Determining History or Ending History?

A
Brief Introduction to Understanding
Hegel’s Historical Metaphysic of Moments
in the Phenomenology of Spirit

Jacob S. Joyce
Advisor: Brent Adkins

Senior Thesis for BA in Philosophy

with Honors in the Major

Defense Committee Members:

Brent Adkins—Hans Zorn—Josh Alvizu
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Introduction: The Concept of a Moment in History

When we consider Hegel’s contributions to historiography, it is easy to over-simplify,

misappropriate, and misinterpret what his works offered to the philosophical study of history.

This is due in part to the difficulty of his prose and the severe lack of accessible clarity in his

major works. But there is also the dimension of how profoundly challenging the object of

Hegel’s philosophical investigations are. Hegel, perhaps more than any other philosopher of the

19th century, makes it incredibly difficult to articulate his central theses into a concise form.

Indeed, Hegel states that the lack of synthetic quality is the mark of a true philosophical system

that is not easily summed up as a “string of random assertions and assurances about truth” (PG

1). Rather, a philosophical system, as with any form of science, requires that we “exert ourselves

to know the particulars” as a fully realized form of whatever happens to be universally true of the

science itself (PG 1).

These difficulties are close to intractable for the vast majority of lay readers, and even for

those academics who leverage claims against Hegel without having understood his system. We

need not fault the laymen for their belief that Hegel’s works contain what are the gravest sins of

academic philosophy: Its incomprehensibility, the use of specialized terms, the lack of any

“practical” application to the metaphysical posturing, etc. The academic has more to answer for,

however, when they misunderstand Hegel’s work. But let us give them the benefit of the doubt

and grant that the time it takes to master Hegel’s admittedly difficult work makes it unlikely that

all who comment on his philosophy will have pulled apart his system to the point of

understanding it in its entirety.

Where, then, does Hegel’s work stand when it asks too much of its reader, yet its impact

and legacy have made it almost universally obligatory for thinkers across academic disciplines to
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draw from it? There is clearly no easy answer to this dilemma. On the one hand, we can continue

to read our own personal Hegel—the Hegel who either affirms our own positions or who

supports the work of our intellectual targets. Or we could demand the continual summarization

and synthesis of Hegel’s work into the nearly unending array of publications, commentaries,

criticisms, and apologias that have been the cornerstone of many academic careers since Hegel’s

time.

The latter has the merit of academic integrity and rigor, but it belies the same problems

that have led to the stalemate of broadening the understanding of Hegel’s work past the academy.

But those who have misapplied Hegel’s work, in either ignorance or through their will, have the

unique ability to make Hegel appealing to a wider audience through a degree of popularization

impossible to achieve with a monograph on Hegel’s system. Whether a middle ground is

achievable without betraying either side is debatable. But there remains the chance that a degree

of rigor can, in principle, simplify Hegel to illustrate what is useful and relevant to contemporary

issues. One area where this can be done, I argue, is in Hegel’s work on history. As mentioned at

the start, Hegel’s historiography is perhaps his most recognized contributions to philosophy and

social criticism (viz. the Marxist tradition), while being also one of the most criticized aspects of

his philosophical system. Underlying this criticism are the issues of understanding Hegel. There

are also aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history that must readily be relegated to the trash bin of

19th century theory. In particular, Hegel’s views on race, ethnicity, and women must never be

granted consideration today for their clear ignorance and contemptibility. But there are also more

fundamental aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history that have been unfairly criticized without

being properly understood.

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One example of these charges against Hegel’s world-history must be cleared from the

start. The typical narrative of the criticism levied at Hegel is that he approaches history from

position of eurocentrism, racism, and cultural relativism. These elements culminate in Hegel’s

often lampooned assertion about the “End of History.” While some of these criticisms are

justified, they fail to adequately grasp the way Hegel’s philosophy justifies the core of his

historical theory. The argument that Hegel makes in favor of a general world-history that reaches

its culmination in the European enlightenment ideal of freedom is derived from the ever

increasing capacity of societies to see individual members as being free in and for themselves.

This is compared to the African societies that live in a state of animalistic social interaction in

which no one is free.1 Asian civilizations, being the next step in the dialectical chain, see only

One to be free; i.e. only the emperor can be considered as free in these societies. Next are the

Greeks, who see that some are free but not others. The Greek view of freedom is limited to what

Hannah Arendt rightly took to be the idea that non-citizens of the polis were animal laborans.

This meant that non-citizens had to labor for their means of survival, making less time for

rational inquiry. Finally, following the rise of the Christian notion of God becoming human

through the body and death of Christ, European civilization found all men to be free regardless

of rank or status. This is then developed further in the Enlightenment.

But it is not so much that history ends with the establishment of the Enlightenment notion

all men being free. It is absurd to believe that there is nothing worth writing about now that the

Enlightenment has finally posited the ultimate end-point of development. And it would be

equally absurd to attribute such an idea to Hegel, who lived during the time of both the genesis

1
There is a deep irony in this view that Lydia Moland points out in her article “Philosophy of History” in G. W. F.
Hegel: Basic Concepts, ed. by Michael Baur, (London: Routledge, 2015), 128-139. Hegel holds that all men have
the capacity to be free and that reason is a universal faculty that develops socially as opposed to developing
biologically. It is inconsistent, then, that Hegel would hold a racial view that sees in the African societies a lack of
any rational capacity.
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and ultimate descent into violence of the French Revolution and the institutionalization of the

Protestant Reformation into the power of the landed elite in Germany. Hegel was immensely

critical of both, for they actively undermined the Enlightenment ideal of freedom. Hegel argued

that history must go on to fight for such an ideal, in whatever manifestation it took place. The

actual end of history, then, is that there can be no greater conception of freedom beyond the

assertion that all are free.

While these aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history have garnered the most attention, in

terms of their contribution to a practical application of Hegel’s philosophy they are eclipsed by

the theory of history that underlie and support them. It is here that we reach what is truly the

most difficult element of Hegel’s philosophy of history and also one of his greatest contributions:

That is, what Hegel’s philosophy of history truly is, is a metaphysical theory of human

consciousness, society, and nature in terms of their historical development and their necessary

relationship to each other. To put it in slightly different terms, we find in Hegel two related but

separate theories of history. There is the theory of World-History that articulates the end of

history and the rational development of freedom. And there is the historical metaphysic, which

places the development of all aspects of the world into a historical context of simultaneous

development and necessary interrelation.

This essay deals with the second of these concepts. I take Hegel’s historical metaphysic

to have a more lasting and profound contribution to the study of history than his World History.

However, we can only understand Hegel’s historical metaphysic through a detailed

understanding of how each Moment of history relates to one another. That is, if Hegel’s

philosophy truly is meant to establish a unified notion of history via a scientific and systematic

exposition, then we must have a firm grasp of what constitutes just one aspect of that whole in its
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development. To achieve this, I first place Hegel’s work into the context of the Enlightenment

and the trend towards understanding basic aspects of human social and intellectual life in terms

of the historical and social influences that affect them (CH. 1). Far from being the first

“philosopher of history,” Hegel continues the tradition of historicizing philosophy that began

early in the Enlightenment with Spinoza and was developed by Hegel’s contemporaries in the

late Aufklärung in Germany. Early romantics like J. G. Herder and J. G. Hamann were greatly

influential on Hegel and developing the concept of history in philosophical investigation. Next I

outline one of Hegel’s earliest complete systems that established his historical metaphysic in the

Phenomenology of Spirit (CH. 2). I detail the project of the Phenomenology as a cultural

education of consciousness. I also show how this cultural education is manifested as Spirit, or the

history of how conscious develops in relation to society. Cultural education is used by Hegel as a

criticism of the formal systems of idealism in Kant and Schelling. I also show how development

of the Absolute, as the supreme understanding of truth to which all philosophical investigation

aims, takes place in moments of history. I show what these moments are for Hegel and how they

supersede one another logically and necessarily. Finally, I see how Hegel employs his concept of

history in his biography of J. G. Hamann (CH. 3). I show how Hegel understands the

development of the Aufklärung as a moment in history and in what sense the historical

metaphysic underlies his analysis.

Chapter 1: Historicity as a Tradition in Hegel and the Aufklärung

Before any detailed analysis of Hegel’s system can be given, it is instructive to examine

how philosophers thought of history prior to Hegel. It is perhaps a result of Hegel’s reputation in

the contemporary mind as the eminent philosopher of history that makes his name nearly

synonymous with the marriage of historical and philosophical studies. This implies, however,
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that there is a binary distinction between the two fields. The reality, however, is that Hegel was

far from the first philosopher to approach the study of history from a philosophical standpoint.

Additionally, there were many thinkers prior to Hegel who influenced what is often thought to be

Hegel’s distinct methodology that conjoins the philosophical and the historical. It was an

intrinsic part of the Enlightenment project to seek answers to the pressing questions about the

nature of history and its relation to the fundamental elements of human life such as: Where do

our ethics arise? Is there necessity underlying historical development? How should we compare

our society to those of the past? These questions take on a metaphysical dimension during the

Enlightenment precisely as a reaction to the static view of societies and human nature that

prevailed in the Western tradition.

I argue that it is precisely because Enlightenment philosophers began to not only raise

these questions, but to also approach the answers to them in a systematic fashion that facilitated

both the decline of the Enlightenment faith in reason and the establishment of the prevailing

trend in understanding history in a deeper and more philosophical manner. I begin by tracing the

trend in historicism back to Spinoza’s work. I place a central importance on the concept of

historicism, despite its ambiguity. In keeping with Frederick Beiser’s usage in hist books

German Idealism and Fate of Reason, alongside his article “Hegel’s Historicism,” I understand

historicism to be broadly any intellectual position that places some concept of history in the

center of its analysis. Of course, everyone’s understanding of history is different, but I argue in

this section that there is a distinct historicist tradition that Hegel is engaging with in his

philosophy.2 It was Spinoza’s work that deeply influenced thinkers like Hegel to apply claims

2
See Frederick Beiser, German Idealism, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 437. While I acknowledge
the ambiguity in the term, it leaves open the many ways philosophers have attempted to incorporate history into their
analysis. Also, there are much more ambiguous terms that philosophers employ constantly. I don’t see why this
terms should be picked out as any more ambiguous or dated.
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about human society and subjective beliefs about the divine, ethics, to ideas considered

immutable and absolute like nature, God, and necessity. Additionally, I show how similar

historical theses support the late-Enlightenment debate over language in Herder’s work. Finally,

I introduce Hegel’s historical metaphysics as a reflection of these positions. Ultimately, Hegel’s

historical philosophy is one that is situated in the general project of the Enlightenment and

reflects the historicist trend at the end of the 19th century. His key contribution to historicity in

philosophy, however, was the degree to which he incorporated this historicism into his

metaphysics.

What exactly constitutes an historical metaphysics and how is it distinct from

historiography in general? Metaphysics, here, is taken in its most common formulation as the

question what is there? as opposed to the epistemological question of how do we know what is?

