The historiosophies of Hegel and Spengler, compared

Again, going back to Hegel and reading him with a bit more subtlety than I was wont to before, I am finding that he is indeed a much more complicated thinker than many of his conservative critics (even the Russian ones) allege. This much is true: he did believe that history had a progressive direction, and he did believe that we are moving towards truth. But he did not buy so wholly into the Whiggish myth of progress as some might imagine – which may be one reason why he continues to be so broadly misunderstood. He didn’t proclaim an ‘end of history’. Hegel did not pretend to know what the truth was or what the final unfolding of the Logos in history would look like, even if in his more chauvinistic moments he imagined that the German nation – what with its refined sense of social responsibility and its balanced constitutional Prussian monarchy – might, at some point in the future, attain to it. Also: the commonly-perpetuated idea of his system consisting of a triad of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ in a continuous upbuilding form is not actually Hegel’s but Fichte’s – this ‘triad’ plays no rôle in Hegel’s philosophy of history. For Hegel the process by which the Logos unfolds in history is swathed in the mystical – much like Hölderlin’s! – and it is incomprehensible except in retrospect:

Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen. Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey-in-grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva begins its flight, only when the shades of twilight are gathering.

Hegel’s philosophy of history does posit an objective dimension, something which is not seen in the ontological grounding of the historiosophies of Liang Shuming or Oswald Spengler. Liang Shuming’s fundamental understanding of the workings of the cosmos – his metaphysics and ontology – was Buddhist, derived from Yogācāra and had as its basis a profound consciousness of the impermanence of any singular truth. Spengler’s ontological grounding was derived from Goethe and Nietzsche, and had an existentialist dimension: he agreed with Liang in his consciousness of impermanence of truth, but also claimed that the truth was something which had to inhere in the ‘great man’ in history. They have a similar form, however, to Hegel’s. Hegel does find within the tragœdies of history – the birth and life and death of civilisations – steps toward this truth. Hegel’s ‘reason’ may be cosmopolitan, universal and absolute; but the concrete instances through which this reason proceeds are entirely subjective: and here he is actually more in agreement with Spengler and Liang than he is with a rationalist and optimist like Kant. Hegel had little truck with democratic peace theory in his day. He would have far less with the neoconservative fever dreams of an eternal Pax Americana, despite some of these people attempting to claim him for themselves.

Even if he did not use the triad which is famously – though wrongly – attributed to him, Hegel saw reason unfolding in history through successions of historical stages, each one containing the seeds of its own destruction. This is something that Marx, by the way, borrowed directly from his teacher and never really revised, even when he ‘stood Hegel on his head’. It is to Hegel’s credit that his understanding of this unfolding did not shy away from instances of historical tragœdy.

It’s first necessary to understand that Hegel saw the unfolding of reason in the human life in terms similar to those of Confucius. The moral life is bound up in Sittlichkeit: one learns to be moral through the concrete habits and rituals of a particular setting. The child learns to be moral within the ambit of her family. As the family interacts with neighbours, reason is elevated to the level of the Gesellschaft, the civil society. And as forms of civil society come into contact with each other, reason becomes the responsibility of the state. For Hegel, this is the highest expression of human reason, as it develops organically within the human life. Hegel shares, at least in this case, in the romanticism of Spengler (which is in fact also the romanticism of Goethe, Hölderlin and – by Spengler’s logic – Plato), insofar as he considers the development of reason, even within states, to be an organic, living process – a natural extension of the imperfect reasoning of the individual.

He was well aware, indeed painfully aware, that instances of concrete reason expressed within states would come to loggerheads with each other. Hegel was not a pacifist, and still less an advocate of Kant’s ideology of democratic peace. For Hegel, the fact of the existence of states lent itself to a realist understanding of foreign policy. Even if there was an absolute, an objective truth out there, it could only ever be imperfectly grasped by the organisms of states, cultures, civilisations… and wars between states were the result of this imperfect striving after reason. Even so, Hegel is trying to bridge romanticism with realism in a particular way. Hegel does not (and with good reason!) want to give up the ultimate teleological bent of his project. Despite his doubts about the ability of reason to be finalised within history, he is still far too good a rationalist – still too good a disciple of Kant – to be able to bring to bear an ontological critique of Kantian Vernunft.

Spengler approaches history from a similar direction, but he radicalises the imperfection of human reason when he cites Goethe and his philosophy of becoming – in fact, an iteration of Platonic philosophy – as inspiration for his approach to history. By focussing entirely on the specific, the concrete, the living expressions of culture, in other words – rather than fixed principles which are for him the forms of the non-living – Spengler is adapting a sceptical, non-objective ontology similar to Liang Shuming’s yogic dharmism and, in a more attenuated way, Konstantin Leont’ev’s highly-stylised and -æstheticised Byzantinism. The wry echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche in the thought of all three men are not accidental… but there is another, unacknowledged source for this ontology. Spengler begins describing time in ways that carry eerie echoes of his French contemporary, Henri Bergson. Spengler comes to strikingly similar conclusions to Bergson in L'Évolution créatrice, about the ways in which the intuitive approach to history (which he prefers) is at odds with a ‘mechanical’, ratiocinating, frame-by-frame historical analysis.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e. organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection…

I was originally brought to reflect on this fundamental question of our world-consciousness through noticing how present-day historians as they fumble round tangible events, things-become, believe themselves to have already grasped History, the happening, the becoming itself. This is a prejudice common to all who proceed by reason and cognition, as against intuitive perception… Life, perpetually fulfilling itself as an element of becoming, is what we call ‘the present’, and it possesses that mysterious property of ‘direction’, which men have tried to rationalise by means of the enigmatic word ‘time’.

Personally, I feel am closer to Hegel (and Plato, and thus also Marx) on this question than I am to Spengler (or Bergson). I do acknowledge the Logos, as an objective Truth that precedes and undergirds the entire cosmos, and which lies in wait for us at the end of all things. But that is not to say that Spengler does not have a point. The question of personality in history is something which Spengler takes very much to heart, examining the force of personality in the ‘great men’ of history: Cæsar, Napoleon and Cecil Rhodes. Hegel was clearly not immune to this sort of historical thinking either, having famously peered out from Jena toward a certain Corsican on horseback! But Spengler looks directly to this kind of dynamism and force of the individual will in history in itself, stamping marks upon entire epochs, particularly enjoying the majesty of the power vertical and the flourishing diversity of forms and modes of life that takes place underneath it. He is drawn, just as Glaukon in the Republic is drawn, to question the ability of justice to provide the fine things in the life of a city.

We have a need for both the Hegelian, and the Spenglerian-Bergsonian, attitudes toward history. We should never fool ourselves into believing glibly that our current social order is in some way the most important, most moral, most rational. Spengler’s bucket of cold water on that conceit is fully warranted – but so are his (and Bergson’s) gentle reminders that we historians are not so much clock-winders and calendar-turners as we are custodians of a living garden as well as of botanical samples that were once alive. I would like to think – but I cannot know for sure until I’ve finally tackled Hegel’s Geschichtsphilosophie itself – that the elder German would agree. Spengler’s here-and-now, present-focussed historical consciousness is badly needed in our day, as both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ fool themselves into believing we can either reason our way backward to a more rational point of national glory in our past, or reason our way forward painlessly into an ever more-liberated Gnostic-libertine ‘woke’ future. But we can also use a modified Hegelian assurance that there is an end, that our work even if not complete does have a certain final form. Even – and especially – if we do not know what that is!