Part 6

At the beginning of history Fichte placed an "_Urvolk_." His account of it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau's primitive "state of nature." The _Urvolk_ lived in a paradise of innocence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art. The philosophy which demands such a Folk is comparatively simple. Except as a manifestation of Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. Yet in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason could not have been appropriated by the self-conscious effort of man. It existed without consciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all true self-consciousness, won by morally creative struggle. Rational in substance, in form it was but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all subsequent history is but a return to this primitive condition. But "humanity must make the journey on its own feet; by its own strength it must bring itself back to that state in which it was once without its own cooperating labor. . . . If humanity does not recreate its own true being, it has no real life." While philosophy compels us to assume a Normal People who, by "the mere fact of their existence, without science and art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed reason," there is no ground for not admitting the existence at the same time of "timid and rude earth-born savages." Thus the original state of humanity would have been one of the greatest possible inequality, being divided between the Normal Folk existing as a manifestation of Reason and the wild and savage races of barbarism.

In his later period of inflamed patriotism this innocuous speculation grew a sting. He had determined that the present age--the Europe of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution--is the age of liberation from the external authority in which Reason had presented itself in the second age. Hence it is inherently negative: "an age of absolute indifference toward the Truth, an age of entire and unrestrained licentiousness." But the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands a Folk which has retained the primitive principle of Reason, which may redeem, therefore, the corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity elsewhere existing. Since the Germans are this saving remnant, they are the _Urvolk_, the Normal Nation, of the modern period. From this point on, idealization of past Germanic history and appeal to the nation to realize its unique calling by victory over Napoleon blend.

The Fichtean scaffolding tumbled, but these ideas persisted. I doubt if it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which German history has been systematically idealized for the last hundred years. Technically speaking, the Romantic movement may have passed away and an age of scientific history dawned. Actually the detailed facts have been depicted by use of the palette of Romanticism. Space permits but one illustration which would be but a literary curiosity were it not fairly typical. Tacitus called his account of the northern barbarians Germania--an unfortunate title in view of later developments. The characteristics assigned by him to the German tribes are such as any anthropologist could duplicate from any warlike barbaric tribe. Yet over and over again these traits (which Tacitus idealized as Cooper, say, idealized the North American Indian traits) are made the basis of the philosophic history of the German people. The Germans, for example, had that psychological experience now known as mana, manitou, tabu, etc. They identified their gods, in Tacitus' phrase, with "that mystery which they perceive by experiencing sacred fear." This turns out to be the germinal deposit of spiritual-mindedness which later showed itself in Luther and in the peculiar genius of the Germans for religious experience.

The following words are from no less an authority than Pfleiderer:

"Cannot we recognize in this point that truly German characteristic of _Innerlichkeit_ which scorns to fix for sensuous perception the divine something which makes itself felt in the depths of the sensitive soul, which scorns to drag down the sublime mystery of the unknowable to the vulgar distinctness of earthly things? The fact that the Germans attached but little importance to religious ceremonies accords with this view."

To others, this sense of mystery is a prophetic anticipation of the Kantian thing-in-itself.

A similar treatment has been accorded to the personal and voluntary bond by which individuals attached themselves to a chieftain. Thus early was marked out the fidelity or loyalty, _Treue_, which is uniquely Germanic--although some warlike tribes among our Indians carried the system still further. I can allow myself but one more example of the way in which the philosophic sophistication of history has worked. No historian can be unconscious of the extent to which European culture has been genuinely European--the extent to which it derives itself from a common heritage of the ancient world and the extent to which intermixtures and borrowings of culture have gone on ever since. As to Germany, however, these obvious facts have to be accommodated to the doctrine of an original racial deposit steadily evolving from within.

The method is simple. As respects Germany, these cultural borrowings and crosses represent the intrinsic universality of its genius. Through this universality, the German spirit finds itself at home everywhere. Consequently, it consciously appropriates and assimilates what other peoples have produced by a kind of blind unconscious instinct. Thus it was German thought which revealed the truth of Hellenic culture, and rescued essential Christianity from its Romanized petrifaction. The principle of Reason which French enlightenment laid hold of only in its negative and destructive aspect, the German spirit grasped in its positive and constructive form. Shakespeare happened to be born in England, but only the Germans have apprehended him in his spiritual universality so that he is now more his own than he is England's--and so on. But with respect to other peoples, similar borrowings reveal only their lack of inner and essential selfhood. While Luther is universal because he is German, Shakespeare is universal because he is not English.