The historian does not generally concern him or herself with the metaphysical question, for

history largely takes the form of systematic proofs of historical claims using tangible evidence.

This method allows the historian a brief glimpse into how things appear to have happened in the

past. From this, larger claims can be extrapolated into an understanding of our own times. This

method, however, does not require that it be predicated on claims concerning human nature or

the innate structure of the world. It only requires an inductive method of investigation to make

claims about a specific snapshot of world-history.

The metaphysical view of history as we know it today has its origins in the

Enlightenment. In the 18th century, the scholastic method of discerning conclusions about God

and nature from a priori claims gave way to the mechanistic world view. Enlightenment thinkers

believed that all things have a necessary causal relation that can be explained rationally. From
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the very beginning of the Enlightenment, we can see a shift towards the view that the explanation

of historical occurrences through causation. The cause of any given event is necessary for a

complete explanation of that event. But mechanistic causal reasoning does not become a

coherent historical theory prima facie. Descartes’ Meditations, for example, lacks historicism of

any kind. It is, in fact, a defining element of Descartes’ philosophy that it rejects an historical

account in favor of a priori reasoning from the universal standpoint of cognition. This denies the

historical genesis of that cognition in favor of the immediate principles that the intellect can

attain. What little room Descartes makes for historical analysis in the Meditations is secondary to

his a priori claims about human reason and God. Because he maintains the immutable standpoint

of both, a culturally subjective certainty about our ethics and ideas like that found in Hegel is

removed from the philosophical equation. One such claim made in Descartes is in the Sixth

Meditation where he says that all the elements that lead to false judgements belong to the body,

which is mutable, and not to the mind, which is immutable. There is, for Descartes, a sole source

of Good, and that is God. It follows from this singular idea of the Good that we can be

completely sure that when our reason has clear and distinct ideas about itself and its sensations

“that in cases like this I am completely free from error.”3 This turns knowledge into either true as

it issues from God’s infinite nature or in error insofar as the will of the body extends beyond the

precepts of reason. I see no room here for an historical analysis of any kind.

If Descartes set the stage for the ultimate destruction of the scholastic tradition without

moving entirely beyond its presuppositions, it was not until Spinoza that the actual death-blow

landed. Seeing the limits of Descartes’ metaphysics in explaining the fundamental structure of

the human relationship to the world, Spinoza set about establishing a philosophy that was

3
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 55-56.
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capable of explaining the phenomena of human culture (its ethics, traditions, and beliefs) while

also understanding the relationship that humans bear to the world as a whole.

There are a number of ways to interpret Spinoza’s philosophy that are amenable to this

view. Perhaps the most significant is to see the effect of Spinoza’s pantheism on later

philosophy. Before we can see the effect Spinoza had on later philosophers like Hegel,

specifically when it comes to historicizing philosophy, we must first see what claims Spinoza

explicitly made. Being a pantheist, Spinoza articulated a form of monism that established the

possibility of two types of things in the universe: there can be only substance and modes.4

Substance is only capable of a univocal existence. There is only one substance, the form of

which can take on any number of attributes.5 But regardless of the attribute through which we

view substance, we ultimately refer back to the same idea of substance. So the distinction

between material and non-material that so befuddled Descartes is removed by understanding

both as one in the same substance. Modes, on the other hand, are said to also exist, but their

existence is only a finite expression of the one substance.6 Thus bodies in their finite number of

permutations and accidents are all the expression of the one substance.

Spinoza interprets history using this metaphysical framework solely as a means of

dispelling all superstitious claims about human capacities for knowing the world. Beginning with

certain knowledge of substance and causality, Spinoza tries to limit our moral claims only to

those that are in accordance with reason. Spinoza says that only by knowing the efficient

causality underlying nature can we remove the “prejudice” of seeing the universe in terms of the

superstitious light that tells us the “God might love [one man] above all the rest, and direct the
4
See Ethics book 1, propositions 1, 14, and 30 in Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley, (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 2006).
5
Human intellect can only comprehend two attributes of God: extension and ideas. See Ethics book 2, propositions
1 and 2 in Ibid.
6
Ethics book 1, definition 5 in Ibid.
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whole of Nature according to the needs of his blind desire and insatiable greed.”7 By

understanding the causal relation between nature’s parts, not as the human will projected upon

the world, but as it extends from rationally determined laws of necessity, Spinoza believes that

we are able to establish a political and ethical system that expands our natural capacities

Human culture for Spinoza reflects the conclusion of his metaphysics. We cannot see the

rise of distinct forms of culture (esp. religion) in terms of superstition and the imposition of

human will on the divine. Rather, we can and must trace those elements attributed to divine

providence back to their manifestations in cultural tradition and human imposed laws. Spinoza’s

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus outlines the necessity and methodology for a complete

understanding of the genesis and meaning of the prophecies laid out in the Old Testament.

Spinoza accomplishes his criticism in two ways that would influence future thinkers like Herder

and Hamann. First, Spinoza shows how the messages espoused by the early Jewish prophets

were the product of cultural norms and prevailing Jewish law.8 This is a direct response to the

belief that the prophets had a supernatural relationship with God that manifested itself in a divine

knowledge over and above that which was accessible to the common Israelite.9 Again, his

method of reaching this conclusion involved a thorough analysis of the prophets’ preaching.

Spinoza argued that, opposed to the interpretation by later Judeo-Christian institutions, there was

no aspect of prophetic teaching that was intended to espouse a truth that was in some form above

the accessibility of the common Jewish worshiper.10 This claim was a direct attack against the

scholastic method of discerning cosmological truths about God and nature from the erudite and

specialized analysis of biblical teachings. Rather, all the bible can tell us is the laws and cultural

7
See Ethics book 1, Appendix in Ibid.
8
See Baruch de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 49.
9
Ibid., 55.
10
Ibid., 32-33.
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norms of the Israelites. Whatever is divine in the bible relates solely to the universal law of love

thy neighbor, a claim which can be reached independent of biblical knowledge: “Thus we should

reject the view that anything of piety or impiety attaches to beliefs simply taken in themselves

without respect to works.”11

Second, Spinoza performs a literary analysis of the Old Testament to reject the possibility

of Mosaic authorship. This is done through a linguistic and structural analysis of the Pentateuch

to show inconsistencies in both authorial voice (Moses referring to himself in the third person for

example) and the incongruity of historical terms and occurrences. One exceptional example is

Spinoza’s analysis of the term ru’ah or “spirit.” There are seven different ways that this term is

used by the authors of the Bible. It can have a naturalistic meaning as in the case of “unusual

works of Nature are called works of God…” making any great gust of wind the “spirit of God.”12

Both of these aspect of Spinoza’s criticism allowed philosophy, history, and cultural to

interpenetrate to form a more complete understanding of what is true for each. Thus the

mechanistic philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries was capable of articulating a theory of

history. Spinoza was a capable and fierce proponent of making Descartes’ philosophy a force for

a deeper understanding of European institutions and traditions through history. This method,

however, did not go unchallenged by those who sought to maintain the established intellectual

order that preserved a transcendent divinity.

There is nowhere a better source on this response to Spinoza’s pantheism over the course

of modern philosophy, specifically in its movement towards historicism, than Frederick Beiser’s

book The Fate of Reason. One of Beiser’s central claims in the book is that the Aufkärung’s faith

in the primacy of Reason to explain the fundamental elements of the human condition and the
11
Ibid., 157.
12
Ibid., 17.
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world was destroyed by the realization that Enlightenment philosophy was inexorably moving

towards Spinozism. Increasingly, the Aufklärer found it difficult to reconcile their belief in

human freedom and faith in God with the ever-expanding mechanistic view of the world. Even

more significant than any mechanistic world view was the effect that both Spinoza and Kant’s

individual philosophies had on the Enlightenment project. While it can be maintained that both

Kant and Spinoza make room for a moral outlook that can be grounded in some degree of

religion, what occurred in their wake only fomented the fear of solipsism, moral relativism (or

nihilism at worst), and fatalism. As Beiser writes, “the Spinozistic model defined reason in terms

of the principle of sufficient reason, which was interpreted in a strictly mechanistic fashion…. If

this principle is universalized, however, it leads to atheism and fatalism; for God and freedom

must be self-causing agencies, causes that act without a prior cause.”13 On the Kantian front, the

apperceptive model that supports the transcendental philosophy results in the barest of solipsistic

conclusions about our knowledge.14 Whether these interpretations hold any ground in the

Spinozistic or Kantian formulations is not relevant to the problem at hand. The concern is, rather,

with the outcomes of these philosophies and how these ideas were presented to and interpreted

by those who would define the debate around Spinoza and Kant.

It can be contended, and I personally lean towards this view, that any advancement in

philosophy arises when we move past the logical structures that prove an argument valid. It

would be a work of patience and near futility to seek out each logical mistake or fallacy in

philosophical works as comprehensive and masterfully compiled as Spinoza and Kant’s writings.

Logical structures, however, are not the measures of truth. If this were the case then how could

we possibly think contrary to any well-formed formula? Would we be content to accept

13
Frederick Beiser, Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press), 3.
14
Ibid.
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Spinoza’s work due only to the formal component, or must there also be an interpretive exegesis

that moves beyond what Spinoza said to answer the question what does Spinoza mean for us?

This is precisely the question that atheists ask when they are presented with any ontological

proof of God’s existence. What arises when we do away with the logical structure of an

argument is that we see the formal text as something distinct from its content. Whatever formal

argument Spinoza makes is different for him in terms of its content that make it incompatible for

the late Aufklärer who see only the outcomes for their own society and thought. To whatever

degree that we can pick apart and understand Spinoza’s intentions in the TTP or the Ethics is

irrelevant if we are unable to move past the profound issues facing Spinoza’s naive ideas about

consensus democracy, the intellectual elitism that permeate the text, the tendentious readings of

the bible, etc. (TTP). Whether we agree with Spinoza or Kant in kind or in degree depends on

our own how open we are to their ideas and our own biases. This does not, however, entail that

the counterarguments that see beyond the formal arguments do not hold their own weight.

Take as an example J. G. Jacobi’s interpretation of Spinoza. Jacobi is entirely false in

characterizing Spinoza’s philosophy in this way: For Spinoza, “we conceive a thing it we can

derive if from its proximate causes, or if we can grasp its immediate conditions from a series;

what we grasp or derive in this manner gives us a mechanical connection.”15 This view entirely

ignores the way that affections constitute our knowledge (however inadequate) of objects and,

more importantly, how the third kind of knowledge operates in Spinoza’s Ethics.16 Despite

Jacobi getting Spinoza wrong, his analysis is in no way insignificant, for it shows what Spinoza

15
Using Beiser’s translation of J.G. Jacobi, Werke, IV/2, 149, 154 in Beiser, Fate of Reason, 83.
16
The third kind of knowledge is immediate knowledge of the order of the universe. There is no causal chain
between this knowledge and substance, for this type of knowledge can exist without reason understanding the causal
connection of things. See Spinoza, Ethics II, Proposition 40 scholium 2 in Spinoza, Ethics.
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meant for the late-Aufklärung and for the way Spinoza’s ideas took on an independent form

beyond the letter of Spinoza’s original argument.

