Delhi university library

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we say we know a man, the better we may be said to know his moral and mental constitution in its relation to the external world. Hegel transferred the concept of the personal character of the individual which jgradu- ally unfolds itself throughout a man’s life, to the case of entire cultures and nations: he referre3~toTfvariously as the Idea or Spirit, distinguished stages in its evolution, and pronounced it to be the motive, dynamic factor in the development of specific peoples and civilizations and so of the sentient universe as a whole. Further, he taught that the error of all previous thinkers was to assume the relative independence of different spheres of activity at a given period, of the wars of an age from its art, of its philosophy from its daily life. We should not naturally make this separation in the case of individuals; in the case of those with whom we are best acquainted, we haJf-unconsciously correlate all their acts as different manifestations of a single nature; we are affected by innumerable data drawn from this or that phase of Lheir activity, which collectively influence our mental portrait of them. This, according to Hegel, applies no less to our concept of a culture or a particular historical period. The historians of the past have tended to write monographs on the history of this or that city or campaign, of the acts of this or that king or commander, as if they could be represented in isolation from the other phenomena of their time. But just as the acts of an individual are the acts of the whole individual, so the cultural phenomena of an age, the particular pattern of events which constitute it, are expressions of the whole age and of its whole personality, a fact which we do indeed tacitly recognize in speaking of a phenomenon as typical of the ancient rather than


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the modern world, or of an age of chaos rather than of one of settled peace.

This should be recognized explicitly. In writing, for instance, the history of seventeenth-century music, and in considering the rise of a particular form of polyphony, it is relevant to ask whether a development of a similar pattern may not be observed in the history of science at this time; whether, for example, the discovery of the differential calculus simultaneously by Newton and Leibnitz was purely accidental, or due to certain general characteristics of that particular stage of European culture, which produced a not dissimilar genius in Bach and Leibnitz, in Milton and Poussin. Obsession with rigorous scientific method might lead historians, as it does natural scientists, to build walls between their fields of inquiry and treat each branch of human activity as functioning in relative isolation, like so many parallel streams which cross rarely and without effect; whereas, if the historian is fully to realize his task, to rise above the chronicler and the antiquary, he must endeavour to paint a portrait of an age in movement, to collect that which is characteristic, distinguish between its component elements, between the old and the new, the fruitful and the sterile, the dying survivals of a previous age and the heralds of the future, born before their time.

This command to look in the particular for the most vivid expression of the universal, for the concrete, the differentiated, the individual, to emulate the art and the realism of the biographer and the painter rather than the photographer and the statistician, is the peculiar legacy of Hegel. If history is a science, it must not be beguiled by the false analogy of physics or mathematics,


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which, looking for the widest obtainable, least varying, common characteristics, deliberately ignores what specifically belongs to only one time and one place, seeking to be as general, as abstract, as formal, as possible. The historian, on the contrary, must see and describe phenomena in their fullest context, against the background of the past and the foreground of the future, as being organic to all other phenomena which springs from the same cultural impulse.

The effect of this doctrine, at once a symptom and a cause of a change of outlook on the part of an entire generation, and now grown so familiar, is inestimably great. Our habit of attaching particular characteristics to particular periods and places and of seeing individuals or their acts as typical of nations or of times: of bestowing almost a personality of their own, active causal properties, upon certain periods or peoples, or even on widely felt social attitudes, in virtue of which acts are described as expressions of the spirit of the Renaissance or of the French Revolution, of German romanticism or of the Victorian Age, springs from this new historicism of outlook. Hegel’s specifically logical doctrines and his view of the method of the natural sciences were barren and their effects were wholly disastrous. His true importance lies in his influence in the field of social and historical studies, in the creation of a new science which consists in the history and criticism of human institutions, viewed as great collective quasi-personalities, which possess a life and character of their own, and cannot be described purely in terms of the individuals who compose them. It was largely due to his influence that there came into existence a new school of German historians whose work made all writers who explained

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events as the outcome of the character or intentions, the personal defeat or triumph of this or that king or statesman, seem naive and unscientific.

