Richard Bourke on Hegel's Philosophy of History
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is often said to have believed that history is determined, that its inevitable course was laid out from the start. But Richard Burke, professor of the history of political thought at Cambridge, says this is a misconception about Hegel's view of history.

And it's not the only one. Richard Burke, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. The topic we're going to look at today is Hegel's philosophy of history. Now, obviously, that's a big subject and Hegel is not an easy thinker to get a handle on. Could you begin by just saying a little bit about who Hegel was before we get on to his philosophy of history?

Yes, well, you're right, it's a very large topic. But to say something generally about Hegel, Hegel was born in Württemberg in 1770, and he died in Prussia in 1831. Two really dominant events in his life, A, the fact that he was 19 at the outbreak of the French Revolution, and its complicated course dominated much of his life. That's number one. But number two, he was a late contemporary of Immanuel Kant's.

And Kant's own philosophical project was itself regarded by him, bless to say Hegel and his contemporaries, as itself a massive revolutionary event. And I think these two historical happenings, Kant and the French Revolution, cast, if you like, a shadow over his career. That's how I'd frame, I think, Hegelgemini.

Maybe you could say a little bit about each of those, because there are different ways of taking the French Revolution, and there are different ways you could characterise Kant's revolutionary thought. First of all, let's take the French Revolution. Hegel is standardly taken as being a sort of cheerleader for the revolution, and I think that's a simplification at best. Hegel thought that

the French Revolution was an index of a positive historical development, but that the events of the revolution itself were, broadly speaking, a series of catastrophic eruptions, really. So there wasn't much to applaud. He wasn't a Girondin. He wasn't a Jacobin. He wasn't Napoleonic. He was, in fact, critical of Napoleon.

So there wasn't much in point of fact to admire. So he thought the abolition of a feudal world was a positive thing, but that was happening anyway in European history for the previous 200 years. It wasn't specifically associated with the French Revolution. So symbolically, the French Revolution was great insofar as it signaled the end of an era. But in point of fact, the way in which it ushered in a new world was by violence, bloodshed, and...

and blind experimentalism, most of which ended in tears. So that's an important point to make. That's that correction. Second of all, Kant, that's enormously complicated. We're certainly a great admirer of Kant, and it would be difficult not to be. He saw Kant as transforming really especially moral consciousness.

Hegel was above all about moral and political transformations in the world. And so he saw Kant as part of that, part of a recognition of the fact that human beings were responsible for their own morality and generated their own moral norms.

That is to say, morality didn't come from interpreting objective nature or reading the mind of God. Rather, morality was a product of autonomy. That's to say, the auto-generation of norms by human beings. Now, Kant thought that was simply a latent possibility within human beings, whereas Hegel thought that was a gradual historical accomplishment of human beings.

that we gradually grew into our autonomy over the course of world history. So whilst Kant was very much a

philosopher's philosopher, interested in the fundamental rational structures of consciousness. Hegel was far more interested in the historical becoming of rational possibilities within human consciousness. So he was at once a philosopher, an historian, which I suppose brings us to our subject, why history was so important to him.

Absolutely. So this is at the heart of what we want to discuss. So why did he approach his understanding of humanity through this, what can seem quite bizarre, description of phases of revolution or evolution? Why did he go about it that way?

Well, in being interested in history, he was above all interested in human development. He didn't want to think of these developments, or history itself, as simply being what had happened to us. He wanted, of course, it is partly what happened to us, stuff happens,

but he also wanted to examine history as something in which we were participants. That's to say, he very much wanted to get away from empiricism as a view of consciousness as a process of passive reception. He saw human beings as active in their own history. Now, they didn't make history just as they chose, but nonetheless, they did play a role in the making of their history. And so he was interested in the process of

of historical construction over time by human beings. And you're right, he saw this as happening in phases. These phases were a process of graduation whereby we increasingly acquired more rational control in our own historical drama. So the stages are very much those advances in human rationality.

So I suppose this gets us into the controversial areas of Hegelist. You know, he saw history as a progressive narrative. And from the middle of the 20th century, people became increasingly skeptical about this sort of progressive narrative. What I would say is that his stories, actual stories, narrative, is not so controversial as we're given to ordinarily believe. Thus to say, he thinks...

that there is something better about the stages of human development, some of which is extraordinarily uncontroversial, that there's been scientific progress. Post-Newtonian Europe is doing rather better than earlier, you know, superstitious versions of groping around. But he also wants to say that our institutions of government have improved.