II

The fact that late-Enlightenment thinkers like Jacobi engaged with Spinoza shows how

deeply influential his philosophy was. Indeed, the tradition of historicism in Enlightenment

philosophy that I think begins with Spinoza continues in the works of J. G. Hamann and J. G.

Herder in the form of the debate around the origins and function of language. The philosophy of

language prior to the Enlightenment was largely relegated to the interpretation of the word and

spirit of scripture. For example, what does the Bible mean when it uses terms like spirit?17

Significant advancement in the field of hermeneutics and linguistic analysis, however, raises

serious problems for scholastic thought. Once we begin to question the primacy of scriptural

readings and the interpretative dogmatic structures that support it, how, then, are we to maintain

a common standard against which we compare our knowledge of the divine? If we conceptualize

reason as a static and unchanging faculty, then this does not present a problem. This is precisely

the position that many in the Enlightenment took in order to reconcile faith and reason. However,

the early Romantics took great steps to undermine the belief that reason is unchanging and given

to us from divine origins. Take as a primary example the 1762 Akademie der Wissenschaften zu

Berlin essay competition which asked the questions “if human beings were left with their natural

faculties, would they be able to invent language? And by what means could they invent it?”18

This competition had the expressed goal of determining exactly the status of premise (1) above.

Either the origin of language arises through reason as a natural faculty or as part of divine
17
Spinoza, TTP, 13.
18
Beiser, Fate of Reason, 130.
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intervention.19 Herder’s award-winning essay, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache,

formulated this debate precisely along these lines. If we cannot accept the consequences of

language originating from human faculties, then we must see language as having a divine origin.

Herder takes the former position, and directs his attacks towards the latter through a polemic

against Süssmilch. For Süssmilch, “man does not have the power to create language by himself,

but depends on God to do this for him.”20 For Herder, Language must originate in nature, for

only in nature can we find the roots of language development. All of language can be reduced to

the natural expression of animals. Indeed, for the primitive human it was sufficient to “speak” in

the language of the painful wails when one is displeased, to exclaim “Ah!” when filled with

pleasure, or to gargle in one’s throat when threatened.

The decisive blow against the divine origin of language is Herder’s argument that

language is subject to gradual and continual change throughout all of human history. As such,

“Herder insists on the need for a ‘genetic’ investigation of the origin of language… [that] is able

to question on of Süssmilch’s basic presuppositions: that language is given and eternal, a

complex, systematic, and perfectly rational structure from time immemorial.”21 But as Beiser

points out, Herders conclusion about the natural origin of language is far from original. What

Herder does, however, is show that there must be a “cognitive content” to language that is more

than just an emotive expression of animalistic urges as in Rousseau.22 Previous theories “reduce

[man’s] rationality to his animal nature.”23

In response to this, Herder begins to unpack the constitution of reason as the cognitive

function of language. It is here that Herder develops what Beiser calls an “proto-Darwinian
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 131.
21
Ibid., 132.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 134.
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account” of how reason allows man to survive through language.24 Put simply, man has language

only because without he could not learn to survive.25 This is not an “innate, eternal, or

supernatural” capacity, “but the product of social, historical, and cultural forces.” As such,

Herder is able to do away with both the divine origin of “characteristic human activities

(language, religion, art, philosophy, science)” but also the rationalist position that these activities

are innate and universal.26

III

I shall now shift over to Hegel’s own position in the late-Enlightenment. This shall only be a

brief outline drawn in the context of the previous section. I shall reserve an in-depth attempt at

understanding Hegel’s work in the next section. What can be said here is that Hegel’s work is not

in any way fundamentally different from the goals of Spinoza and Herder (among others). Hegel

saw human activity as socially defined and dependent on natural reason, not divine intervention.

This makes Hegel’s work part of the continuity of the historicist trend in the Enlightenment.

This thesis arises in part from Beiser’s claim that “Hegel’s philosophical revolution

consisted in historicizing the traditional objects of classical metaphysics, God, providence and

immortality. Hegel argues that metaphysics is possible only if its central concepts are explicable

in historical terms.”27 But if this constitutes a revolution for Hegel, it is not “a radical break from

the past.”28 From Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, to Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise,

Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Humanity, and Schelling showing how “the

24
Ibid., 135.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid., 144.
27
Frederick Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,” in Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Friedrich Beiser, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 271.
28
Ibid.
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intellectual intuition of the ‘I am’… was the product of the ego’s history.”29 All of these are part

of the long held Enlightenment project of destroying the immutable order and recontextualizing

it through history.

For Beiser, Hegel’s contribution was the way he “historicized philosophy itself.”30 The

various forms of “a-historicity” that Hegel responded to cannot be discounted. Beiser Lays out

multiple forms of this a-historicity:

(a) The belief that certain laws, beliefs, or values are universal, eternal, or in

nature when they are in fact the product of, and only appropriate to, a specific

culture. (b) The doctrine that certain ideas or principles are innate, the inherent

elements of a pure a priori reasons, although they are learned from experience,

the product of a cultural tradition. (c) The claim that certain institutions and forms

of activity have a supernatural origin (for example language, religion, and the

state) when they in fact originate from all-too-human sources, and so on.31

What Hegel’s work amounts to is an attempt at offering a systematic account of how history,

human culture, and subjectivity underlie all of the above presumptions.

For Beiser, “the epitome of Hegel’s doctrine of the historicity of thought is his claim that

we cannot separate philosophy from the history of philosophy.”32 This means that any succession

of ideas as conceived through the history of philosophy is sufficiently characterized as the

“succession of moments of the idea.”33 In other words, the presence of a given system of

philosophy B posterior to an earlier system A is enough for B to be considered “more consistent

29
Ibid., 271-272.
30
Ibid., 272.
31
Ibid., 273.
32
Ibid., 277.
33
Ibid.
 Joyce 18

or precise than A.”34 While Beiser himself does not see the temporal succession of ideas as equal

to the “logical succession simpliciter,” it is easy to see how Hegel’s philosophy can be construed

in this way. For one, we often tend to think of historical development only in terms of temporal

succession: first Hitler rose to power, then he Invaded Poland, then the Allies intervened, etc.

This, however, is not enough to constitute historical analysis for Hegel. Hegel sets a standard for

his analysis which sees whether “a philosophy adequately expresses the Spirit of its age, whether

it is true in describing its characteristic values and beliefs.”35 This maintains the temporal nature

of history by seeing in each moment of history a chance to judge whether a given idea is

adequate to its expression in Spirit (which can include the material elements of society insofar as

Marx was concerned alongside the philosophical expression of ideas as concerned Hegel).

This, however, does not give a complete account of how Hegel’s philosophy allows us to

analyze an historical moment. There must also be the crucial aspect of the socializability of Spirit

that is co-joined with the temporality of a given idea that allows it to be properly considered

within Hegel’s historical metaphysical framework. What a simple comparison of moments in

philosophy leaves out is the complete role of Spirit in Hegel’s historicity. I interpret Spirit

alongside Pippin as the “rejection of both an empirical or naturalistic as well as a transcendental

notion of subjectivity in favor of a notion of a subject of experience and action as necessarily

self-transforming in time and necessarily social.”36 Of course this raises many issues regarding

the way Hegel transitions between the temporal and social and the fact-of-consciousness that is

the primary issue in the Phenomenology. But ultimately there remains that for Hegel the

historical interpretation of philosophy is not merely a temporal relation of ideas. There must also

be the issue of how this history is thought through “mutually recognizing, social self-
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., 281.
36
Robert Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here,” in Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Fredrick Beiser, 57.
 Joyce 19

consciousness.”37 Subjectivity, sociability, Geist, history, and ideas are all wrapped together for

Hegel. We cannot talk about one without the others. As such, the way we interpret intellectual

history, or any history for that matter, must be made in reference to these very concepts as

subsisting within each other as the way we contextualize the history itself. It is this theme of the

socializibility of Spirit in history that will be the subject of the next chapter.

37
Ibid.
 Joyce 20

Chapter 2: The Absolute Science and Its Moments

In the preceding chapter I examined how Hegel’s philosophy of history both fits into the

Enlightenment tradition that sought to contextualize philosophy according to the social and

cultural factors that define our ideas. Hegel’s contribution to this movement was the

incorporation of historical development into the analysis of ideas. In what follows, I will show

how Hegel describes his own historical metaphysics and how it relates to philosophical

investigation.

Specifically, this section analyzes Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in

order to illustrate three critical elements of his historical metaphysics. First, I analyze the nature

and need of a science of absolute knowing, or the ultimate understanding of what is true about

the world. I show what exactly such a science is for Hegel, and how he compared this to the

status of science historically. Next, I analyze absolute knowing as the end product of such a

science. The absolute, in its unfolding through the methodological development of science, is

imbued with an aesthetic significance for Hegel, one which mirrors elements of culture. I

conclude that the significance of Hegel’s absolute knowing requires an understanding of how

each distinct Moment of historical development relate to each other socially and necessarily. In

this way, Hegel makes room for a unified notion of history that is defined by its distinct and

often contradictory moments. To reach this point, Hegel must show that the entire project of the

Phenomenology is one of cultural education. Following this section, I believe that we can

adequately answer the question of what a Moment in history is for Hegel with a theory of

cultural development. I point out some of the ways this cultural development can be conceived

over the course of this section, but ultimately I fall in line with Robert Pippin’s characterization
 Joyce 21

of Hegel’s project as analyzing how knowledge becomes the relationship of our ideas historically

and within a socializable context.

The Necessity for Science

A central concern of Philosophy is the problem of certainty. No philosopher engages with their

topic without believing that the position they hold either already conforms to what is certain or

will contribute to greater certainty in our understanding of reality, human nature, an ethical

position, etc. Even the skeptics, who are reviled for taking away what reason tells us we should

be most certain of, aim to establish a new type of certainty—even if it is a certainty of what we

cannot be certain about. The idealists at the end of the Aufklärung were especially concerned

with protecting reason from the assault by the Humean skepticism.38 The predominant method

employed by the idealists of this era in establishing certainty was to create a speculative system

that could maintain the a priori principles that allow us to be certain in our judgments. One way

philosophers have sought to establish certainty is through finding some unifying principle or

principles that can account for the detailed exposition of the structure and content of what the

system takes as its object. The German idealists, roughly beginning with Kant, were no different

in their aims. But the key distinction, at least in Kant’s mind, was that any system must have a

the capacity to unify its concepts under “an idea of the totality of the a priori knowledge yielded

by the understanding,” or, rather, the a priori law that allows for the unity of the knowledge of

the sensible world (B 89). Hegel, following Kant, also sought to establish a system that could

unify the subjective concepts that constitute our knowledge of the world.

