Hegel and the Eternal Struggle for Freedom

By Scott Horton

Two hundred years ago this week the first pages of G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit made their appearance. This seminal work of the German idealist tradition revolves around some simple, but revolutionary concepts. Drawing on what already seemed apparent in the work of Herder and Kant, Hegel saw the slow, steady rise of mankind as a struggle for freedom—a process that liberated the human spirit and drew the human race forward. This struggle was unavoidable, even as the object was always unattainable—an ideal to be approached, but never achieved.

Hegel wrote at an ambiguous point in time. The promise of the Enlightenment had faded; in its place had come the terror of revolutionary France, and the nature-oriented reaction of romanticism in Germany. The Enlightenment had seeded both, but which was to be the true successor? Germany was racked with war, and Hegel was soon to live under hated French occupation. These facts seem somehow alive in the pages of the Phenomenology—for instance, in Hegel's observations about the curious interrelationship between creation and destruction. An old world is destroyed as a new one rises, he noted—citing the arc that bridges the seed and the fruit, and arc which we call the plant. And noting the curious Vedic legend of the dance of Lord Shiva, who created with one foot and destroyed with the other.

In the last decade, the world has witnessed genuine and false applications of the Hegelian evolutionary concept—which provides a basis to say that Hegel and his thinking have both helped and harmed the progress of mankind. The collapse of Communism (itself a construct on Hegelian foundations) fifteen years ago shattered the old bipolar world marked by the struggle between socialist and market systems. The market perspective triumphed. However, the political adjunct of the market system, liberal democracy, has had a less clear time of it. Francis Fukuyama demonstrated the vitality of the Hegelian model with his essay on the “End of History,” published in the National Interest in 1989, with its strong note of liberal democratic triumphalism. Fukuyama also marked the Neoconservative perversion of Hegel—an adaptation of Hegelian notions to suit the Neoconservative political agenda, with its special focus on the political and social transformation of the Middle East.

While Hegel assuredly is concerned with the building of state structures and the triumph of the concept of freedom, the invocation of his concept as authority for the Neocon project in the Middle East was more than a stretch. In fact it was almost completely at odds with the Hegelian view, which would require the demand for freedom as a demand of the popular spirit. The Neocons grafted their vision on to the Middle East—or worse still, they invoked a Hegelian vision to cloak what was in fact Neoimperialism. Hegel would have a clear prognosis for such a project: spectacular failure.

Today Francis Fukuyama tells us that the baton of leadership for the West has passed from America to Europe. “Europe, not the United States, is the history at the end of history.” That observation seems to state the obvious, and it presents a correction from the worst excesses of Fukuyama's 1989 piece. Significantly it demonstrates the vitality and utility of the Hegelian mode of analysis that started with The Phenomenology of the Spirit.

But Hegelian dialectics are often miscast and bridled to serve purposes Hegel never intended. The greatest historical example is provided by Marxism. Any serious student of Hegel knows that he would look askance at any attempt to put historical forces at the service of an alien political ideology—the failing of both the Marxists and the Neocons. Hegel is less concerned about a battle between theories and ideas (though doubtless they are important) and more about the forces of life—about a battle among the forces of life. Life produces the Images (Gestalten) of which he spoke. And only the living are capable of creating new worlds out of the old ones they destroy. Life is therefore essential as the force behind history and culture, science, religion and art—and also the eternal striving for freedom. Viewed in this way, Hegel's philosophy of history is pliable, pragmatic and reaches beyond the constraints of European intellectual history to which it is generally captive. Like the Romantic, Hegel tugs at the borders of his world. His writing resonates of Hölderlin (once Hegel's roommate), and also Novalis and Schiller. Indeed, lines of Schiller appear at several points in this work and much of the reasoning resembles Novalis's political writings.

“The true is the whole,” he wrote, echoing a phrase of Nicholas of Cues some four centuries earlier. It reminds us of Hegel's stupendous knowledge, his fascination with exotic and alien cultures. Only the totality of humankind gives us the picture of what is human, it seems to tell us. You Europeans should not be so arrogant, so limited in your perspective of the world. There is a very profound note of wisdom and tolerance about this work, and also the sense of an unfinished project. But two centuries later it has not lost its fascination.