Is that so staggeringly controversial? I mean, who wants to say that modern Europe is preferable to ancient China, preferable to ancient Greece and Rome, because they were slave-based societies, preferable to the most primitive forms of human existence for various reasons that one

could get into. Now 21st century readers react with dismay about this but by the way it's nothing Hume wasn't saying, there's nothing Voltaire wasn't saying, there's nothing Adam Smith wasn't saying. They also thought that modern civilization was preferable to rudimentary primitivism. So beginning there it's not as mad as we might think.

Well, I suppose one of the objections is that on many readings, Hegel is saying it's necessarily moving in this direction. And that is controversial because we can go backwards as well as forwards, it seems.

Absolutely. Now, this is an additional layer of complexity and controversy. That's to say, is Hegel a fatalist or a necessitarian or determinist, one might just say? In other words, was a pattern set at the beginning of time and there was, as it were, metaphorically speaking, an original puppet master and we're just functionaries in the drama?

Now, it's very important to say that that is not what Hegel is saying. He is not a determinist or predeterminist. It is not as though there is a demiurge who wrote a script and we're just playing it out. That can't be the case, simply because Hegel definitely believes that there are historical deviations. If there were scripts, there couldn't be. Or there are backward steps. He says, rückstritte. There are steps backward in time, and there are less preferable states in which one could be.

He wants to say that the outcome is necessary not because it was predetermined. His necessary outcome really means normatively justified outcome. So it's not necessary in the sense it was predetermined. Modern constitutionalism is for us necessary because it's normatively necessary by comparison with living in tribal societies which are basically patriarchal. They're no longer possible for us

we have rationally embraced what has somewhat contingently happened and therefore that's this model of necessity. That's my reading of Hegel, not everyone's. Could you just spell out what you mean by normatively justified? Because it's not obvious what that means.

Well, it's justified, let's say, a given form of spirit, as he puts it, a given life world, as we might say, a given language game in neo-Wittgensteinian rhetoric, a given language game might either be a contingent happening in a sea of possibilities,

And our world competes with all others and we have no grounds in which to argue that it's normatively preferable. Another way of saying that is no grounds in which to say it's normatively superior. It means the same thing. Hegel thinks there are reasons to think that our game of life, our form of spirit, is normatively justified in a way that others aren't.

because these have become non-viable by a process of being defeated world historically or dialectically as he would put it. They've been rationally defeated in our historical juncture. Now how he justifies that, in other words how he justifies the statement that our form of life is more justified,

is enormously complicated and will pose problems for him. But the point of a given language game being necessary is that it is justified. How is it justified? Because it has defeated other language games. Now, a model for that might be Einsteinianism has defeated Newtonianism. Now, we're used to that. So if you want to think of Hegel on that model as a process of trial and error has delivered us

a more sustainable worldview, you can see why that might be compelling. Then we can get into detail as to, are you seriously telling me that slave-based societies pose a normative challenge for us? Are you seriously telling me that a division of the world into discrete roles of male and female, woman does housework, man goes to work, is this normatively compelling for it? Now, actually, from a Ghanian point of view, for you to tell me these are equally compelling language games begins to look, hmm,

Do you even believe that yourself? I don't think you do. So if you start totting up what populates his form of spirit, his language game, it includes a system of rights,

a system of political representation, a separation of powers. If we add all these up, they do look rather compelling and we don't want to cash that in for rudimentary tribalism and daddy's the ruler and patriarchy is true. I'm trying to understand what this means for our assessment of what human beings are like in different ages, as it were. A naive view might be that

People in ancient Rome were not very different from us. They just had different technology and different information about the world, but they're basically the same as us. Am I right in thinking that Hegel would say, no, their minds are absolutely tied to their historical circumstances? It's not that you can time travel in that way into the mind of a Roman straightforwardly without taking on board far more than just the difference in technology.

