Anthony Quinton on Hegel's metaphysics

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Anthony Quinton in Spreading Hegel's Wings (link behind subscription) New York Review of Books 05/29/1975 makes the following summation on the 19th century German philosopher Hegel's metaphysics:

There are good reasons why Hegel's metaphysics, for all the obscurity of its presentation and the elusiveness of the general picture of the world it seeks to convey, should exert a continuing fascination. It claims to provide a rigorously reasoned foundation for a spiritualistic account of the nature of things, in place of such flimsier supports as mystical intuition or magical anecdotes or communications from the dead. Its extraordinary scope, the breadth and variety of its creator's learning, and the integrity of his admittedly baffling intellectual style endow it with a formidable quality that demands attention. It was said of J. H. Stirling's Secret of Hegel (1865), the first substantial book on Hegel in English, that its author knew how to keep the secret to himself. The secret is still far from fully revealed. [my emphasis]

What is considered "baffling" is always relative, of course.

In a second installment, Spreading Hegel's Wings—II (link behind subscription) New York Review of Books 06/12/1975, Quinton looks at Hegel's political philosophy. After the Second World War, Anglo-American evaluations of Germany often fell into what is known as the "From Luther to Hitler" line of thinking, which essentially viewed all major philosophical and social trends in Germany since the 16th century onward as somehow precursors to Hitler's National Socialism (Nazism).

Hegel figures in that view as a "totalitarian" thinker. The foundation for this line of criticism preceded the Second World War. As Quinton writes:

Most recent discussion of Hegel's political philosophy in the English-speaking world has taken the form of concrete polemical argument for and against the view that Hegel is to some extent responsible for Wilhelm II and the First World War and for Hitler and the second. The apparent message of Hegel's political theory is that law and the interest of the state transcend and override morality and the interests of the individual. Hegel's "realism" about war and about the domination of historical epochs by particular states seemed to some a theory fitting such manifestations of German Kultur as the invasion of Belgium, the atrocities inflicted on Belgian civilians, and the punitive burning down of the University of Louvain. This line of argument began with L. T. Hobhouse's Metaphysical Theory of the State, an attack on the English Hegelian Bosanquet, motivated by the death of Hobhouse's son in battle in the Kaiser's war. The issue was revived by a debate between T. M. Knox and E. F. Carritt in 1940 on Hegel and Prussianism.

The liberal (in the European sense) philospher Karl Popper was a particularly tough critic of Hegel's philosophy, as Quinton observes:

Popper makes Hegel out to be a nationalist, a racialist, a militarist, and an adherent of the Führerprinzip [Leadership principle of the Nazis] by hyperbolic extrapolation of the much milder positions he actually holds. Hegel did think that states should not be bits of dynastic property but should be associated with coherent communities; that in each epoch there is a nation that dominates the scene (but culturally rather than politically); that war is both inevitable and an engine of progress (agreeing on this second point with Popper's paradigm of political enlightenment, Kant); and he assigned a historic role to Great Men. But he was certainly no fascist. He favored constitutional monarchy with representative institutions, not inspired heroic leaders; he supported autonomous corporations; he lauded reason not intuition; he held art, religion, and philosophy to be "higher" than the state. [my emphasis]

By saying that Hegel "was certainly no fascist", Quinton uses the term "fascism" anachronistically. There were no such movements in Hegel's days. What he presumably means is that it's wrong to regard Hegel as some kind of proto-fascist.

I would add that in his Philosophy of History, Hegel argues that the greatest cultural advances in human history occurred when previously established cultures mixed. Such huge generalizations are hard if not impossible to document on anything remotely like an empirical basis. But whatever one thinks of that particular judgment, it's a long way from any notion that civilization is primarily the product of some mythical "Aryan" people.

But though rejecting the untenable "from Luther to Hitler" approach to Hegel's political philosphy, Quinton is still troubled by what he sees as an insufficient appreciate on Hegel's part of the rights of the invidual against the state:

... even when demythologized, Hegel's theory still has implications for the central issue of legitimacy. Even when Hegel's view that the individual finds his true reality as a citizen is translated into the view that in modern industrial society the state must take on an altogether new kind of supremacy it still adds up to the thesis that the individual has only the rights that the state confers on him.

In another formulation, he argues that it is "beyond doubt that Hegel was not a totalitarian, racist, or fascist." But he still sees Hegel as "pretty much of an authoritarian. The representation of public opinion that he provides for is more a safety-valve for the information of the real bureaucratic rulers than an ultimate control over law and policy."

But even so, Hegel was not "the monstrous Hun of liberal myth":

What is also put beyond question is the fact that Hegel was no toady to the Prussian state that employed him (although, as [Schlomo] Avineri points out, for anyone of a toadying bent there were few states more worth toadying to than the progressive, fairly liberal Prussia of Stein and Hardenberg in which Hegel lived and which was very different from the military autocracy of Frederick William IV). His much criticized attack on Fries is put in the perspective of Fries's irrational, and wildly anti-Semitic, protofascism. In favoring representation and a merely symbolic constitutional monarch, he was far from endorsing the Prussian status quo which had neither. His last piece of political writing, an essay on the inadequacy of the British Reform Bill in face of the social problems of British industrialism, was censored by the Prussian authorities. [my emphasis]

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