One of the central theses in the preface to the Phenomenology that contributes to Hegel’s

system concerns the historical development of the Idea as philosophy. The Idea, or philosophical
38
Schulze’s “Aenesidemus” deflated the Kantian idea that the critical philosophy had done away with Humean
skepticism. It was with great vigor that Fichte wrote a response to Schulze defending the post-Kantian destruction of
the thing-in-itself. See Terry Pinkard, Legacy of Idealism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105-
107.
 Joyce 22

truth as it manifests at different moments in historical development, garners no easy claims to

certainty without a thorough and systematic look at its own history. This self-examination is not

just a narrative of what ideas came before and where things stand in the current moment with

truth. If this were the case, then it would be enough for any sufficiently literate individual to

enter a lecture on the history of philosophy and be certain that he or she has learned all that is

necessary in order to understand the ideas in the present. And if an idea was so easy a thing as to

be grasped in the immediate presentation of its parts, then the entirety of philosophy would be no

more a “science” than would the mere labeling of the different parts of the body constitute the

science of anatomy (PG 1). This is one of the greatest impediments to reaching actual

philosophical knowledge, or what Hegel sees as moving beyond philosophy as the love of

knowing to embrace actual knowing (PG 5). It lends itself to the positing of each constituent part

of the development of the idea as either true or false compared to the already developed Idea that

one has of what is true (PG 3). This entails that what already stands as true is the ultimate aim

[Resultat] of all previous philosophical inquiry, and any incompatibility with the philosophy of

the present is, in Hegel’s terms, a differentiation of the moments of philosophical development

into a pigeonholed, “lifeless universal” that fails to get at that which is “really at stake” [die

Sache selbst].39

The process by which the Absolute (i.e. the truth of the Idea) moves from knowing one or

another idea as true to being actual knowing is through the systematic exposition of an ideas

content. When the Absolute remains in a state of stasis it lacks the differentiation of content that

makes actual knowledge possible. This static notion of the Absolute is precisely what Hegel

attributes to Schelling, in whose philosophy all content of the absolute is subsumed under the

39
I am using Pippin’s translation of this famous phrase over A V Miller’s “matter at hand.” Pippin’s better expresses
the gravity of the phrase in a way that is more consistent in its multiple appearances throughout the Phenomenology.
 Joyce 23

equation A=A. Absolute knowing is, after this view, knowledge of only the substance of the

absolute (PG 16). The entirety of our conception of what it means to possess knowledge is to

state what is universally true about nature and thus reduce the entirety of philosophical (i.e.

scientific) knowledge down to a universally applicable proposition. Previous efforts at

establishing certainty in this way have, for Hegel, prevented philosophy from attaining the

standpoint of truth, for a “proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just

because it is only a principle” (PG 24). These propositions are “easy to refute,” for they only

constitute the presence of a universal statement; it only forms the start of the movement of

knowledge from which the actual content of our knowledge can become explicit.

It is worth mentioning briefly that the refutation of universal principles is a necessary

one, but only insofar as the refutation of the principle does not result in the complete stagnation

of the process of cognition. When we hold a proposition firmly in our minds to the point that it

becomes a fundamental element of our knowledge, we resist arguments that attempt to

undermine it. All individuals have their knowledge fortified by the fundamental belief that what

they hold as necessary and adequate for Truth is untouchable by the pure negation of the

principle. But it is not the case that those fundamental beliefs do not become subject to change

over time. What occurs, for Hegel, and what should be avoided in understanding knowledge of

universal principles is the attempt to perform an absolute negation of those principles. Absolute

negation, as set against Hegel’s notion of determinate negation, is the complete destruction of the

initial principle. While Hegel’s work looks at the destruction of concepts as necessary for their

development (viz. determinate negation of the concept), a complete and absolute negation

removes the concept entirely from the dialectical space. We must avoid this at all costs, Hegel
 Joyce 24

writes, for “if the refutation is thorough, it is derived and developed from the principle itself, not

accomplished by counter-assertions and random thoughts from the outside” (PG 24).

We can see how this affects our current problem of the Moment in the development of

knowledge. When science (as the unfolding of the Absolute) develops according to the principle

of determinate negation we can see that the initial universal principles that we rejected begin to

relate each to each other. This is a continual process that draws out the content of our principles

and lays them bare to be thought by cognition. With the introduction of cognition into Hegel’s

idea of a science, he moves beyond the notion that the science’s content is substantial (or related

only to Substance in-itself). Instead, cognition allows science to think through its content. Before

science merely reported the way the world is. This maps easily onto the chapters “Sense-

Certainty” and “Perception.” According to each mode of cognition, “in the dialectic of sensuous-

certainty, hearing and seeing are bygones for consciousness, and as perceiving, consciousness

has arrived at thoughts, which it brings together only in the unconditioned universal. This

unconditioned would now itself again be nothing but the extreme of being-for-itself” (PG 82). In

this dialectic, we see that any object that is merely perceived does not become something

essential for consciousness. It is taken, rather as something set beside conscious cognition, not

determined by conscious cognition. This is taken up in “Sense-Certainty” where Hegel shows

that the mediation between an object and consciousness “precipitates all at once out of pure

being” (PG 64). I take this to mean quite simply that the very concept of substance as existence

must underlie the very positing of difference between the I and the Object. As such, Hegel is

very much in line with Kant in terms of rejecting sensuous-certainty as the means of absolute

knowing.
 Joyce 25

In doing away with the grounds of sense-certain knowledge through by positing

substantial being as underlying difference, Hegel is quick to show the role that the understanding

plays in doing away with the traditional notion of substance. The employment of the

Understanding in seeing differences as a unity is precisely the process through which science

apprehends “the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (PG 17). It is indeed odd to

conceptualize a science substance, or knowing, as a Subject. What this ultimately amounts to is

being able to have knowledge of the self-relation of modes as the finite expressions of substance

even in their contradictory states. There are an infinite number of manifold expressions that

absolute knowing can take, but it is precisely the job of the understanding to unify them. Hegel is

directly responding to Spinoza on this point. We can indeed form a coherent, adequate notion of

substance, but there arises from that a fundamental problem of how the attributes and modes of

substance can interpenetrate one another and form a cohesive unity in their sheer variety. If self-

consciousness is precisely the capacity to unify the distinct conceptions of the self, as Kant

thought, then Spinoza’s fatal flaw was making a place for self-consciousness “that was only

submerged and not preserved” (PG 17). Thus Hegel wants to understand how the different

moments of the unity can relate themselves to one another by understanding the Absolute as a

self-consciousness.

But how does self-consciousness of distinct moments form a coherent part in the

development of human society and culture (i.e. history)? This is precisely the problem of the

Phenomenology of Spirit as Hegel conceptualizes it in the Preface. As Hegel says, “the

development [Werden] of Science as such, or Knowing, is what is presented in this

phenomenology of spirit, as the first part of the system itself” (PG 27).40 The stress placed on the
40
My translation adds back the following clause dropped in the Miller translation, “als der erste Teil des Systems
derselben.” I have also decapitalized “phenomenology of spirit” as means of distinguishing it from the title of the
book. Here Hegel uses the term as a descriptor of how Spirit develops through the experience of consciousness. In
 Joyce 26

term phenomenology indicates that what is needed for a scientific exposition of knowledge is to

understand how it is experienced by consciousness. There is a prima facie difficulty in

understanding why Hegel uses a phenomenological method as opposed to any other form of

argumentation. Indeed, what Hegel has thus far concerned himself with in the Preface is the

notion of the Absolute as an objective science, not with the experience of individual cognition.

This would appear to be an insurmountable difficulty if Hegel was talking about the Absolute as

something separate from human consciousness. But as Hyppolite points out, one of Hegel’s

initial critiques of Kant was that he had not “progressed beyond Locke,” for the critical

philosophy of Kant only applied to the principle of subjective idealism and formal cognition.41

This prevented Kant from being able to “move beyond its starting point” in human understanding

and reach objective knowledge.42 Reinhold, too, falls into the Kantian trap of remaining purely in

the realm of the logical foundations of cognition without reaching out to the absolute. For this

reason, Hegel begins, as with Schelling, with the identity of the subjective and the objective to

form the Absolute and not with the formal principles of cognition that form experience. For both,

“knowledge of this identity is primary and it constitutes the basis of all true philosophic

knowledge.”43

The method that Hegel employs to reach the determination of the absolute identity of the

object and the subject is through phenomenology. For Hegel, the process by which cognition

reaches this identity is the science of how “common consciousness… necessarily leads to

absolute knowledge, or, even, how it is an absolute knowledge which does not yet know itself as

the German the nouns are capitalized due to the nature of German grammar, but we can clearly see in the structure
of the sentence that he is referring to the process present to the work, not the work itself.
41
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, (Evanston Ill: North Western
University Press, 2000), 5.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
 Joyce 27

such.”44 But while Hegel here seems to agree with Schelling’s absolute subject-object identity,

Hegel returns to the very methods employed by Kant, “which assumes the distinction between

subject and object.”45 Despite this Kantian method, Hegel ultimately frees himself by turning the

Phenomenology into a propaedeutic of this common consciousness. This unchains him from the

purely formal Kantian bonds. I shall discuss this topic more in the next section.

We have seen, briefly, what Hegel finds at stake in the Phenomenology. He is invested in

moving philosophy beyond the mere love of Knowing and to create actual knowing. The only

way to achieve this is through the method of science. This requires that we understand the

universal principles laid out by philosophy, not as sufficient in themselves, but as constituting a

starting point for cognition. The method of phenomenology attempts to unify the moments of

how we conceive of these universal principles and ultimately reach an understanding about the

Absolute. Thus far I have only shown why Hegel believes a science is necessary. We shall now

see how Hegel conceives this as coming about in the Phenomenology through the unity of

moments of cognition. This results in science becoming a formative process for consciousness,

through which consciousness comes to know the moments of its own development through

Spirit.

Spirit and Phenomenology as a Propaedeutic Science

For all of Hegel’s immense difficulty, one of the areas where he exceedingly clear is how the

Phenomenology forms a propaedeutic for consciousness. One Hegel scholar who has developed

this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy has been John Russon in his Reading series. In these two

44
Ibid., 6-7.
45
Ibid., 7.
 Joyce 28

works, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Infinite Phenomenology, Russon shows

how the process of the development of consciousness throughout the course of the

Phenomenology mirrors the process of how actual consciousness learns to read. It is not a

coincidence that Russon, as well as other scholars like Terry Pinkard, compare Hegel’s work to

the popular 19th century literary style of the Bildungsroman, or educational novel. In these

novels, the principle character must undergo a series of transformations brought on through a

series of events, the end of which results in substantive change in the main character (particularly

a transition from childhood to adulthood).46 The Phenomenology’s structure mirrors this type of

development seen through the “eyes” of a single consciousness. As consciousness begins to

understand its world, so, too, does consciousness understand itself in relation to the world. This

section shows how consciousness reaches understanding of the world, not through the formal

application of its sense knowledge, but through a propaedeutic that allows consciousness to enter

on a path to grasp its own capacities for self-knowledge. The end result of this self-knowledge is

Spirit, or historical knowledge of consciousness’ development of itself and its relation to the

world. I shall also show why it is significant that Hegel uses aesthetic language to unify the

dynamism of the Understanding and Spirit.

