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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
When we are studying Hegel's answer to any question, or his solution to any problem, we must always look first at the systematic context in which the problem is raised, or the question asked. Hegel's “philosophy of world-history” comes as the climactic stage of the development of “objective spirit”; and it provides the transition to the spheres of “absolute spirit”. The philosophical comprehension of political history provides the ultimate context for our political theory; and then it leads us on to the sphere in which we are directly aware of “the Absolute”. Our political science comes to an end, when we recognize that “the world's history is the world's court of judgment”. But that “court of judgment” has jurisdiction only over the objective forms of political and social organization. The judgment of history is not the “Last Judgment” for everything and everyone. There are modes of experience which emerge and develop in history, but which are recognized as transhistorical; and when “philosophy”, as the historical quest for wisdom, reaches its goal, we can see and say why Greek art has an enduring significance for us, even though the Greek religion (which their art expressed in its highest form) has passed over into history just as completely and irrevocably as the “city-state”. Our political thought and action exists in the context of a religious ideal that will not allow us to divide the human community into “us” and “them”, the freemen and the slaves, the civilized and the barbarians. But only the arrival of philosophical “wisdom” has enabled us to see and say what is “absolute” about our religion (just as it is we, and not the Greeks themselves, who have the “absolute” consciousness of Greek art).
1 Except the faith in reason that is universal and compulsory, the faith that keeps Philo from walking out of the window when Cleanthes challenges him to live up to his critical scepticism. The Hegelian philosophy does not “depend” upon that either. But there would be no “absolute” knowing (other than that of mathematics and formal logic) if the certainty of experience were not there for the circle of logical cognition to start from. The circle itself abolishes the presupposed - or faithlike - character of the commonsense beginning - and history is what shows that this circular sublation is necessary.
2 Compare Schelling's letter (10) of 4-ii-1795 (Butler and Seiler, p 32). Further evidence can easily be found in Toward the Sunlight.
3 I mean those of us who are not willing to begin from the religious belief in Providence, because we want our philosophical interpretation of the world to be “autonomous”. “Autonomous” means (a) “presuppositionless” in Hegel's sense and (b) acknowledging only the “necessities” that enforce themselves in every rational consciousness indifferently, so that one ceases to be rational when one seeks to deny them (as Philo would cease to be rational if he went out by the window instead of the door). The enforcement does not have to be as immediate or as categorical as Philo's death - let us suppose - when he hits the ground. The point is that we all know that “faith” or “trust” in Providence (the religious attitude) could never enforce itself in every mind, in the way that the acceptance of “necessity” or “fate” does. That is exactly why we say that it requires an “act”. Faith in reason requires only the desire to be rational (ie. to acknowledge only what everyone must acknowledge). One can still have voluntary commitments that go beyond that minimum (“acts of faith”); but one must not pretend that there is anything philosophical about them.
4 To speak thus, of a direct interaction between Kant and Hegel, is a radical simplification of the complex story of Hegel's concept of Providence. Lessing, Herder, Hölderlin, and Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism were all influential in the formation of Hegel's mature theory. But the whole development is “rational” in the Kantian sense; and it is “critical” in the sense that no transcendent self-conscious power is posited or appealed to. Hegel's Providence belongs to the World Spirit, ie. to that community of active minds living and dead upon which the human development of every one of us is dependent, and of which our human achievements become a permanent part.
5 Hegel's calm acceptance of the exclusion of the female half of the human race from active politics could lead us to say that the rational was not completely actual even in his thought. On this view, Kojeve's work came at the precise moment of the “end of history”; but the view itself is a mistake. No one is excluded from the Hegelian community; and everyone is equal before the law and in conscience. The womenfolk are like the peasants. They are excluded from politics for reasons of “natural necessity”. The judgment of actual necessity is strictly historical. Our historical situation (and our judgments) are different from those of the European Restoration. It is not the task of the philosopher to prescribe judgments to his world, but to comprehend those that are “objective” (universally valid) for his time. He is supposed to surrender his arbitrary freedom of judgment to the Sache selbst.
6 “The End of History”, The National Interest, Summer 1989, 3–18 (see p 17).Google Scholar
7 “Responses to Fukuyama”, The National Interest, Summer 1989, 19–21 (see p 20)Google Scholar. For Kojeve, Reason can only be subjectively actual in a Kantian critical way, because his own existentialist ontology makes the conception of a spiritual substance impossible. But in his diminished way Kojeve is a better Hegelian than Fukuyama, precisely because he has the Marxist belief in the “brotherhood of man”.
8 In the version read at the Conference I claimed “that Marx was mistaken in his belief that fraternity can be politically articulated and embodied”. That was a serious mistake, which I recognized as soon as someone expressed doubt that it was true, during the discussion period. Fraternity must be articulated and embodied in social institutions that are self-consciously established. But those institutions cannot embody it completely (ie. in a reliably self-maintaining way). They articulate a free consciousness which can as readily destroy itself as it can maintain itself. Thus the maintenance of rational fraternity depends upon the free consciousness of an ideal community that is not “political”, but “absolute”. The sense of fraternity is the “religion” upon which “the State” is founded. It cannot be “brought into the State in bushels and baskets”. But if the actual life of the State does not enlighten it into the awareness of membership in the absolutely rational community, it can easily break the modern State down into fraternal communities that are (properly speaking) prepolitical. Antigone and Creon provide the logical paradigm of this. Thus only the whole process of self-consciousness (in which the religious “subjectivity” of Absolute Spirit is concordantly equal with the objective substantiality of political institutions) can articulate and embody “fraternity” adequately.
