Ping Pong 32; The Bleeding of History Dry
Hegel’s claim that history has an end is a complex one. The claim ultimately is rooted in two facets of human nature, which were for him self evident. On the one hand Humanity is at a state of flux; On the other hand this flux is not random. Humanity is constantly responding to a world, and dealing with the problems in that world, problems which once solved remain, at least in that form, forever solved. If history does ever repeat itself, it is because within the old problems other unstated problems also awaited us, and still await solving. The upshot of these two facets is that one might expect gradually over time a human nature to develop, and complexify. Hence Hegel, echoes Rousseau in arguing that human development from child to adult, is mirrored in human history itself. History becomes thereby classically divided up into a number of developmental stages, and phases. The Greeks: the Middle Ages; The Reformation… Each epoch has its own challenges to master. These tasks both build upon the last phase of history, but also look to the next phase, and usher in the problems that that phase will need to confront. From which it follows, that Hegel would argue that one need never judge preceding phases according to the ethics of the current one. Each time and its problems must be allowed to stand.
However Hegel then adds another twist to the argument. History, understood as the constant inter-development of idea and event in tandem, might itself have a terminal point. Oh events will keep on happening, of course they will. But there might be an ideal model to human society and human nature, a model best suited to respond to, and include within it all possible events that the world throws at humanity itself. The key to this moment of calm at the end of history, Hegel suggests, would surely lie in what he would call Positive freedom. Positive freedom is the freedom to choose how one would act, it is therefore the freedom to choose choice (here Hegel is echoing Kant and Rousseau); and is opposed to negative freedoms which are merely the freedom to follow a desire. Positive freedoms, Freedom with a capital “F”, is for Hegel the answer to the riddle of history. If one can create a system which humanity would self consciously choose, or at least would always develop towards come what may, then that system is the goal or end of history itself. It is the point at which no further meaningful new ideas could be developed or understood.
Perhaps the much touted complexity of Hegel lies in the richness of this apparently straight forward (if rather quaint) theory. There are in fact at least four very different theses wrapped up within this explanation.
Thesis one is that history - meaning the mere succession of events - is never enough to understand the world. One also always needs to understand those events in the context of the individuals whose nature is patterned by them, and ideas which both exist before such events, and yet are transformed through them. History becomes therefore, a dialogue of idea and actuality, and the two are often (if not always) creatively out of sorts.
Thesis two is that there is a political end goal to history. This goal Hegel suggests, is very close to his own times. Something is happening during Time that will change everything. Some deep revolution, towards the ending of a history.
Thesis three is Hegel’s understanding of this change. It is, he suggests the rupture of Freedom out of the bounds of the dictat of mere negative freedoms. States (and he does mean states) are coming together and finding a voice to choose what they are. People (or at least groups of people) are very really becoming free.
Thesis four is that this freedom is linked to the formation of nation states, with some form of representative government. Each state encodes a freedom for its own citizens. All these freedoms, and so all these states, are ultimately compatible with one another. The future of humanity therefore lies in nation states, which will always be able to find a way forward through negotiations with one another.
Hegel’s claim to be at the end of history is therefore to a large degree prefiguring much of modernity; both in the sense of how we understand ourselves (free nation states) but also of how we assume (or at least our political classes have a tendency to assume) that our (by which we mean the Western) model is the one that must triumph; and, state that the political organization of any face-to-face culture has no future beyond that which we give it. In a very real sense Hegel’s fate has been to become the stock of ready assumptions and easy ideas, which lazy politicians draw upon. A real indignity for a philosopher. The real problem is though, that while Hegel presented (and Tony Blair presents) these four hypotheses as naturally united in a complete Western package (we often say you cannot have Western lifestyles without Western freedoms….) it has in fact been the case that their history since Hegel has separated, as have their effects upon the world. We might still unite them in windy rhetoric and complex (and smug) claims about the virtue of democracy and war democracies do not fight each other, but they sure as hell seem to fight everyone else, and are RIGHT to do so... To understand our current plight is therefore to understand how these histories moved apart from the great Hegelian synthetic in which they were initially presented. How that is, they stopped being true, and became the mere bad wind of politicians. A very brief history of each thesis will then form the rest of this Rant.