It is not enough for consciousness to merely observe the world, to take stock of the

entirety of its experience external to itself and to apportion the manifold intuitions into rigid

categories that are the predicates of our intuitions. This presents to consciousness a type of

formalism that takes “the simple determinateness of intuition—which means here sense-

knowledge—” and places that knowledge into the empty formal categories (PG 51). This “empty

formalism” of the Understanding is “predicated in accordance with a superficial analogy, and

this external, empty application of the formula is called a ‘construction,’” that is, it does not raise
46
Terry Pinkard, Legacy of Idealism, 7-8.
 Joyce 29

itself or sensuous knowledge to the level of a science. In one of Hegel’s more acerbic examples,

he attacks the formalism of Kant and the other idealists as being “just like any other. What

dullard a man must be who could not be taught in a quarter hour the theory that there are

asthenic, sthenic, and indirectly asthenic diseases, and as many modes of treatment; and… who

could not hope to be transformed in this short space of time from an empirical into a theoretical

physician?” (PG 51). What this example precisely shows is that immediate knowledge that arises

from the Sensibility cannot be subject to the purely formal categories of the Understanding

without becoming in some way actual, or “expressing the Notion itself or the meaning of the

sensuous representation” (PG 51).

But what up to this point has limited philosophy from reaching actual knowing? We have

already seen how those who interpret the history of philosophy fail to articulate its distinct

moments in a way that leads to the unity of the contradictory views. We must not, however,

place the blame squarely on the present observers who know nothing else but the systems of

philosophy prevailing in their time. Here we come to what I take to be the first major distinction

in Hegel’s phenomenology. This is a theme that will continually show itself over the course of

the work. On the one hand, we find the individuals who exist in time—in a particular moment of

Spirit. These individuals look back upon, say, the history of philosophy as it has unfolded and

see nothing in it but a morass of distinction and counter distinctions that result in the net negative

of any dialectical movement. This absolute negation of philosophy is what hinders the movement

towards any actual knowing. It must also be acknowledged that the time in which Hegel was

writing was the era of the post-Enlightenment upheaval against the authority of Vernünft. The

skepticism of Hume had cut deep into the heart of the Aufklärung’s most sacred and fundamental

ideas. Additionally, the rise of the Sturm und Drang had further withered away the old-world’s
 Joyce 30

belief in the stasis of societies and the authority of monarchies and the church institutions that

supported them. The skepticism of the absolute negation of philosophy and the heightened sense

of actual, tangible change in the prevailing structures in Europe created conflicting ideas of the

state of knowledge. As Pinkard writes,

In the wake of the Kantian revolutions, philosophy in that climate began to play a

leading, speaking part in the collective and individual imaginative life. As the hold of the

older ways simply lost its grip on the younger generation, they began to see themselves

called to something different… of acting according to one’s own law and not simply the

rules one had been taught.47

There is, then, the undeniable deliberate disunity between the philosophies of the Aufklärer and

the new Stürm und Dranger, and Hegel was a philosopher who tapped into this new sense of

philosophical purpose. But how can individuals have the idea that the philosophy of old was

static when there is the undeniably constant state of flux around us at all times? Hegel’s solution

is to show that there is no stasis in philosophy, just as there can be no abstract, unmediated

universal ideas. Furthermore, the change we see in history and in philosophy is not the result of

chaos and caprice, but it arises from a logical development of the absolute nature of history—a

nature that is immutable and accessible to human cognition.

For philosophy to be static is for it to posit the abstract universal as the truth. Philosophy,

for Hegel, has largely concerned itself only with the truth of these abstract concepts that arise, in

part, from the intuitions dogmatically taken as the ground for absolute knowing. This immediate

knowledge of the absolute demands that the truth be immediately intuited by consciousness, not

as a mediated “concept of the Absolute” (PG 6). That is, we immediately intuit the absolute as

the knowledge of substance. The result of this immediacy of knowing is that consciousness
47
Terry Pinkard, German Idealism, 214.
 Joyce 31

cannot have certainty of what it has previously thought to be certain. For Hegel, philosophies of

immediate certainty of substance fall when “the bare possibility of imagining something

differently [is] sufficient to refute [their] idea” (PG 16). When this happens, consciousness

detaches itself from its own substantiality, for “its essential life [has] been lost to it, it is

conscious of this, and of the finitude that is its content” (PG 7). A philosophy with the goal of

actual knowing must not reestablish the substantiality of Spirit “by suppressing the

differentiations of the Notion and restoring the feeling of essential being” (PG 7). What

philosophy requires is to return itself to essentiality by “opening the fast-locked nature of

substance, and raising it to self-consciousness… by bringing consciousness out of its chaos back

to an order based on thought,… to the simplicity of the Notion” (PG 7). To not do these things,

to bring consciousness by the force of “running together what thought has put asunder, by

suppressing the differentiations of the Notion and restoring the feeling of essential being,” is to

merely edify a given state of cognition as something flaccid and static.

Philosophy must instead develop a comprehensive science of cultural development. We

have already seen what this science must entail, but how does one actually go about forming and

following the path of such a science? This is no easy question in the Phenomenology. Hegel is

adamant that the knowledge of the absolute is only accessible once the formative process of the

science has already been seen to its logical end. Merely recounting the steps one must take to

reach certainty of absolute knowing again only raises the issue of seeing each moment in itself

without reference to the process of self-knowledge that facilitates its change:

For the most part, this unfamiliar impediment forms the basis for the complaints about

the unintelligibility of philosophical literature even when the individual has otherwise

met the conditions of cultural development for understanding such philosophical writing.
 Joyce 32

In what is said about this, we see the reason behind the specific reproach which is so

often leveled against such writings, namely, that so much has to be read over and over

again before it can be understood – a reproach which has to do with such definitive

unreasonableness that, if it were justified, no rejoinder would be possible. – It is clear

from the above what is at stake here (PG 63).

Indeed, what is at stake is the very knowledge of the absolute as it is explicated through the

method of science. Hegel articulates a serious problem in society, a problem that is not original

to the 19th century nor one that has changed much since the publication of the Phenomenology. It

is the problem of individuals relying on adumbrated and often tendentious readings of

philosophers from second-hand sources. But it is not just the presumption of knowing what a

philosopher has said in a given work that is the real problem. Rather, it is the pretense of actual

knowing reached through the easy path of mere exposition of concepts. These concepts, taken as

immediate truth, are ripped out of the culture and time from which they arose and are given a life

independent of all that came before. And the unscientific minds who find in these ideas the

greatest profundity are those that have not reflected on how those ideas arose. But even more

importantly for Hegel, there must be a great deal of self-reflection before any actual knowing can

arise.

This, then, is the cultural education that Hegel wants to bring about in the

Phenomenology: He wants to raise unscientific consciousness to the realm of scientifically

conscious knowing. The path to knowing is long and arduous. Additionally, this road is not some

arbitrary path set along by will and caprice; Rather:

“The path along which the concept of knowing is reached likewise itself becomes

a necessary and complete coming-to-be, so that this preparation ceases to be a

 Joyce 33

contingent philosophizing which just happens to fasten onto this and those

objects, relations, or thoughts arising from an imperfect consciousness and having

all the contingency such a consciousness brings in its train; or it ceases to be the

type of philosophizing which seeks to ground the truth in only clever

argumentation about pros and cons or in inferences based on fully determinate

thoughts and the consequences following from them (PG 34).

Precisely because Hegel understands this knowledge of substance as a Concept can it be thought.

We can only know the world through the Concept, and only in the absolute Concept reached

after the systematic development of knowledge do we have something entirely simple and

graspable by consciousness:

Concepts alone can produce the universality of knowing, which is not the common

indeterminateness and paltriness of plain common sense, but rather that of culturally

mature and accomplished cognition.—It does not bring forth some uncommon

universality of a reason whose talents have been ruined by the indolence and self-conceit

of genius; rather, it brings forth this truth purified into its native form, which is capable of

being the possession of all self-conscious reason (PG 70).

A simple concept is one that has undergone this rigorous development of science and has

reached determinate knowing, this “truth purified” that is accessible to anyone in a given time

period. Education for Hegel can be reformulated, then, in the following terms: Insofar as any

knowledge that we possess remains static or immediate to consciousness (which amount to the

same for Hegel), there is no room for further development. But when knowledge is raised to

level of a simple Concept, one which is thought through according to the rigor of the

understanding, can it reach the universal status of actual knowing.

 Joyce 34

The Aesthetic of Spirit: Temporal and Sociable

After a long-drawn-out outline of Hegel’s project and method, it is now possible to diagnose

what a Moment is in Hegel’s philosophy. I shall approach this in terms of our original framing

question in the introduction to the paper: How does an individual who has undergone this

cultural education understand the Spirit of his own time in relation to the previous stages of

history? For consciousness to understand how a concept manifests itself in the present as

something essential for consciousness it must acknowledge two relationships: the concept must

stand in a temporal relationship to previous stages and it must be sociable (i.e. the concept

cannot be understood by a select individual or group. Rather, the concept must be diffuse within

Spirit, making any individual capable of apprehending it).48 I call this the temporal diffusion of

knowledge. The form this temporal diffusion of knowledge takes has an aesthetic significance

for Hegel. Rather than knowledge of the past (i.e. knowledge of Spirit) being a static formalism,

knowledge must instead define itself through the interplay of its content. Hegel characterizes this

cultural knowledge as something that is simultaneously beautiful and destructive.

Spirit is difficult concept in Hegel’s work, and there are many places where Hegel seems

to use it with different connotations. For the sake of this paper, I shall limit the definition of

Spirit to Hegel’s usage in the Preface. Hegel is clear about the meaning of Spirit here: Spirit is

only the “genuine knowing” of Truth as a concept (PG 27). All this means is that an individual

“who laboriously sets down the path” of science moves beyond knowing immediately by

becoming a scientific consciousness (PG 27). This view of Spirit as a science, or rather as the

48
It is important to distinguish between an idea being apprehended commonly be all individuals and mere common
sense. Common sense for Hegel is something that is very much inessential. A concept that is common sense has
only an abstract form of particularity about it that does not tell us anything necessary. For example, do not wait until
the last minute to revise your senior thesis is common sense. No one needs to be educated about that fact. We need
only to observe the fact that last minute edits don’t make a bad paper good, but this hardly amounts to a true
understanding of the truth of the matter (PG 131).
 Joyce 35

Science of human cognition grasping the true, is incomplete when viewed only as a “simple

Concept” [einfache Begriff], independent of the formative process Spirit took to reach its

determinate new form. Hegel understands this formative process of Spirit as Spirit making a

“qualitative leap” from its moment of “merely quantitative growth” into an entirely new form

(PG 11). What is interesting in Hegel’s framing of the transition of Spirit in the Preface is that

the quantitative change in Spirit is in hindsight a “gradual crumbling;” it is a structural

disintegration that leaves “unaltered the face of the whole.” And as Pinkard points out, it is

nearly impossible to not consider this a direct response to the era of upheaval that Hegel saw in

his own time.49 Hegel characterizes the “established order,” in their “frivolity and boredom” as

becoming “unsettled” by what it cannot see ahead (PG 11). In its dissolution, a new order is

established, but one that has yet to undergo its own quantitative growth, leading inevitably to a

new structural change. The quantitative aspects of a Moment are, for Hegel, Spirit traversing “its

content in time and space,” or put another way, the quantitative is the content of a world-

historical epoch (PG 12). It only becomes the simple Concept once it has undergone the stress of

its development and has, once again, been born anew (PG 12).