If history is the development of the impersonal Spirit, which Hegel did not identify solely with the human spirit, since he denied any essential dworce between mind and matter, it is ncccssar.yJ.flje write it as the history of the achievement of the Spirit. The horizon suddenly seemed immensely widened. Legal history ceased to be a remote and special preserve of archaeologists and antiquaries and was transformed into Historical Jurisprudence, wherein contemporary legal institutions were interpreted as an orderly evolution from Roman or earlier law, embodying the Spirit of the Law in itself, of society in its legal aspect, interwoven with political, religious, social aspects of its life.

Henceforth the history of art and the history of philosophy began to be treated as complementary and indispensable elements in the general history of culture: facts previously thought trivial or sordid were accorded sudden importance as being hitherto unexplored domains of the activity of the Spirit—the history of trade, of dress, of the useful arts were seen to be essential elements in the complete, ‘organic’, institutional history of mankind.

There was one respect, however, in which Hegel sharply diverged from the Leibnitzian conception of development as a smooth progression of an essence gradually unfolding itself from potentiality into actuality. He insisted on the reality and necessity of conflicts and wars and revolutions, of the tragic waste and destruction in the world. He declared that every process is one of perpetual tension between two incompatible

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forces each straining against the other, and by this mutual conflict advancing their own development; this duel—which is sometimes concealed and sometimes open, and can be traced in all provinces of conscious activity as the struggle between so many rival physical, moral and intellectual forces and influences—grows in strength and sharpness until it turns into an open conflict, which culminates in a final collision, the violence of which destroys both the adversaries. This is the point at which the hitherto continuous development is broken, a sudden leap takes place to a new level, whereupon the tension between a new dyad of forces begins once more. Certain among those leaps, those, namely, which occur on a sufficiently large and noticeable scale, are termed political revolutions. But, on a more trivial scale, they occur in every sphere of activity, in the arts and sciences, in the growth of physical organisms studied by biologists and in the atomic processes studied by chemists, and finally in ordinary argument betw'een two opponents, when, after a conflict between two partial falsehoods, new truth is discovered, itself only relative, itself assaulted by a counter-truth (antithesis to its thesis), the destruction of each by the other leading once more to a synthesis—a process which continues without end. He called the process dialectical. The notion of struggle and of tension provides precisely that dynamic principle which is required to account for movement in history. Thought is but reality conscious of itself, and its processes the processes of nature in their clearest form. The principle of perpetual absorption and resolution (Aufhebung) in an ever higher unity occurs in nature no less than in discursive thought, and demonstrates that its processes are not purposeless, like the mechanical


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movements postulated by materialism, but lead in the direction of greater and greater perfection. Each major transition is marked by a large-scale revolutionary leap, such as, for example, the destruction of Rome by the barbarians, or the great English or French Revolutions. In each case the Spirit or universal idea advances a step nearer to complete realization, humanity is carried a stage forward, but never strictly in the direction anticipated by either of the two sides engaged in the preliminary conflict, that side being more deeply and more irrationally disappointed, which believed most firmly in its own peculiar ability to force the direction of history.

The new methods of research and interpretation which had suddenly been revealed produced a startling, and even intoxicating, effect on enlightened German society, and to a lesser extent on its cultural dependencies, the Universities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Hegelianism became the official creed of every man with intellectual pretensions: the new ideas were applied in every sphere of thought and action with an uncontrolled enthusiasm which an age more sceptical of ideas may find it difficult to conceive. Academic studies were entirely transformed: Hegelian logic, Hegelian jurisprudence, Hegelian ethics and aesthetics, Hegelian theology, Hegelian philology, Hegelian historiography, surrounded the student of the humanities wherever he turned! Berlin, where Hegel’s last years were spent, was the headquarters of the movement. Patriotism and political and social reaction lifted their heads again. The advance of the doctrine that all men were brothers, that national, racial and social differences were the artificial products of defective education, was