I have intimated that Fichte's actual influence was limited. But his basic ideas of the State and of history were absorbed in the philosophy of Hegel, and Hegel for a considerable period absolutely dominated German thinking. To set forth the ground principles of his "absolute idealism" would be only to repeat what has already been said. Its chief difference, aside from Hegel's encyclopedic knowledge, his greater concrete historic interest and his more conservative temperament, is his bottomless scorn for an Idea, an Absolute, which merely ought to be and which is only going to be realized after a period of time. "The Actual is the Rational and the Rational _is_ the Actual"--and the actual means the actuating force and movement of things. It is customary to call him an Idealist. In one sense of much abused terms, he is the greatest realist known to philosophy. He might be called a Brutalist. In the inquiry Bourdon carried on in Germany a few years ago (published under the title of the "German Enigma"), he records a conversation with a German who deplores the tendency of the Germans to forsake the solid bone of things in behalf of a romantic shadow. As against this he appeals to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, "in opposition to the idealism which had lifted Germany on wings, arrayed and marshaled the maxims of an unflinching realism. He had formulae for the justification of facts whatever they might be. That which _is_, he would say, is reason realized. And what did he teach? That the hour has sounded for the third act in the drama of humanity, and that the German opportunity is not far off. . . . I could show you throughout the nineteenth century the torrent of political and social ideas which had their source here."

I have said that the essential points of the Fichtean philosophy of history were taken up into the Hegelian system. This assimilation involved, however, a rectification of an inconsistency between the earlier and the later moral theories of Fichte. In his earlier ethical writings, emphasis fell upon conscious moral personality--upon the deliberate identification by the individual will of its career and destiny with the purpose of the Absolute. In his later patriotic philosophy, he asserts that the organized nation is the channel by which a finite ego acquires moral personality, since the nation alone transmits to individuals the generic principle of God working in humanity. At the same time he appeals to the resolute will and consciously chosen self-sacrifice of individuals to overthrow the enemy and re-establish the Prussian state. When Hegel writes that victory has been obtained, the war of Independence has been successfully waged. The necessity of emphasizing individual self-assertion had given way to the need of subordinating the individual to the established state in order to check the disintegrating tendencies of liberalism.

Haym has said that Hegel's "Philosophy of Law" had for its task the exhibition as the perfect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the "practical and political condition existing in Prussia in 1821." This was meant as a hostile attack. But Hegel himself should have been the last to object. With his scorn for an Ideal so impotent that its realization must depend upon the effort of private selves, an Absolute so inconsequential that it must wait upon the accidents of future time for manifestation, he sticks in politics more than elsewhere to the conviction that the actual _is_ the rational. "The task of philosophy is to comprehend that which is, for that which is, is Reason." Alleged philosophies which try to tell what the State should be or even what a state ought in the future to come to be, are idle fantasies. Such attempts come too late. Human wisdom is like "the bird of Minerva which takes its flight only at the close of day."[110:A] It comes, after the issue, to acknowledge what has happened. "The State is the rational in itself and for itself. Its substantial unity is an absolute end in itself. To it belongs supreme right in respect to individuals whose first duty is--just to be members of the State." . . . The State "is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." It is a commonplace of idealistic theism that nature is a manifestation of God. But Hegel says that nature is only an externalized, unconscious and so incomplete expression. The State has more, not less, objective reality than physical nature, for it is a realization of Absolute spirit in the realm of consciousness. The doctrine presents an extreme form of the idea, not of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right of States. "The march of God in history is the cause of the existence of states; their foundation is the power of reason realizing itself as will. Every state, whatever it be, participates in the divine essence. The State is not the work of human art; only Reason could produce it." The State is God on earth.

[110:A] Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the divine showed but its posterior side.