Starting with the last of these points, the image of a nation such as Hegel envisaged, was the image of a group of people who, coming together, chose their land mass, and their laws. A nation is small enough that his affirmation means something (and is not the bland assertion of empty humanity), and large enough that it configures power. Moreover he also claims that nation states make sense as they represent zones of land and language which have been caught up in the same history. One would expect then this history to have slowly forged a distinctive mindset, a mindset that will then be freely expressed within their nationhood. Hegel therefore offers a lot – he offers freedom, a freedom that he might argue is the effect of a certain history, and a certain destiny. We then constantly speak as Hegelians when we talk of the aspiration to be a nation, and assume that a collective history ought to allow a certain chosen people the right to govern a certain land. What is more Hegel assumes that as these freedoms are a genuine free expression of that deeper freedom, the freedom to choose what we choose that lies at the root of the human mind, then there is a very deep sense in which these actions ought, over important issues, to draw agreement between nations, to act in concert, and essentially espouse the same freedom.
The problem with this thesis is that once again Hegel synthesizes what subsequent human development shows us remains separate. Thence the Hegelian claim that peoples have histories is erroneous. History is what flows between peoples, a flowing between, that appears to master or at least linger on beyond, any dialectic. So that the problem with forming nations, is that every such prospective nation includes within it elements with other histories of their own. These elements, unable to be mastered in the history of the ‘chosen people’ (those whose land it is said to be) are left the subjects of endless pogroms and persecution (Jews in Europe, Palestinians in Israel….). This problem being all the more complex because, even if this group is not persecuted, the very lack of a state might, in an ethic of statehood, feel like oppression. On the wider level of nation states, each state is likewise caught up in its own very political realities which it needs to hold itself together. A necessity which dictates that its dealing with others are of course far from ideal. They never follow the ethic of open freedom that every state is meant to espouse.
The third thesis identified above, ‘the ethic of freedom’ has likewise had rather a chequered career. The Freedom which Hegel means remains (in spite of his protestations otherwise) a gloriously abstract affair. Or perhaps rather, it is applicable to a whole variety of different elements, different facets of modernity, and so it breeds then the illusion that all these facets are complementary, when in fact subsequent human history has shown that the obverse in the case. Freedom synthesises in a word, the rights of the consumer to make free choices between products, the rights to choose their government, the rights of nations to act as they will, the rights of the free market, the right of a state at times to interfere with this market, the right… Freedom spawns rights. It defines ways that one might choose new forms of choice. However having spawned these choosings, it offers not a clue about how its various progeny might get on together. There is nothing therefore in the word freedom which allows one to understand how one might negotiate between the different freedoms of the market, the state and the individual. There is merely a word, and a belief that everything is already alright (if it is just left alone). Freedom, is therefore as it were a productive blight on language. It spawns endless new freedoms, and yet prevents a meaningful dialogue beyond its vapid restatement (and creation of yet another type of freedom) in order to understand how rather different rights might interact.
The second thesis identified above understood that Hegel was right to think there was something odd about his times, something significant. We might say now with the advantage of hindsight, that the issue came down to industrialization (as Marx thought). Humanity was turning a corner in its relation to nature, and Hegel, in his misty eyed philosophizing realised that fact (but erroneously attributed that change to the power of thought alone). Hegel therefore merely discovers in his idea of freedom an effect or expression of a much deeper change, a change occurring elsewhere. This hypothesis, which forms the centre of Marx’s critique of Hegel, explains why he unites what history actually divided, a point to be turned to in later Rants.