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arrested by the Hegelian counter-thesis according to which such differences, for all their apparent irrationality, expressing as they do the peculiar genius of a given race or nation, are grounded in some historical necessity. They are needed for the development of the Idea, of which the nation is the incarnation, and cannot be made to vanish overnight by the mere application of reason by individual reformers. Reform must spring from traditional soil; otherwise it is doomed to failure, condemned in advance by the forces of history which move in their own time and at their own pace. To demand freedom from these forces and seek to rise above them, is to wish to escape from one’s inevitable historical position, from the society of which one is an integral part, from the complex of relations, public and private, by which every man is made to be what he is, which are the man, are what he is; to wish an escape from this is to wish to lose one’s proper nature, a selfcontradictory demand, which could be made only by one who does not understand what he is demanding, one whose idea of personal liberty is childishly subjective.

True freedom consists in the discovery of the laws to which, in the particular time and place in which one lives, one is necessarily subject, and in the attempt to make actual those potentialities of one’s rational, that is - one’s law-abiding nature, the realization of which advances the individual and thereby the society to which he ‘organically’ belongs, and which expresses itself in him and in others like him. When a man in the name of some subjective ideal attempts to destroy a tradition instead of modifying it, he opposes the laws of history, attempts the impossible, and thereby reveals his own irrationality. Such behaviour is condemned, not only

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because it is necessarily doomed to failure and therefore futile: for situations might occur in which it might be thought to be nobler to perish quixotically than to survive. It is condemned because it is irrational, since the laws of history which it opposes are the laws of the Spirit, which is the ultimate substance of which everything is composed, and are therefoi e necessarily rational; indeed if they were not, they would not be amenable to human explanation. The Spirit approaches its perfection by gradually attaining the greater self-consciousness with every generation: and the highest point of its development is reached in those who at any time see themselves most clearly in their relation to their uni\ e' se, that is, injhe profbundest philosophers of every epoch. By philosophers are meant the artists and the thinkers, the scientists and the poets, all those sensitive and inquiring spirits who are more acutely and more profoundly conscious than the rest of their society of the stage of development which humanity has reached, of what has been gained in their time and partly by their effort.

The history of philosophy is the history of the growth ' of this self-awareness^ in which the spirit becomes conscious of its own activity; and the history of humanity on this view, is itself nothing other than the story of the progress of the spirit in the process of its growing self-awareness. All history is thus the history of thought, that is, the history of philosophy; which is identical with the philosophy of history, since that is but a name for the awareness of this awareness. The celebrated Hegelian epigram, ‘the philosophy of history is the history of philosophy’, is, for anyone who accepts the Hegelian metaphysic, not an obscure paradox, but a

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platitude, quaintly expressed—with the important and peculiar corollary that all true progress is progress of the spirit, since that is the substance of which all else is compounded. Hence the sole method by which those who have the good of society at heart can improve it, is by developing in themselves and in others the power of analysing themselves and their environment, an activity later called criticism, the growth of which is identical with human progress. From this it follows that changes involving physical violence and bloodshed are due solely to the recalcitrance of brute matter, which, as Leibnitz had taught, is itself but thought, at a lower, unconscious level. The revolution instituted by Newton was therefore far more truly a revolution than events which are commonly so called, although it occurred with no bloodshed; all genuine conquest, all true victory is literally, and not in metaphor, gained always in the realm of the Spirit. Thus the French Revolution was in effect over when the philosophers had completed their systems, long before the guillotine began its work.

This doctrine appeared to solve at last the great problem which vexed men’s minds throughout the early nineteenth century; the question to which all its leading political theories are so many different answers. The French Revolution had been made in order to secure liberty, equality and fraternity among men; it was the greatest attempt in modern history to embody a wholly new revolutionary ideology in concrete institutions by the violent and successful seizure of power on the part of the ideaologues themselves: and it failed utterly to secure its end. It changed the face of Europe, but its purpose, the establishment of human freedom and equality, was as remote from realization as ever.

