Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on Historical Progress

Introduction: Philosophy, Revolution, and the Self

For Hegel, the idea of the progress of history was tied to his immersion in the world of Enlightenment and Romantic writers and thinkers. He lived at a time when the French Revolution occurred and reshaped the direction of history. The Revolution expressed and institutionalized new ideas about Reason — literally deified by the Revolution — as well as socio-political philosophy regarding fraternity, equality, and liberty. Hegel came to maturity during this era, and for him, philosophy consisted of a clash of forces. The old-world concept of philosophy as the love of knowledge and wisdom was what Hegel sought to transform in The Phenomenology of Spirit, as he clearly states in the book's Preface: "To help to bring philosophy nearer to the form of science — that goal where it can lay aside the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge — that is what I have set before me."¹

In other words, Hegel wanted to redefine philosophy as that which the old world — pre-Reformation and pre-Revolution — had sought to understand. Instead of looking at knowledge in the way that Plato did — as that which is acquired through one's ascent to truth, leaving the Cave of shadows and climbing toward the highest realities — Hegel viewed the philosopher as the source of knowledge. For Hegel, engagement in the dialectic was the ultimate act of knowing, with perception and experience continually shaping one's understanding. The progress of history, as far as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are concerned, is therefore tied to the philosopher's elevation of the Self as definer, interpreter, and mover of history, meaning, and time. This paper assesses Hegel's sense of the progress of history and compares it to that of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Foundation of Hegel's Thought

For Hegel, the phenomenon of knowing was what The Phenomenology of Spirit was fundamentally about. Yet, because of the primary place given to personal perception, the method of knowing and the art of philosophy were altered. Definable reality became fluid under these circumstances. The philosophers who followed — Nietzsche and Heidegger — faced the world through this Hegelian philosophical lens and took to describing their own perceptions of reality, of knowing, and of philosophical truth. Nietzsche produced Beyond Good and Evil; Heidegger wrote Being and Time. Both works act as rejections of the philosophical footholds that had come before: each is an attempt to reconcile the world with the questions, ideas, and interests within the respective philosopher. By projecting his words as knowledge rather than as a study — or love — of knowledge, Hegel inverted the system of philosophical order. There was no longer an insistence on an object of knowledge to be studied and loved for its own sake and goodness.

Hegel was interested in the experience of knowing rather than in what knowing produced. He was interested in the phenomenon itself rather than in the objective truths and realities proposed by old-world philosophy and religion. He states in the Preface: "The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, love — these are the bait required to awaken the desire to bite: not the notion, but ecstasy, not the march of cold necessity in the subject-matter, but ferment and enthusiasm — these are to be the ways by which the wealth of the concrete substance is to be stored and increasingly extended."² The ideals of Western philosophy articulated by Socrates and affirmed by Christian teaching are here renounced by Hegel, described as "bait" to lure the thinker toward the real truth — which, for Hegel, was once again the experience itself. Instead of seeking the love of the one, the good, and the beautiful, Hegel sought the love experience. He was more interested in the act than in the outcome.

The progress of history is thus that which is interpreted by the philosopher as he engages with the facts of reality while maintaining a certain distance — just as a lover may engage in the act of love without consummating it in its fullest sense. Hegel's notion of the philosopher is of one who wants to be part of the experience of history yet not be responsible for any actual moral objective. History is a process and cannot be understood without the philosopher's engagement with the facts after the fact — and this engagement is but an interpretation which, when made, alters the shape of history. History is thus reinterpreted again down the line, with each philosopher altering and transforming it through engagement. There is never an objective in the sense that the old world defined one.

Hegel approached philosophy in a "rational spirit." The Revolutionaries would deify Reason; Hegel would define philosophy as an act of "Rationality."³ Oneness acquired new meaning in this light: it was not unchanging and whole in itself, but rather evolutionary, and its wholeness derived only from the conscious examination of how the process of Rationality weighs in on acquired knowledge. This is what Hegel means when he states:

"In the nature of existence as thus described — to be its own notion and being in one — consists logical necessity in general. This alone is what is rational, the rhythm of the organic whole: it is as much knowledge of content as that content is notion and essential nature. In other words, this alone is the sphere and element of speculative thought. The concrete shape of the content is resolved by its own inherent process into a simple determinate quality. Thereby it is raised to logical form, and its being and essence coincide; its concrete existence is merely this process that takes place, and is eo ipso logical existence."⁴

If the outcome of the old world's love of knowledge was conformity — to doctrine, to a way, to an ideal, to truth, to the teachings of religion — because of an appreciation of the objective facts that knowledge made plain, the outcome of Hegel's philosophy was the opposite. Conformity was not the purpose; experience was. The examination and understanding of experience would lead to deeper knowledge, but the cycle was constantly continuing. In some ways this was consistent with Plato's idea of the philosopher climbing the mountain toward the Sun — the Truth — because the higher the philosopher climbs, the more deeply into the Oneness he sees.