The moments of this development are intelligible to individuals, even those who lack the

understanding of the system’s underlying logic. Science, as the exposition of this intelligibility,

is universal in its explication of these moments precisely because it is already present in the

consciousness. Despite a Moment seeming static to individual observers, we are still able to

grasp it in its simplicity precisely because our consciousness has already taken into itself the

previous moments into its present Moment, here and now, that it so firmly understands to be its

own. The Moment, as I interpret it, is precisely this here and now that we as observers take to be

a determinate stage in the development of Spirit. This is shown most readily in the development
49
Pinkard, German Idealism, 215.
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of culture for Hegel which “must always begin by getting acquainted with general principles and

points of view, so as to work to a general conception [Gedanke] of the real issue” (4). The

possibility for what Hegel calls the “laborious emergence” of culture “from the immediacy of

substantial life” is precisely consciousness taking as inessential those principles that in previous

stages of development were precisely those essential principles that formed the general

conception.

Hegel develops this further in regard to the primacy of certain mathematical ideas that

formed the “stage of mental culture that has now passed away”:

[B]ut it is significant that the scientific régime bequeathed by mathematics – a régime of

explanations, divisions, axioms, an array of theorems, with proofs, principles, and the

consequences and conclusions drawn from them – all this has already come to be

generally considered as at any rate out of date. Even though there is no clear idea why it

is unsuitable, yet little or no use is made of it any longer; and even though it is not

condemned outright, it is all the same not in favour. And we must be so far prejudiced in

favour of what is excellent to believe that it can turn itself to practical account, and make

itself acceptable. But it is not difficult to see that the method of propounding a

proposition, producing reasons for it and then refuting its opposite by reasons too, is not

the form in which truth can appear. (48)

The culture that places an emphasis on its geometrical propositions differs from the intellectual

culture today in so far as they took as content what we take as the simple Concept. For us,

geometrical proofs no longer form the explicit content of a culture that has moved beyond that

form of argumentation. Instead, it becomes something inessential to us. We qua observers are so

biased towards our own culture that we no longer find geometric proofs as capable of articulating
 Joyce 37

truth. And in a fundamental way, this method will never articulate any truth to us beyond the

understanding of scientific progress. But as the passage above says, we are unable to formulate

clearly why this method is incapable of articulating truth. Hegel does not state that this

inarticulability ought to end any discourse on the subject. What it illustrates, rather, is that the

previous moments of Spirit are taken as inessential, for the cultural structure that allows

geometric proofs to articulate truth has dissolved. What remains in hindsight our opinion of its

inessential nature, while those elements that are essential to Spirit form the foundation of a new

moment of culture. They are so ingrained in our scientific understanding that even unscientific

consciousnesses cannot see them as something essential to its own culture without understanding

the Concept’s origins in what came before.

At first it might appear that Hegel’s move to cultural formation is missing something

essential of its own. The simplicity of the moment that Spirit has arrived at in the destruction of

the previous moment means that Spirit has forgotten all that has came before it. But how does it

happen that the essentialities of, say, geometric expression of truth fall out of favor to the point

where the tenability of postulating them as Truth becomes absurd to the modern consciousness?

Or, reformulated in Hegel’s terms, why does “consciousness [miss] in the newly emerging shape

its former range and specificity of content, and even more the articulation of form whereby

distinctions are securely defined, and stand arrayed in their fixed relations?” (13). For Hegel, the

loss of what was essential in the previous moment is also lost in the newfound simplicity of the

present shape of Spirit. We can understand Hegel as arguing a theory of temporal diffusion, in

which the content of science builds over time until the preponderance of content consolidates

itself into a unifying idea. This idea is then diffused among all individuals who possess an

adequate level of scientific literacy. The science individuals learn is the science that has already
 Joyce 38

undergone its own internal development. The result then is the “taking for granted” of the past

experience of science.

To begin with, the simplicity of the present moment is the “whole veiled in its simplicity”

(13). There has been no extrication of the previous experience of consciousness beyond placing

it deep into the recesses of memory. In doing so, consciousness loses its ability to articulate what

made the distinctions in its previous forms essential. Science, as the explication of this

development, “lacks universal intelligibility” (13). Instead, science becomes something

“esoteric” and “individual.” In the first case, its esoteric nature comes from the immediacy of the

Concept being dealt with. This means for Hegel that the knowledge of scientific development

has not made what is essential to the previous moment essential for it. That is, the knowledge is

only present as an “inwardness,” or as an implicit knowledge. It is individual precisely because

the knowledge has yet to diffuse itself among the general public consciousness. In this way,

knowledge remains “something singular,” accessible only to a few individuals. How precisely

these individuals access this knowledge Hegel does not make clear, but it is at least conceivable

that these individuals act as the continuity between Moments. So while this knowledge may still

lack the diffusive quality to actually become spiritual (scientific) knowledge, it is possible to still

know something in its particularity.

It is only through the temporal diffusion of knowledge that we gain insight into the nature

of our own Moment beyond the individual and esoteric. Temporality in this sense deals with the

question of development across time. For Hegel it is clear that there is a beginning, middle, and

end to development. But temporality is not always explicit for consciousness. As in the case of

geometric proofs, the memory of its past is capable of being lost to consciousness just as easily

as we forget the eggs we had for breakfast this morning. Nonetheless, history never loses its
 Joyce 39

temporal nature, nor does the history of the development of Spirit lose this temporality. By all of

this, I mean simply that history in its absolute structure does not forget that events happened in a

particular sequence, even if this sequence is completely lost to human consciousness. Ultimately,

temporality tells us nothing except that one particular event occurred, and then another, and then

another, and so on.

Diffusion is a more problematic concept for Hegel, though by no means one incapable of

being solved. We often think of the diffusion of knowledge as issuing from a central point in

space and spreading outwards through a network down to the individual. For example, school

systems are the means of distributing knowledge in from the curriculum to the child. The

obvious consequences this has for knowledge diffusion is that the centralized point, whether it be

a government, religion, or some other institution, acts as the sole authority on that knowledge.

Hegel rejects this outright as the means of diffusion. For Hegel, science as the way of knowing

the absolute is “open and equally accessible to everyone, and consciousness as it approaches

Science justly demands that it be able to attain to rational knowledge by way of the ordinary

understanding” (13). Knowledge cannot be contained within the narrow scope of an institution,

though that institution might in fact facilitate the spread of knowledge.

A succinct encapsulation of way reason facilitates the diffusion of knowledge come from

Pinkard. He writes, “the claims of reason as making a universal demand on us are themselves

historical achievements and could not thus emerge on the scene in their full form until they had

gone through a long and somewhat painful process of historical development, with various

candidates for such claims proving themselves to be unsatisfactory in the course of that

development.”50 The actual way that this diffusion of knowledge occurs is through reason. But

reason is only a historical process, one that is not only a succession of various intellectual
50
Pinkard, German Idealism, 230.
 Joyce 40

positions about the absolute, but also the spread and retreat of those reason within societies. This

is the diffusion that I am speaking of. It is not simply taking what is true from a higher authority

and spreading it over the minds of individuals until some new authority arises in place of the old

one. It is the collection of various ideas and modes of thinking about the world that are in

constant relation to one another. In some eras of history, one takes hold and defines truth in a

more elegant and accurate way than what came before. When this occurs, the Spirit of that time

takes a further step along the path of truth (as Hegel would say). The temporal element of history

takes a secondary role to the diffusion of ideas. When an idea occurs in a sequence is of less

consequence than how an idea comes to define a society. Thus ideas of freedom from Athens and

Rome are diffuse among the American patriots in the Revolutionary War, while the ideas

supporting European ecclesiastical and secular authorities were rejected for their contradictions.

Whatever use temporality has is of secondary concern, though we can have no idea of history

without saying “yes! This came first than this!” This is less important I find for Hegel than the

way these ideas spread and are incorporated into his idea of Spirit.

At this point, Hegel complicates his theory of history significantly. Science is intelligible

only because the “ordinary understanding” is already implicitly familiar with science. But how is

this possible? Hegel addresses this by first raising the issue of formal accounts of the absolute.

What is striking in Hegel’s criticism of formal knowledge is the reference to the monochromatic

formal nature these systems (PG 15). Indeed, Hegel’s own system, with its use of metaphor,

analogy, and occasional poeticisms could hardly be considered formal in its structural aesthetic.

But the aesthetic quality of a system seems to be a mark of its philosophical significance for

Hegel. A formal structure like that attributed to Schelling has only “monotony and abstract

universality” as the absolute Concept (PG 16). It is quite easy to “master the absolute standpoint
 Joyce 41

and to keep hold of it” when we only need posit that “in the Absolute everything is the same”

(PG 16). This view of the absolute, for Hegel, is not only the perspective that “palm[s] off its

Absolute as the night in which… all cows are black,” but it is the quite literal blacking-out of all

qualitative distinctions that make absolute knowing an actual knowing (PG 16). What fashions

together the disparate content of the absolute into the whole is “nothing other than the essence

consummating itself through its development” (PG 20). This imbues the absolute with its

essential content, indeed, the entirety of its absolute content.

In one of Hegel’s most quoted lines in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, what is

often ignored is the preceding line: “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life

has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of

Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”51 In this line we see a

return to the aesthetic themes found in the Phenomenology. The birth of a new form of knowing

is dependent on the destruction, or the greying, of the past essentiality. Like a Passion painting

long forgotten on the stone walls of a cathedral, the blues have faded to black and the reds to

grey. In its place, the whole remains intact. There is nothing about the Absolute’s structure that

disappears, for the structure is dependent on the reason or logic that underlies the relation of its

parts. But from the greyed remains of the old world, there arises a new one that subsumes under

it what came before. In the Science of Logic, the destruction of the old metaphysic that

suppressed the true pursuit of knowledge “had been brushed aside, existence seemed to be

transformed into the sunny land of flowers—and, as we know, no flowers are black” (SL 34).

The most egregious example of the monochromatic account of the Absolute comes from

Kant. Kant’s formalism only shows the logical functions of cognition as they relate to possible

51
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde, (London: G. Bell, 1896), accessed 4/20/2019,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/preface.htm.
 Joyce 42

experience. The content of that cognition is ultimately irrelevant insofar as all objects fall under

the a priori faculties that make knowledge of appearances possible. Hegel, however, shows the

objective nature of the subjective logical thought.