Well, there are many factors which determine historical change. There's technological change, as you just said. There's various other forms of cultural change. And Hegel is interested in taking these epochal changes as a sort of whole, as a totality, as he puts it. And he thinks...

in a given culture the bits and pieces sort of hold together. Roman art hangs together with Roman constitutionalism and it hangs together with Roman society. Now the Roman world is indeed different from ours and there are fundamental differences so to that extent we are different types of human being but

I think he would want to say we are human beings all along and our humanity is defined in terms of our distinction from animality. We're specifically not animals. That's what a human being is, not an animal. And we're not animals because we have this thing called consciousness. And this thing called consciousness is a latent or active human capacity whereby we can diverge from instinct.

that's basically what it is for him. So we are therefore sites of choice, whereas most instinctive creatures are not. They do the instinctive thing that the animals do. As a result of choice, we therefore deviate from our original formation and begin to reform ourselves. So a human being is...

is such a creature as can remake itself. That's the crucial thing for him. And history has been the process of human beings remaking themselves over time. That's a long process. As we move on from one state of consciousness to another, we do preserve bits of this older world. So we have bits of Rome. From Rome we get

many sort of legal concepts, notions of rights. But there is a crucial deviation from the Romans, which is the Roman concept of a person includes the notion that I am a person because these people over there, we call them people, these things over there are actually born slaves. So built into the Roman notion of citizenship and personhood

is the concept of a non-person which we call humans. So the very fact that we have an inclusive concept of humanity and the Romans very specifically didn't means that we have a different conception of human beings and therefore we're different humans. Does this process of change keep going forever? Is it perpetual or does it reach a final culmination at some point?

Well, that's a great question because Hegel's associated with this notion of the end of history. I think I would put it in the following way. Human history is a process of human self-liberation over time from the Chinese through the Persians and Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, a gradual acquisition of insight to, if you like, a final moment of insight, which you might call the end of history, whereby we recognize, ah,

all human beings are human. Now that is in a sense the end of history because there's no epochal transformation in consciousness to happen. That's to say there's a final insight that if you think of world history as basically dividing into different epochs in which subspecies of humans are created, so caste-based societies, free and slave, that's most of world history after all.

I mean, we're just sort of the tale of this long development in which our tribe is human, that tribe is therefore definitely not really human. We have now finally seen, no, actually, we all participate in human drama. We're equally human within it.

That, however, in my view does not mean that there's no ongoing struggle. And so history does not really end in that comprehensive sense. We continue to struggle what it means to say we're all equally human. And that obviously has been a very major struggle since 1831 when Hegel himself died. So we go on to fight over that. But something has ended, but not really history as such.

So Hegel isn't determinist about history. He doesn't really think it comes to an abrupt end. Are there any other misconceptions of Hegel's philosophy of history that you want to get out of the way while we're here?

Well, I'd say the idea that we just construct the world in our image and our ideas make the world is a false view of Hegel. It's much more that the world is as it is and our ideas come to grasp it as it is and that there's therefore a benign coincidence between them.

idea and world. And therefore, you lose this sort of Kantian division between noumenal and phenomenal. I mean, after all, his phenomenology of spirit is a developmental account of how our perspectives on the world, how our various phenomenological readings ultimately dovetail with the truth of

phenomena become ultimately coincidental with the noumenal. That's the best way of seeing it. So our struggles, the labours of our consciousness to decode the meaning of the world overlap ultimately with the true version of the world. But that's not to say our heads make the world. The world is itself a world independent of us. So you've immersed yourself in Hegel's world, something that

takes a lot of energy and determination to get through because of the notoriously difficult language for a start. What do you think he got right and what do you think he got wrong in his view of history?

Well, that's a very important question. I think I'd put it this way, that there is just an enormous question about whether Hegel is possible after the Holocaust. So there is this affirmative story in Hegel. We might want to ask the question, why does he think it's important to have an affirmative story? In this, he was a Kantian, thus to say, if moral action is constitutionally irrational, if there's

no point in being a dutiful agent because it's systemically counterproductive. That just creates a problem with morality altogether. And Hegel is an inheritor of that notion that moral action can't be pointless or in Hegelian terms, history can't be completely pointless and therefore reason has to try and make sense of it.

Now of course much of the Hegelian world imploded in Germany between '33 and '45. The constitutional representative regime was blown out of the water. Weimar collapsed.

and collapsed into a discriminatory engine of bigotry and destruction, which divided the world into at least two human types. One human type was supposed to be the end of history, and now we have two human types again. How is that possible? That's the sharpest question you can put to Hegelianism. I'm not convinced myself that Hegel has no answer, but it's certainly highly debatable whether he's got a compelling answer.

And what about the best of Hegel? What is the best you can take away from Hegel and think, yeah, that was a profound insight? Well, I think the most profound and important insight he had was to at least argue that human beings are free agents in the process of the making of their own history. And that when we survey the past, we're surveying what we have made of that past.

Richard Burke, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.