fully, and thus,
when all was said and done, had buried it with a
dramatic conceptual eulogy to console those for whom
its death would be experienced as a loss.
A moment ago I connected Heidegger
with silence. But there is much Heidegger, or should
I say many Heideggers, before this silence is reached.
Heidegger shares with Hegel – apparently an
occupational hazard for German philosophy professors – the
view that the history of philosophical ideas is the
driving engine of History itself. Unlike Hegel, however,
Heidegger understands the historical sequence of
philosophical ideas to demonstrate not progress but
decline, a conceptually accelerated, if also growingly
sophisticated falling away from a set of encounters
most extraordinary.
For purposes of brevity I am
going to recount this, in fact largely enduring dimension
of Heidegger's philosophy of History as a story.
Once upon a time there was an extraordinary sense
of wonder and amazement over the fact that things
were and how they were. There arose the emerging
and enduring, physis, out of which later came physics.
Intimately and unavoidably intertwined with physis
there simultaneously emerged a letting things be,
logos, out of which all too soon came reason, logic,
and eventually manipulation and technology.
Though it would not have been
within the very limited confines of Heidegger's even
more limited supply of generosity to admit such,
were it in fact the case, Heidegger's account of
the extraordinary advent of physis-logos is perfectly
compatible with and might have been influenced by
long conversations with Jaspers, in whom an account
of something called "the dawn of the axial age" had
been gestating. For Jaspers the axial age – explored
by Heidegger most explicitly and without attribution
in his Introduction to Metaphysics, circa 1935 – involved
the bifurcation of our human world into reality and
appearance, liberation and bondage, enlightenment
and confusion, light and darkness, and somewhat later,
eternity and time. At the dawn of the axial age human
life gradually unfolded, to those who sought to comprehend
it, as a journey: through appearance to reality,
from bondage to liberation, out of confusion to insight,
through darkness and toward the light.
It is not hard to understand
Heidegger – all reference to possible Jasperian
influence aside – as standing, or at least
through heroically intuitive re-appropriations of
pre-Socratic fragments, attempting to stand, at the
dawn of this axial age. If little else is certain,
something that is evident is that Heidegger not only
thought philosophy had begun in wonder, but that
the only hope for philosophy and, thus, for humanity
as philosophy's child, was that philosophy return
to that wonder which had spawned it and, possibly
simultaneously, had also spawned we humans in our
specific humanity.
Considerably indebted to a subtle,
though not thereby particularly controversial reading
of Nietzsche, Heidegger understood the rise of post-Socratic
Athenian philosophy as introducing or at least highlighting
and intensifying the time/eternity bifurcation in
axial thinking. The journey of human life not only
sought a way out of appearance, bondage, confusion,
and darkness, it also sought escape from time. The
goal of the journey was not just reality, liberation,
enlightenment and light. It was also eternity. In
Heidegger's account the early axial experience of
physis became transformed into the quest for what
lay behind physis, the metaphysical, something soon
identified with form or primary substance. For this
metaphysical pursuit to offer hope of success, logos,
which was first a focused and benignly concentrated "letting
things be," got transmuted into "reason," "dialectic," "logic," "episteme," and,
more generally, conceptual thought.
The result of this assault of
Greek metaphysical philosophy upon human axial history
was from Heidegger's point of departure catastrophic.
Once the enduring and abiding became the eternal
and unchanging, the goal of History – the quest
of the religions of the "Book" Platonized – became
the escape from History. It was acceptable for appearance
to belong to time, and thus History, but for time,
and thus History to belong to appearance, progressively
implied that time, and thus History, were just appearance.
Beyond them and intimately intertwined, it came to
be believed, were reality and eternity, a reality
that was eternity, and an eternity that, equally,
was the only true reality.
For Heidegger, thus, the task
is not to bring History to completion. Neither is
it to bring History to its end or help us find ways
to escape or transcend it. Pardoxically, the task
is to get us back into History. It is not that we
have ever actually left it, but the deep spiritual
therapy needed is to make unavoidable the understanding
that time and, thus, History are the only place we
can ever be. It is as if Heidegger were claiming
that "the fall of man" were not a fall
into time, but in fact a deeply deceptive quest or
possibly even deluded belief that we existed in our
essential being outside of time. If there was a fall,
on this Heideggerian account, the fall was from within
time toward a nonexistent domain outside of time.
Humanity has thereby lost any authentic History.
If much of religious thinking later in the axial
age involved delivering us from time and History,
Heidegger's thinking strove to return us to History,
to push our thinking back into that inescapable History
we had never left.
A moment ago I mentioned the
notion of authentic History. If philosophical History
has been for Heidegger the further fixating of a
misguided because a-historical purpose, the transcendence
of time and History, what then might an authentic
History look like?