Though Hegel sets his objective philosophy apart from Kant’s, it is wrong to suggest that

Kant never saw his transcendental idealism as objective. Any knowledge of an object of

experience for Kant must be thought by the categories of the Understanding. Kant spends the

first half of the first Critique establishing how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible and what

authority it has to think about objects. Synthetic a priori knowledge is the key to unlocking how

the “subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity” (B 122). But to reach this

objective state of knowledge, all objects must relate themselves to a central principle that allows

the understanding to unify its representations. The fundamental unifying principle is the

subjective state of pure apperception. To know an object is to say that I think this object. Kant is

explicit in the second edition of the first Critique that the “I think” must accompany all of our

representations (B 131-B 132). By having a subjective principle provide the form for knowledge

of the object, knowledge becomes possible. Without “original apperception” (compared to the

empirical apperception of Descartes which does not explain a priori the laws of cognition) “the

mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed thinks

this identity a priori, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act” (A 108). The a

priori rules of cognition require that there be a universal standpoint from which all formal rules

can form a synthetic unity that is thought of an object in general.

This is not the case for Hegel, however. For Hegel, objective validity does not arise from

the formal capacities of the Understanding to pass judgment on a manifold representation. The

formal nature of Kantian philosophy posits a “dichotomy” between the capacities of the intellect
 Joyce 43

and the Absolute.52 Dichotomy arises historically in any given era of philosophy as the syllogism

of what the Absolute appears to be for that era and Absolute as the independent, fixed origin of

knowing. The middle term connecting the two is the purpose or “the need of philosophy.”53

Hegel continues in the Differenzschrift, “the intellect, as the capacity to set limits, erects a

building and places it between man and the Absolute, linking everything that man thinks worth

and holy to this building, fortifying it through all the powers of nature and talent and expanding

it ad infinitum  and so mocks itself.”54 Thus Kantian philosophy, as the pure explication of these

mediums of the understanding that stand between the Absolute and absolute knowing limits

reason’s ability to grasp the Absolute.

To tie this Kantian theme back into our discussion of the aesthetics of cognition in the

phenomenology, we see that all that is familiar to a particular era of philosophy takes on a grey,

monochromatic formalism. The life of Reason as the life of Spirit does not manifest itself in such

formalism. To borrow again from the Differenzschriften: “The necessary dichotomy is One

factor in life. Life eternally forms itself by setting up oppositions, and totality at the highest pitch

of living energy (in der höchsten Lebendigkeit) is only possible through its own re-establishment

out of the deepest fission.”55 Hegel’s philosophy makes it possible to express life, difference,

death, and the negative in terms of the aesthetic. In doing so, he does away with the contingent

and the formal as a barrier to knowledge in favor of a cultural education of the individual. It is

this aesthetic sphere of knowing that unifies the content of the Absolute as something familiar to

spiritual consciousness and makes into something contingent. But even in this contingency as

52
G. W. F. Hegel, Differenzschrift, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), accessed
4/20/2019, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/fs/ch01.htm.
53
Hegel’s emphasis. Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
 Joyce 44

something negative, there is a self-movement of knowledge that sublates what was previously

essential for it and relates itself to that previous cognition.

Conclusion

This section has served two key purposes. First, it established Hegel’s project and argument in

the Phenomenology. As his first major work, the Phenomenology set the course for his thought.

It is for this reason that I argue we must understand the Phenomenology as a crucial text for

Hegel’s later work on the philosophy of history. The second purpose of this chapter was to

illustrate precisely the nature of Hegel’s historical metaphysics. History for Hegel is not only his

world-historical philosophy. Rather, all of human cognition and knowledge relates itself to

history as the development of concepts in Spirit. Each moment of Spirit relates itself to what

came before as both the inessential part that has been rejected and the essential step in its

coming-to-be. Thus when we seek to understand history, we must not merely take what is

essential for us as the Absolute. For any given moment is replete with contingencies and

contradictions. Only by understanding the development of our own time through the

development of Spirit can we understand the determinate nature of historical development. Thus

the issues of Hegel’s philosophy of history that I mentioned in the intro are negated as

misappropriations of Hegel’s world-historical philosophy to his historical metaphysic that is

more fundamental to his philosophy of history. Whether this means Hegel’s philosophy of

history is valid remains to be seen. In the next chapter, I shall observe Hegel’s own applications

of his philosophy of history qua historical metaphysics to a particular moment in the 19th century

intellectual history.
 Joyce 45

Chapter 3: Applying Hegel’s Philosophy of History to the Particular in

Hegel on Hamann

In the first chapter, I outlined in brief some of the prevailing general criticisms of Hegel’s

philosophy of history. Having given a detailed exposition of Hegel’s overall project in the

Phenomenology as an historical metaphysic, I shall now respond to one of those criticisms. In

particular, I push back against the criticism that Hegel’s philosophy of history is a “totalizing

view of history.” According to this view of Hegel’s philosophy, the truth of historical

development cannot be questioned from an external point.56 The view of Hegel’s philosophy as a

totalizing system was not only taken up by the French post-structuralists, but also by so called

thinkers of modernity during the mid-century such as Erich Voegelin who criticized Hegel’s

philosophy as a form of Gnosticism in Wissenschaft, Politik, und Gnosticismus. In this short

work on the rise of modern political science, he claims that Hegel makes the impossible “leap

over the bounds of the finite into the perfection of actual knowing.” 57 For Voegelin, this gave

rise to, first, socialism and then the national socialism of 1930s Germany, both of which held

similar totalizing ideas about history as being a closed system. In contemporary historiographic

analyses of Hegel, we see a similar criticism of the world-historical position as “condoning

precisely such ‘world historical deeds’—the rape of continents, the destruction of cultures, the

poisoning of the environment… [through] pseudo-historical language of imperialism [to describe

populations in terms of] Prehistory.”58 I shall show how, in its practical employment, Hegel’s

own historical analysis avoids this totalizing view by taking each individual moment in history

and seeing that even within a given moment, there are a manifold of historical pressures that

56
For a outline of the French response to the totalizing view of Hegel’s philosophy, see Brent Adkins, “Hegel and
French Post-Structuralism,” in G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts, 222-233.
57
Erich Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays, (New York, Regnery Publishing, 2012), 41-42.
58
Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
 Joyce 46

weigh upon any given moment of history. As a historiographical project, meaning a theory for

the interpretation of history, Hegel’s central goal is indeed the movement towards a world-

historical theory. However, Hegel does not flatly ignore the individual moments of history as

defined by the interaction between individual actors, material realities, and the not-so-great men

of history. In a word, Hegel must make room for the particulars of any given moment in history

if he is to hold any broader universal view of history. These are of central importance to Hegel in

exactly the same way that the Moments of consciousness are vital for the Phenomenology’s

project. However, when historians (or even philosophers in general) get caught in these

particularities, our ideas about any given historical moment run the risk of becoming abstract

particulars. I shall show what Hegel means by this term, how it relates to his metaphysics, and

ultimately how observing history as the rejection of these abstract particulars gives us a more

meaningful concept of historical development beyond Hegel’s own world-historical thesis.

The personality of J. G. Hamann hung over the late-Enlightenment like a specter.

Relatively unknown in the modern day compared to the more famous thinkers like Jacobi,

Mendelsohn, and Kant, Hamann was, nevertheless, significant in helping shape the late-

Enlightenment response to the Spinozist Controversy. Hamann never published a book, nor did

he hold any academic office nor receive widespread public attention.59 The few works that he did

publish were often short and nearly incomprehensible in their esoteric style and idiosyncrasy. If

one were to publish a collection of Hamann’s work alongside explanatory notes for all of the

allusions, metaphors, obscurantisms, and esoteric patterings with which Hamann imbues his

work, the volume of notes would easily exceed the works themselves.60 One need only observe

the sheer volume of notes in Kenneth Hayes’ recent collection of Hamann’s writings on
59
GWF Hegel, Hegel on Hamann, trans. Lisa Marie Anderson, (Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2008),
31.
60
Ibid., 40.
 Joyce 47

Language to see how a short essay like the Metacritique of the Purism of Reason (originally

published as seven pages61) becomes a cumbersome morass of obscure biblical references and

explanations that are only elucidated from personal correspondences after publication.62 Despite

these shortcomings to Hamann’s academic status, nearly all of the major thinkers of the time

engaged with Hamann’s formidable and acerbic personality.63 From his influence on his students

Herder and Goethe,64 to his arguments with Jacobi over the nature of faith,65 to being the first to

read and respond to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,66 to his tenuous friendship with

Mendelssohn,67 etc. we can see Hamann as essential figure in the Aufklärung’s development.

Hamann is significance to the concerns of this paper. This may be surprising to those who

have even a minor knowledge of Hamann. Hamann was not a philosopher of history nor did he

make any personal contributions to post-Kantian idealism (he pre-dated Hegel’s rise fame twenty

or so years). When Hamann and Hegel’s names are brought up together, it usually relates to the

superficial similarities of their philosophies, not so much their differences.68 It is largely thanks

to Lisa Anderson’s recent translation of Hegel’s review of Hamann’s collected works that we are

able to read first-hand how Hegel compared himself to the Magus of the North.69 I present

Hegel’s response to Hamann’s life and work as a novel and powerful example of how Hegel

analyzes the history of philosophy. In his brief history of Hamman’s life, we see the ways that

the individual moments of history relate to the development of 18 and 19th century intellectual

history. Primarily, it is important for Hegel to show whether Hamman’s work was actually

61
Ibid., 36.
62
Ibid., 41.
63
Beiser, Fate of Reason, 16.
64
Ibid., 16.
65
Hegel, On Hamann, 20.
66
Beiser, Fate of Reason, 38.
67
Hegel, On Hamann, 26.
68
Fate of Reason ch. 1.
69
This was Hamann’s pen name.
 Joyce 48

significant in the development of the philosophy at the time by giving an analysis of Hamman’s

material, personal, and social history. Far from only being concerned with the idea of a totalizing

view of history, Hegel is very interested in understanding the moment of history that Hamman

occupied and relating his philosophical contributions to the state of philosophy as it was in the

18th century Berlin Enlightenment.