The first thesis is perhaps the richest of them all. Hegel is very original in arguing that there needs to be a complex interchange between ideas and the practical world. Neither side need to dominate or directly reflect one another. On the contrary it is in their mismatching that human development happens. History, the history of ideas, and philosophy, all run therefore together, and becomes endlessly muddled up in one another. A hypothesis that almost all post-Hegelian thinkers have accepted in some form or other. However once again there are problems with Hegel’s formation of the idea. He wants to argue that history is a narrative. It goes places. The rationale for this thesis lies very clearly with ideas. It is ideas which are right and wrong, and which develop. A bad idea is succeed by a better (for which understand; a more powerful one). Nor will one ever unlearn what one has already learned. History becomes then education, and therefore incremental. The result is therefore that it follows a certain order or pattern. One gets cleverer. One improves.
Two immediate corollaries follow: Firstly that history is therefore all about progression - it mirrors ideas, it develops and becomes richer. Secondly in this history there are moments when everything becomes stuck. Men of destiny then step into the breach at such times. They move history on - for Hegel for example, this was the role of Napoleon. The Narrative of History becomes a tale also of superheroes (Gordon Brown in the economic meltdown?) who save the say, and allow change to happen. The problem is however that both these corollaries are highly problematic.
The first rests on the assumption that ideas need to be both successive, and dominant, and yet neither of these claims appears particularly convincing. One might easily argue that the power of ideas lies not in forming narratives, but rather in inventing endless alternative storylines. They might therefore use events not as points along their own history, but rather as the means in which they (the virtual domain of ideas) become able to think afresh and suppose anew. Events are the point to break narrative, and ideas are their handmaidens. That is, the sheer contingency of events, has a habit of changing everything (just think how awful the last week would have been for Gordon Brown, with retreats on both 42 days detention and tests for fourteen year olds, if there had not been a global financial meltdown…).
The second corollary rests also on the simple assumption that collective behaviour acts in a certain way to produce a certain series of events. While it is of course true that things do happen, be they revolutions or wars or industrial change or economic melt down or liberation, the link between this happening (as it has happened, as it is enshrined in human history) and the actions that led to that event need not be direct. People act and react without ever knowing the consequence of that action (this is the point of capitalism after all, attempting to ensure differing futures). It is not then good enough to simply impose upon human history a narrative thread, where certain superhumans drive the narrative (that is, that which becomes the past) forward. No human alone has the power to create a certain past. That only comes later, and is only formed across a multitude of other actions and reactions. One might ‘save’ the banking system, only to find that its very saving has changed everything, and made everyone else plunge into a recession. Or again, one might save the banks, only at the price that one’s costly environmental policy is lost (and with it any hope of a realistic attempt to tackle climate change - but then again a recession might be more useful to the environment than any amount of policy). History has a habit of not staying to plotline, and never simply apes the passages which ideas would create for it….
Hegel’s ultimate failure is perhaps twofold. He is one of a select band of thinkers who have one idea (the inter-development of idea and event) that is an awful lot more radical that the rest of his theory (Kant is the same). The result is that this idea cannot be contained within the entire system, but rather struggles free, and demands its own take on what follows. Secondly it failed to exactly define the nature of the change that he was caught up in. He thought of it in terms of philosophy, romance and nationalism, and missed the power of industrialisation and capitalism. Hegel, the man who thought in terms of destiny, thereby missed the actual destiny of his time (appropriately enough). However this missing really matters to all of us, as it tended to create (or better enforce) a belief which since Rousseau had been around. Namely that the story of the West was the story of freedom, and not the growth in naked power. This myth is of course one that still blights our ‘worthy’ actions today. These three elements; i.e. Hegel right, Hegel problematic, and Hegel problematizing, remain with us today, and will recur again and again in the subsequent Rants of this sequence. Next week’s Rant will begin this consideration by developing one aspect on them, that is industrialisation, and looking at exactly why Hegel might have missed its power and effect.