An anti-enlightenment thinker
significantly indebted to romanticism and figures
such as Fichte and Herder, Heidegger understands
History to be the History of a people who are the
bearers of something spiritually significant. To
be such bearers becomes especially significant, even
desperately important, in the wake of the death of
God, Nietzsche's proclamation which on Heidegger's
reading is Nietzsche's accurate but for Nietzsche
himself not fully comprehended announcement that
the axial age had ended – however many decades
or even centuries might be required for this circumstance
to be fully absorbed?
Without an eternal and liberating
reality beyond appearances – in short, without
religion as traditionally and Platonically conceived – something
else must sustain human existence. And what might
this be? For Heidegger it appears to be a people.
It is a people not so much because they so choose
as because they are chosen, but because it is their
Geschick.
But who or what chooses them?
The Heidegger who is enduringly influenced by Nietzsche,
and at best benighted through arrogance and misunderstood
political opportunity, comes, however briefly, to
see the people themselves, his people, choosing themselves.
After the death of God, not only does the transcendent
go, with it departs chosen-ness as well, except as
a collective act of will. We can safely see what
has been called Heidegger's decisionism as very much
alive in at least a significant portion of the thirties.
The account of History it suggests has a remarkable
and further parallel with something else in Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was prone to think
of History as a series of long and insignificant
detours in the service of a few great individuals.
His list once included Goethe, Heine, Schopenhauer,
Wagner, and himself. Gradually the list suffered
attrition born of disillusion or anger, and we know
that by his end, tragically documented in Ecce
Homo,
only Nietzsche remained on that list. I suggest that
Heidegger at one point understood peoples in a similar
manner, but there were and always remained for him
just two such peoples: the Greeks, and the Germans,
speakers of those two "most spiritual of languages," Greek
and German. A middle Heidegger, neither early not
late, partly under the influence of Nietzsche, saw
actual history as ordinary in a manner beneath philosophical
interest – not, by the way and as we know,
an atypical stance taken by a number of philosophers
of History – and Heidegger saw two peoples,
one long ago and his own people in his own post-Weimar
Republic time as worthy of an authentic History and
having had or possibly soon having one.
And there is the later Heidegger,
for whom not only the gods, but Being and History
have fled, for whom all that remains for us regarding
History is a waiting and expectant silence and even
silence about this silence, for, as is finally stated,
and deliberately as a posthumous remark, "only
a god can save us."
When we turn to Jaspers we find
subtleties found neither in Hegel nor in Heidegger.
In one sense Jaspers might be termed a pre-Hegelian
enlightenment thinker. Made more influential through
the writings of Habermas, communicative reason plays
a major role in Jaspers' thinking. Through what Jaspers
sometimes simply calls communication – which
involves the recognition of differing perspectives
and the attempt at least to understand, if not always
to overcome them – people and peoples are granted
equal standing and mutual recognition in a process
reciprocal comprehension. The dignity of people as
peoples receives acknowledgment and support.
Jaspers, however, is not an "enlightenment" thinker,
if by this is meant someone oblivious to the importance
of History or someone optimistically and confidently
directed toward its progressive completion or its
end. For Jaspers we are enmeshed in History, and,
having knowledge neither of its origin nor of its
goal, are in no position to know its purpose nor
to glimpse beyond it toward its presumptive ground
(or grounds). To recognize oneself as enmeshed in
History has as a consequence a considerable measure
of humility regarding any claimed narrative meaning
to History.
For Jaspers as well, to experience
oneself as historical and thereby grounded by History,
is also to accept that History may not be one's only
ground. If Hegel turns eternity into History and
then reabsorbs History into a present that collapses
History, then Jaspers, through Existenz, accepts
History as unavoidable and as unavoidably suggestive
of a ground that transcends it and upon which it
may rest.
If Heidegger spurns eternity
in the name of a specific, post-Nietzschean History,
and then, flees this History, or at lest its overt
acknowledgment, in the name of a yet to be found
future History, Jaspers finds glimpses of an elusive
Transcendence while always acknowledging his and
our historical circumstances, our pluralized hopes
and in some painful ways our human guilt over opportunities
lost and actions committed.
There is a strong tendency to
demand a unified narrative History, unifying and
simultaneously convincing. In its absence there is
an equally strong tendency toward understanding History
as incommensurable and non-communicate histories,
histories very much conflicting and plural. Perhaps
worse, there is the abandonment of hope with regard
to narrative philosophical History and an abdication
of historical reflection in deference to those painstaking
and deservedly respected gatherers and their gatherings
of information. Jaspers, however, shows us another
way — or perhaps it is many ways: These many
ways involve living in the largely irreconcilable
tensions of varying Historical narratives that co-exist
in our twenty-first century, Histories either ignoring
or speaking at, not to each other. In his notion
of communication and the humility that the recognition
of our entanglement in History requires of us, Jaspers
may suggest our one hopeful, though never safe nor
sure philosophical opportunity to reinstate and to
explore the philosophy of History.
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