I mentioned the idea of abstract particularity at the start of this chapter. This concept of is

important for Hegel, for it builds off of many of the themes that we saw in chapter 2. By

abstraction, I mean roughly what Hegel outlines in his brief essay Who Thinks Abstractly? By

abstract thinking, Hegel does not mean the work of philosophers who try to draw out their ideas

to their most rigorous conclusions through reason. Let alone do Hegel mean metaphysics! Hegel

exclaims,  “for metaphysics is a word, no less than abstract,  and almost thinking as well, from

which everybody more or less runs away as from a man who has caught the plague.”70

Abstraction of thought is something far more sinister than metaphysics. To think abstractly is to

not think historically about our concepts. In Who Thinks Abstractly? Hegel uses the analogy of a

criminal on the gallows. When an abstract thinker looks at the criminal, they see only the most

abstract particular conceivable: That this man could be anything other than a murder “is the

corruption of morals.”71 Thus when one tries to trace “the development of the criminal’s mind…”

his history, education, the abuses he endured as a child, “there may be people who will say when

they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer!”72 To think only in terms of the abstract

70
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. “Who Thinks Abstractly,” in Hegel, Reinterpretation: Texts and Commentary.
Trans. Walter Kaufmann, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966),
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/abstract.htm.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.
 Joyce 49

particular is “to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to

annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.”73

Hegel sees Hamann’s philosophy as exemplifying the way philosophical ideas come to

embrace abstract particularity. Hamann’s place in the Aufklärung is as an individual figure who

was unable to make move past his own individuality to make his philosophical criticism

sociable. Even though Hamann was intimately involved in the philosophical debates happening

in the Berlin philosophical circles at the time, he was never able to pull whatever actual

contributions he made to philosophy out of the vacuum of his own individuality. This in turn

makes his philosophy impossible to adequately interpret.

Despite of all of the contributions to philosophical criticism that Hamman made in his

time, Hegel is skeptical about Hamann’s actual contributions to the advancement of philosophy.

When we consider any particular contribution that we as academics and thinkers make to our

field, we are attentive to the demand that our individual egos should be subsumed under the

claims that we try to make about our subject matters. Whether it is philosophy, history, political

science, or any other discipline, we must not allow individuality to overshadow the certainty of

our claims. Or, In the case of political writing, the self-serving drive to obscure the truth in order

to promote our ideology is the most egregious abuse of the public sphere. In history as well,

personal histories and claims about the individual nature of a given event for its own sake hardly

constitutes the proper use or method of historiography. Rather, it only gives the barest assertion

of facts as meaningful without properly understanding their intricate relation to the development

of society or a nation. Hegel agrees with this view in Vernunft und die Geschichte where he says

about reflective history, “it has no other purpose than to present the totality of country’s

73
Ibid.
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history… But the individuality of spirit which must characterize a writer is frequently not in

accord with the spirit that runs through the period he writes about. The spirit that speaks out of

the writer is quite different from the times he describes.”74 This results in the individuality of the

author overpowering the history of the era.

Hamann falls right into the trap of individuality and egoism. Indeed, Hagel’s text on the

writings of Hamann, is less a biography and memoriam of a monumental thinker of Hegel’s time

than it is a cautionary account of how philosophy can commit the cardinal sin of being right

without being true. Hegel writes,

Hamman’s authorial character, to which we now proceed, needs no special representation

or assessment, since it consists solely in expression of the personal singularity which we

have described thus far, and rarely transcends that singularity to arrive at an objective

content. Our editor [or the collection of Hamann’s writings], in his apt characterization

of Hamann’s writings, says that they were received upon their publication with esteem

and admiration by only a few, by most rather indifferently as unenjoyable or ever with

disdain as the works of an enthusiast. As for us, already Hamann’s posterity, we may find

both—an awareness of both respect and unenjoyability—intermingled, the unenjoyability

perhaps to a greater extent for us than was the case for Hamann’s contemporaries, for

whom the abundance of particularities with which his works are filled could still hold

more interest and also more comprehensibility than for us.75

There is little to no chance that Hamann’s work could be entirely comprehensible to us who are

no longer immediately involved with the spirit of Hamann’s time and the way his individuality

74
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History,
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 6.
75
Hegel, On Hamann, 31.
 Joyce 51

interacted with that spirit. Thus any actual truth that Hamann’s work produces in the

“ingeniousness of the form that gives the compact content its brilliance” produces also “not an

exposition, but merely an expansion consisting of subjective particularities, self-important

vagaries, and abstruse bantering… which could neither please nor interest his friends, much less

the general public.”76 Hamann’s abstract particularity of thought limits his actual contributions to

philosophizing, and any truth amounts to nothing more than an unimportant vessel for Hamann’s

personal posturing.

How is any of this analysis important for Hegel’s view of history? While Hegel does not

present On Hamann as an explicitly historical text, I believe it provides a valuable insight into

how Hegel analyzes moments of history through his historical metaphysic. On the one hand, we

see in On Hamann a constant concern, not for the universal truth of philosophy outside of the

Berlin Enlightenment, but for the way Hamann’s individuality relates to the spirit of the Berlin

Enlightenment. As Anderson says in her introductory essay to the translation, “Hegel devotes a

surprising amount of attention to Hamann’s personal life [and especially his friendships with the

Berlin Aufklärer]…. Thus, it seems fitting to consider the role that friendship plays” in

Hamann’s life.77 I propose to expand our understanding of Hegel’s review beyond the theme of

friendship to Hamann’s relationship to the ideas of the other thinkers of the time using the

framework of the temporality and sociability of Hamann’s philosophy.

For one, the way Hegel analyzes Hamann’s life and work is limited primarily to the

beginning and end of Hamann’s life.78 This puts the majority of Hegel’s analysis before

Hamann’s Socratic memorabilia and after Golgotha and Sheblimini.79 This severely limits the

76
Ibid., 33.
77
Ibid., xxi.
78
Ibid., xiv.
79
Ibid., xv.
 Joyce 52

temporal nature of Hegel’s historical analysis. However, this is in conformity to a qualification to

my initial thesis that temporality does not constitute a significant element of Hegel’s philosophy

of history beyond merely stating that A happens, then B. If I can show that Hegel’s analysis is

still useful when viewed in terms of the sociability of Hamann’s ideas, then I feel I will have

adequately shown the proper deployment of Hegel’s historical metaphysic to interpretation of

historical moments.

The crux of Hegel’s analysis in On Hamann is on the proper interpretation of religion and

religious experience. For Hamann, religion and language are intrinsically linked to one another.

This makes it surprising for Anderson that Hegel disregards language, which is “so clearly

essential for [Hamann’s] views on religion…, which are a real focal point for Hegel.”80 All of

Hamann’s views on religion, especially his view that religious “exegesis depends on… ‘a

positive foundation’ which is not’ a doctrinal formula contained in literal words…’ but rather

‘only the beginning of his faith, essential to its animating application, for its formation,

expression, and concretization.’”81 This animating principle for Hamann, keeping in line with

Hamann’s doctrinal affinities for Luther, is “essentially [one’s] own individual spirit.”82 Hegel

disagrees with this individualist interpretation of God in favor of the idea of God as a “balled

core of truth” this is constantly unfolding into “a system of nature, into a system of the state, of

justice and morality, into a system of world history….”83 Human nature has the “capacity,

according to its nature, first to transcend the surface of divine unfolding, or rather to enter into

this unfolding by way of reflection on it, and then to ponder this divine unfolding.”84 Reflection,

here, is essentially the task that Hegel sets out in the Phenomenology of understanding how a

80
Ibid., xvi.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid., 39.
84
Ibid.
 Joyce 53

fully developed notion of, say, consciousness relates to the individual steps on the path towards

its developed end.

For the analysis of history, this reflection does not need to only make reference to the

fully developed world-historical concept of the end of history. Rather, as we see in On Hamann,

the reflection is concerned with the way Hamann’s individual philosophy relates to the

Enlightenment as a whole:

What is interesting to note, under the circumstances which Hamann comes to discuss, is

his relationship to and his opinion of philosophy. He has to depend upon it, because the

theological drive of his time is immediately connected to philosophy and, first and

foremost, to Wolffian philosophy…. Hamann’s deepseeing genius is recognizable in the

fact that he rightly regards those Wolffian determinations as only a display, ‘in order to

enact a beggarly law of nature which is barely worth mentioning and conforms neither to

the state of society nor to the matter of Judaism [in Mendelssohn’s interpretation of

Wolff].85

Whether Hegel’s analysis of Wolffian philosophy is valid holds little weight in my consideration.

As I have said in chapter 1, I take a more intentional approach to understanding a thinker’s

argument. This means that trying to understand whether a thinker’s argument is valid is less

important than try to understand the importance that their argument has on understanding their

world view.86 So in analyzing Hegel’s moves here, I see an attempt to place Hamann into the

context of post-Wolffian philosophy. By doing so, Hegel leaves Hamann and the Berlin

Enlightenment open for an analysis and criticism of their nature, intentions, and significance in

the larger historical scheme of the late-Enlightenment. While Hegel does attempt to place this
85
Ibid., 35.
86
I assume that this is what is partially meant by internalist hermeneutics.
 Joyce 54

analysis into a larger teleological framework, we see that he is nonetheless concerned with how

this particular moment in history stands in its own relation to what came before and after it.

In regard to the sociability of Hamann’s work, we have already seen multiple cases where

his individuality hinders him from engaging with the spirit of the Berlin Enlightenment at the

time. In this way, it is impossible for Hamann’s work to become a simple concept for Hegel.

Again, I interpret a simple concept as being a moment that was once significant for individuals in

the past. But due to the way that concepts develop for Hegel, the once essential concept become

inessential due to the development knowledge. Wolffian philosophy was simple in Hegel’s time

precisely because of the way Kantian philosophy was able to illustrate its contradictions.87

Hamann, due to his individuality and abstract particularity, lacks any coherent content that could

possibly be considered part of the essential makeup of the Berlin Enlightenment.

87
Hegel, Difference, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/fs/preface.htm.
 Joyce 55

Conclusion

Over the course of this essay, I have advocated for a revised account of Hegel’s philosophy of

history. As opposed to the view that Hegel’s philosophy of history amounts only to his ideas

about the end of history, I have illustrated how he can think of history in terms of Hegelian

moments. These moments are merely events in history. An event only constitutes a part of a

moment, and is therefore less significant for how we categorize our thoughts about history. A

moment is something that can be thought for Hegel. We can reflect on moments, pick them apart

and compare them to one another, ponder their significance for the present, and ultimately see

how one moment relates to all of the others in a long string of development. Moments belong to

thought, and when we consider them in this way, we are able to track the logical consistencies

between events that lead from one to another. And yes, Hegel is concerned with the way history

leads towards greater and greater freedom. The real significance that Hegel’s metaphysic of

moments has is in our ability to consider each one as being both self-contained and necessarily

related to something larger, i.e. the whole of historical development.

I have shown how Hegel fits into the Enlightenment project of uniting philosophy and

history. I have also shown the individual contribution that Hegel makes to this historicizing

project by making philosophy a historical medium that is both temporal and social. For ideas to

be social, they must be comprehensible to the common intellect. This means that our analysis of

any moment in history requires a thorough analysis of particular ideas and thinkers of the time

and their relation to what ultimately resulted from those ideas later in that development. We can

indeed step outside of the Hegelian call for an end to history. But in doing so, we are ultimately

either drawn to an abstract particularity that only sees the individual elements of history for
 Joyce 56

themselves. Or we can stand above these individualities and take note of how each relates to one

another in the larger scheme of historical development. Only in doing so does history become

something determinate. We can understand and compare our histories of moments and take note

of what is ultimately essential in each. Maybe we can have done with the divinity of Hegel.

Maybe we can replace it with a better understanding of his method as opposed to his goal.
 Joyce 57

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