Abstract
‘Unless you lived in those times’, Mikhail Bakunin wrote in 1873, ‘you will never understand how powerful the fascination of this philosophical system was in the 1830s and 1840s’ (p. 3) – the system in question being that of G.W.F. Hegel. The reasons for this fascination are the main question addressed in this study, in which Jon Stewart offers a (necessarily selective) history of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, understood as the story of Hegel’s philosophy as it was ‘disseminated and modified in different ways’ (p. 5) by later seven thinkers. (Stewart rightly laments the absence of Max Stirner or David Friedrich Strauss from his account, pointing to the length requirements of today’s academic publishing (p. 9)). The thematic focus of this investigation from a seasoned commentator on Hegel is twofold, focusing on alienation (Entäußerung or Entfremdung) and recognition (Anerkennung). But its argumentational net is cast much wider, from uncovering the central, constitutive role played in nineteenth-century philosophy by religion to questioning some of the clichés about key figures in this period – including the jibe that Hegel was just a Prussian apologist.
Stewart begins with an examination of Hegel’s account of alienation in The Phenomenology of Spirit, notably the analysis of the lord and the bondsman in the ‘Self-Consciousness’ chapter, a short eight-page snippet which, given its influence on (among others) Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler, has proved to be an ‘influential text in the history of philosophy’ (p. 23) if ever there was one. The notion of alienation informs Hegel’s analysis of the story of the Fall in Genesis, a key aspect of his account of the origins of Christianity in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (with its analysis of the Roman Empire). According to Hegel, Christianity is able to overcome alienation in a way that Judaism and Islam cannot, for Christianity is in his eyes the religion of freedom. Yet, as Stewart notes, Hegel nevertheless recognized there is a ‘discordant note’ in actuality, and he characterized his age as one of ‘infinite anguish’ (pp. 61–2); in fact, teasing out this ambiguity in Hegel is one of the major tasks of this book.
In line with Stewart’s entire approach, he begins with Heine, presented as not just a poet but as deserving inclusion in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy (p. 69). In his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heine (1833) explains the invitation extended to Schelling by Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to come to Berlin as a move in the fight against ‘the dragon seed of Hegelian pantheism’ (p. 74), and presents Hegel as ‘the mother-hen’ sitting ‘on the disastrous eggs’ of the atheistic left Hegelians (p. 77). Of those left Hegelians, one of the most important was Feuerbach, who wrote in The Essence of Christianity that he ‘unconditionally repudiate[d] absolute, immaterial, self-sufficing speculation’ (p. 94). Yet, despite his explicit rejection of Hegel and his affirmation of materialism and realism, Feuerbach nevertheless embraced a conception of God as determined by our own highest capacities that can fairly be described, Stewart suggests, as ‘idealist’ (p. 97). Similarly, an argument about Hegel that turns on the interpretation of religion can be found in many works by Bruno Bauer, notably his Christianity Exposed of 1843; a protest against Bauer’s firing from the University of Bonn in 1842 and the culmination (so Stewart argues) of his shift from a more conservative view to a radical one, accompanied by a movement away from scholarship towards political activism (pp. 126–7). So, whereas Feuerbach (like D.F. Strauss) wanted to maintain Christianity albeit it in a modified form, Bauer openly declared his atheism and embraced Hegelian ‘criticism’ as an essential tool for disabusing people of the error of religion (p. 139).
Of course, neither Feuerbach nor Bauer was radical enough for Marx, whose theory of self-consciousness, alienation and historical development evidently owes a great debt to Hegel, despite Marx’s dismissal of Hegel’s tendency to abstraction as ‘idealistic humbug’ (p. 177). And for all his ‘overt polemic’ against Hegel, Marx actually follows a Hegelian methodology in his view of history and society (p. 178). Nevertheless, the critique of Bauer in The Holy Family (co-authored with Engels in 1844) reveals a ‘somewhat surprising’ interest in religion and theology in the thought of Marx who, after all, wrote in the introduction to his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ that the criticism of ‘heaven’, ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ is ‘transformed’ into the criticism of ‘earth’, ‘law’ and ‘politics’ (pp. 162, 148).
Outside Germany, Kierkegaard can be seen as responding to the same problem as Hegel: how to defend Christianity and its traditional doctrines (p. 204). Although Kierkegaard is often cast in the role of a great anti-Hegelian, his pseudonymous author in The Sickness unto Death (1849), Anti-Climacus, uses conspicuously Hegelian language, while his account of different forms of ‘despair’ presents a taxonomy of various forms of alienation; and Kierkegaard’s criticism of the present age in his ‘Literary Review’ (1846) – the ‘age of disintegration’ (p. 191) – for its reflection (rather than action, think of committees!) and its envy – finds echoes in Hegel and in Nietzsche alike. Similarly, Dostoevsky – ‘the only psychologist’, as Nietzsche once wrote, ‘from whom I had anything to learn’ (p. 205) – was, while not one of Hegel’s students in Berlin, nevertheless deeply influenced by his thought, and the Russian novelist’s ‘terrifying vision of the modern human experience in the face of the rise of science and technology’ demonstrates the ‘general trajectory’ of nineteenth-century European thought traced by Stewart (pp. 228, 207).
Bakunin’s analysis of the nature of authority and power in his theory of anarchism demonstrates how ‘profoundly receptive’ he was to key aspects of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology in general and his theory of human freedom in particular (p. 244), while his concept of rebellion reveals it to be a fundamental feature of human growth and development – and a radicalization of Hegel’s idea of spirit becoming aware of itself over the course of history (pp. 256–7). Finally Engels, in his monograph on Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888), draws out the core ambiguity in Hegel’s thought – on one hand, the revolutionary aspect of its dialectical method, on the other hand, the conservative aspect of its dogmatic systematicity (p. 267). But Engels also goes some way to explaining the attraction of Hegel’s thought as identified by Bakunin by pointing out that, thanks to Friedrich Wihelm IV’s anti-Hegelian campaign, the fight over religion and politics may have ‘still carried on with philosophical weapons, but no longer for abstract philosophical aims’ and instead now ‘turned directly on the destruction of traditional religion and of the existing state’ (p. 269).
Thus, Stewart amply demonstrates how Hegel ‘cast a long shadow’ (pp. 64, 244, 282) on philosophy in the nineteenth century, and this book confirms his view that the history of philosophy in the nineteenth century is characterized not much by a radical break as by various attempts to come to terms with some of the key analyses of Hegel (p. 203) – attempts that continued well into the twentieth century and, indeed, continue into our own (pp. 294–301); Hegel’s shadow is very long. Stewart envisages that his book might be used as a companion or textbook in classes on philosophy or the history of ideas, and it could very well serve this useful function. But there is another significant point: apart from Hegel himself, none of the figures discussed here was a university philosopher (or, if they were, it was not for long; p. 293). (Tellingly, in Eduard Gaertner’s painting of Unter den Linden (1873) that graces the dust jacket of this book, the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great and the Staatsoper are clearly in view, but the Humboldt University on the other side is largely occluded . . . ). In fact, Stewart suggests that there is ‘something powerful in the idea that something important was lost in the practice of philosophy once it became institutionalized’, speculating that ‘the true spirit of philosophy can only exist outside these structures in the spirit of free inquiry’ (p. 281). There is a lesson here for us all.