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What answer was there to those who, bitterly disillusioned, fell into cynical apathy, proclaiming the impotence of good over evil, of truth over falsehood, affirming the total inability of mankind to improve its lot by its own efforts. To this problem, with which the social thought of the period of political reaction in Europe is wholly preoccupied, Hegel provided an impressive solution by his doctrine of the ^inevitable character of the historical process, which involves the predestined failure of any attempt to deflect it by violence, even when the attempt is itself historically necessitated, a view directly opposed to the rival hypothesis then being advanced in France by Saint-Simon and Fourier. The problem of social freedom, and of the causes of the failure to attain it, is therefore quite naturally the central subject of all Marx’s early writings. His approach to the problem and his solution are in spirit purely Hegelian. His early training and his natural instincts inclined him towards an extreme empiricism: and the modes of thought which belong to this outlook are sometimes visible below the metaphysical accretions beneath which they are for the most part concealed. This emerges most clearly in his passion for exposing irrationalism in every shape and guise; often in his argument he uses the methods of eighteenth-century materialism: but the form in which it is expressed, and the theses it is designed to prove are wholly Hegelian. He was converted to the new outlook in his youth and for many years, despite his vehement attack on the idealist metaphysic, remained a convinced, consistent and admiring follower of the great philosopher.


CHAPTER IV

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

They [the Germans] will never rise. They would sooner die than rebel . . . perhaps even a German, when he has been driven to absolute despair, will cease to argue, but it needs a colossal amount of unspeakable oppression, insult, injustice and suffering to reduce him to that state.

MICHAEL BAKUNIN

The years which Marx spent as a student in the Univer- sity ofjlerlin were—a—period nf profound depression among the jndical intelligentsia of Germany. In 1840 a new king from whom much was expected had ascended the throne of Prussia. Before his accession he had spoken more than once of a natural alliance of patriotism, democratic principles and the monarchy; he had spoken of granting a new constitution; ecstatic references began to appear in the liberal press to Don Carlos and The Crowned Romantic. These promises came to less than nothing. The new monarch was no less reactionary, but astpter and less bound by routine than his father; the methods of suppression employed by his police were more imaginative and more efficient than those in use in the days of Frederick William III; otherwise his ' accession made little difference. There was no sign of reform, either political or social; the July Revolution in France, which was greeted with immense enthusiasm by German radicals, had merely caused Metternich to set up a cpntraf^cornn-iission to suppress dangerous thought in all German lands] a measure zealously welcomed by the Prussian-landowning gentry, whose continued power paralysed every effort towards freedom.


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the governing class did all that was in its power to obstruct—it could not entirely suppress—the growing [class of industrialists and bankers, which, even in backward and docile Prussia, began to show unmistakable signs of restiveness. Open expression in the Press or at public meetings was unthinkable: the official censorship was far too efficient and too ubiquitous; the Diet was packed with the King’s supporters; the gathering feeling of resentment against the landlords and officials, increased by the growing sense of its own strength on the part of the middle class, finally poured itself out in the traditional form of German self-expression, in a flood of words, a philosophy of opposition.

If orthodox Hegelianism was a reactionary movement, the answer of wounded German nationalism to the French attempt to impose its new principle of universal reason upon the world, the secession of its younger members represents an effort to find some progressive interpretation for the formulae of natural development, to detach the Hegelian philosophy from its preoccupation with past history and to identify it with the future, to adapt it to the new social and economic factors which were everywhere coming into being. Both camps, the right and the left, the old, and as they came to be called, the Young Hegelians, based themselves on their founder’s famous dictum according to which the real is the rational and the rational is the reaLi and both agreed that this was to be interpreted as meaning that the true explanation of any phenomenon was equivalent to the demonstration of its necessity, which was tantamount to its rational justification. Nothing could be both evil and necessary, for whatever is real is justified because it is real: Die Weltgeschichle isl das Wellgericht (woild