However, in Hegel's view, the Oneness was mutable, never really fixed, always changing, because it derived its meaning from the experience of the climber, the philosopher. It did not project meaning to which the philosopher should conform; rather, the philosopher's climb toward the perceived Oneness projected the meaning, and the Oneness changed with regard to the climber's position. The focus shifted away from the objective toward the subjective — which describes modern philosophy as a whole. Hegel elevates the role of subjective experience and diminishes the role of the objective. This same practice is furthered by both Heidegger and Nietzsche as each arrives at different conclusions about self, life, and truth based on their own subjective experiences, thoughts, and inclinations. Their relevance was made possible because of Hegel, and Hegel's relevance was made possible because of the Revolution and the role that Romantic-Enlightenment thinking played in European society. To take it one step further, Romantic-Enlightenment thinking was itself made relevant by the Reformation and the overthrow of the doctrinal and philosophical system that could be described as Thomistic, but which had roots in the foundations laid by Aristotle and the whole of prior philosophy. All of that was based on the love of knowledge — of the objective.

The Reformation served as the first rejection of this old-world objectivity and began the cascade of subjectivity evident in everything from Hegel to Nietzsche: the predominant rise of Self as opposed to the subjection of Self to the One, identified as God by the pre-Revolutionary world. It is thus that Hegel insists on the "scientific method" and states: "This nature of scientific method, which consists partly in being inseparable from the content, and partly in determining the rhythm of its movement by its own agency, finds, as we mentioned before, its peculiar systematic expression in speculative philosophy."⁵ There is no separation between observer and the observed — this is the essence of phenomenology. The breakdown between objective reality and subjective reality is achieved by this merging in the science of phenomenology. The philosopher is partly "inseparable from the content" — from that which he seeks to know. The essence of the method is bound up in the "rhythm" of the philosopher's own interaction with that which is being examined.

Beethoven would elevate rhythm during this same period — most notably in his Fifth Symphony — and also introduce the sustain pedal, thereby doing for music what Hegel did for philosophy: overthrowing the old established order and asserting a new emphasis that blurred the lines of distinction and made knowledge into something fluctuating. Hegel makes this point most clearly when he objects to the proposition that God is Being.⁶ He states that by dividing the subject from the predicate, the former — "God" — seems to cease to be what it was when the proposition was put forward, namely a fixed subject.⁷ Simply attempting to define something through the traditional process of propositional logic changes the substance of the thing being defined. The outcome of this theoretical position is that "thinking [i.e. ordinary reflection], instead of getting any farther with the transition from subject to predicate, in reality finds its activity checked through the loss of the subject, and it is thrown back on the thought of the subject because it misses this subject."⁸ The act of thinking obliges the thinker to mix with the propositional sides and become part of the proposition in his attempt to comprehend it. This engagement leads to a synthesis, which in turn creates a new cycle of propositional logic, of which the thinker is still required to be a part so long as he is engaged in the act of knowing. Hegel describes it thus: "Thinking therefore loses that fixed objective basis which it had in the subject, just as much as in the predicate it is thrown back on the subject, and therein returns not into itself but into the subject underlying the content."⁹ The act of knowing does not move the thinker toward the object — which would lead to conformity according to the old-world method — but rather it returns him to himself as he attempts to reconcile subject with predicate, or thesis with antithesis. The subject and predicate are not bound by nature but require the thinker's examination of the relationship to have any real meaning. This is the ultimate awakening of the subjective for which Hegel is responsible, made completely clear in The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Conclusion

Hegel's sense of the progress of history is framed by his assertion of Self into the phenomenology of knowing. He sees the propositional logic of philosophy as interpretable only by the thinker who engages with and thereby alters the meaning of the proposition. This begins a cycle of the interpretation of history that accounts for the evolution of history. The progress of history, in this light, moves away from an objective absolute — which the Old World regarded as God — toward the elevation of the Self, which Nietzsche viewed as ultimately expressed through the assertion of the Will. However, as Selves in the twentieth century asserted their Wills most violently, the result was destruction, and Heidegger was left both without faith and without a sense of progress. Being no longer made sense, so Heidegger sought to understand it — but without the aid of revelation, his attempt illustrates the limitations of the Hegelian take on the progress of history.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Foulis, 1913.