The Philosophy of History Book

Marx says somewhere that he had to take Hegel's method and turn it on its head to make sense of it. And while I always thought this was a really brilliant image, I also thought it was probably one of those extremes of overstatement that philosophers are a bit prone to. However, if nowhere else, Marx is proven right with this book. It is hard to underestimate the change that Marx wrought to Hegelian thought - and to the study of history generally, and, to me at least, that seems most clear after reading this book.

Hegel is not really all that interested in history itself - at least, he says he's not particularly interested in history per se (the 'one damn thing after another' bit of history) - but rather what history can tell us about what he calls the world spirit. This is a complicated idea, and one I'm not entirely sure I have fully understood. Still, it might help to sort of personalise this spirit. In one way I guess this is what Hegel intends. He wants you to think that there is a single 'god' that is using human history as a way to either manifest itself, or perhaps better, to come to a full realisation of its own actual essence. The spirit does this by literally using people and the kinds of societies they develop to realise or understand itself - a kind of reflection through alienation idea. To Hegel the highest realisation of this spirit - something he is often (and rightly) criticised - is the Germany he just happened to be living in at the time. Here the spirit, which had alienated itself into various realisations of various human societies, finally is in harmony with itself - in a kind of dance between necessity and freedom, which to Hegel is the highest realisation of freedom.

You know, if your philosophy makes the society you just accidentally happened to be born into the ideal form of all societies, it might just mean that rather than you being critically aware and your thinking being a pure manifestation of rational disinterestedness, that in fact you are just proposing a kind of self-congratulation that is, well, somewhat unworthy.

Still, Hegel takes us on a tour of world history showing the diversity and development of the world spirit. Some of this history seemed, to me at least, rather quixotic, I mean, I couldn't see why one thing was discussed in some length when a million other things were skirted over or even not mentioned at all. The lessons in relation to the development of the world spirit seemed rather obscure to me - but this might well be just me. I suspect there are commentaries I really ought to have read while reading this that might have explained this and that I've completely missed important bits along the way.

He makes it clear early in this that the world spirit doesn't climb a ladder all at once and so develop in the way we like to think humans did in that standard monkey walking left-to-right to become an ape to become a man. But rather that all aspects of the history of the development of the spirit co-exist in the world and all are ongoing aspects of the spirit. It is in this sense that there is a national spirit and so nations like China and India - that had once been the bloom of the pinnacle of the world spirit - have languished while the spirit has gone on to find more fertile soil to continue its development.

Progress is toward increased freedom, as I said before - and this is a freedom that is strongly linked with what was, at the time, the recent birth of capitalist freedom. The individual as the core of society and their enterprise unfettered by caste and feudal restrictions as the highest realisation of that freedom.

What is interesting about all this is in relation to Marx's inversion is perhaps made clear by thinking about Diamond's book 'Germs, Guns and Steal'. For Hegel a people have a particular character - often highly associated with the kind of religion they practice. These ideas structure and constrain the amount of freedom these people can have and thereby determine how far their society will be able to develop and progress. The world spirit uses these various characteristics of these people to understand itself. For Diamond - and Marx too, obviously, but Diamond is very clear on this - the reason why Europe ruled the world and China didn't isn't really linked to Chinese 'character', but rather to a series of local conditions that went to structure that character. That is, the geography of China in the first instance where, once conquered, the nation tended to remain conquered. The plants and animals available - rice providing quite different relations to work than wheat does. And, related again to geography, the possibility of competing civilisations on your doorstep that will overthrow you if you don't 'keep up' was much more evident in Europe than it is in China. Rather than history being a product of a spirit and idea, national characters become a product of real conditions of life, character has a physical, rather than purely mental series of causes.

This transformation in how we understand history - the kinds of things we look for so as to explain differences between societies - isn't just superficial. As Marx said, it is a complete inversion. I found this book particularly interesting because in it we glimpse into a world where ignoring the physical and geographic conditions of societies and resting human progress on spirit has reached its highest point. Not that Hegel doesn't discuss these physical conditions at all - his discussion of Greece and Rome, for instance, does focus on geography, but even here this seems less causal than yet another factor that goes to composing the national spirit which seems much more important than these physical constraints.