His depreciation of the individual as an individual appears in every theme of his Philosophy of Right and History. At first sight, his theory of great world heroes seems inconsistent with his disregard of individuals. While the morality of most men consists simply in assimilating into their own habits the customs already found in the institutions about them, great men initiate new historic epochs. They derive "their purposes and their calling not from the calm regular course of things sanctioned by the existing order, but from a concealed fount, from that inner spirit hidden beneath the surface, which, striking the outer world as a shell, bursts it to pieces." The heroes are thus the exception which proves the rule. They are world characters; while they seem to be seeking personal interests they are really acting as organs of a universal will, of God in his further march. In his identification with the Absolute, the world-hero can have but one aim to which "he is devoted regardless of all else. Such men may even treat other great and sacred interests inconsiderately. . . . But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower--crush to pieces many an object in its path." We are not surprised to see that Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon are the characters he prefers to cite. One can only regret that he died before his contemplative piety could behold Bismarck.

A large part of the intellectual machinery by which Hegel overcame the remnants of individualism found in prior philosophy came from the idea of organic development which had been active in German thought since the time of Herder. In his chief work ("Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity"), written in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Herder holds that history is a progressive education of humanity. This idea, had from Lessing, is combined with the idea of Leibniz that change is evolution, by means of an internal force, of powers originally implicit in existence, and with the idea of Spinoza of an all-comprehensive substance. This idea of organic growth was then applied to language, literature and institutions. It soon obtained reinforcement from the rising science of biology. Long before the days of Darwin or Spencer, the idea of evolution had been a commonplace of German thought with respect to everything concerning the history of humanity. The notion was set in sharp antithesis to the conception of "making" or manufacturing institutions and constitutions, which was treated as one of the fallacies of the French philosophy of the Enlightenment. A combination of this notion of universal organic growth with the technique of prior idealism may fairly be said to have determined Hegel's whole philosophy. While Leibniz and Herder had emphasized the notion of harmony as an essential factor of the working of organic forces, Hegel took from Fichte the notion of a unity or synthesis arrived at by "positing," and overcoming an opposite. Struggle for existence (or realization) was thus an "organic" part of German thinking long before the teaching of Darwin, who, in fact, is usually treated by German writers as giving a rather superficial empirical expression to an idea which they had already grasped in its universal speculative form. It is characteristic of the extent in which Hegel thought in terms of struggle and overcoming that after stating why it was as yet impossible to include the Americas in his philosophy of history, and after saying that in the future the burden of world history will reveal itself there, he surmises that it may take the form of a "contest" between North and South America. No philosopher has ever thought so consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and overcoming as Hegel. When he says the "world history is the world judgment" he means judgment in the sense of assize, and judgment as victory of one and defeat of another--victory being the final proof that the world spirit has now passed from one nation to take up its residence in another. To be defeated in a way which causes the nation to take a secondary position among nations is a sign that divine judgment has been passed upon it. When a recent German writer argues that for Germany to surrender any territory which it has conquered during the present war would be sacrilegious, since it would be to refuse to acknowledge the workings of God in human history, he speaks quite in the Hegelian vein.

Although the phenomenon of nationalism was very recent when Hegel wrote, indeed practically contemporary with his own day, he writes in nationalistic terms the entire history of humanity. The State is the Individual of history: it is to history what a given man is to biography. History gives us the progressive realization or evolution of the Absolute, moving from one National Individual to another. It is law, the universal, which makes the State a State, for law is reason, not as mere subjective reflection, but in its manifestation as supreme over and in particulars. On this account, Hegel's statement that the fundamental principle of history is the progressive realization of freedom does not mean what an uninstructed English reader would naturally take it to mean. Freedom is always understood in terms of Reason. Its expression in history means that Thought has progressively become conscious of itself; that is, has made itself its own object. Freedom is the _consciousness_ of freedom. Liberty of action has little to do with it. Obviously it is only in the German idealistic system--particularly in the system of Hegel himself--that this has fully taken place. Meantime, when citizens of a state (especially of the state in which this philosophic insight has been achieved) take the laws of their state as their own ends and motives of action, they attain the best possible substitute for a reason which is its own object. They appropriate as their own personal reason the objective and absolute Reason embodied perforce in law and custom.

After this detour, we are led back to the fact that the Germans possess the greatest freedom yet attained by humanity, for the Prussian political organization most fully exemplifies Law, or the Universal, organizing under and within itself all particular arrangements of social and personal life. Some other peoples--particularly the Latin--have thought they could _make_ constitutions, or at least that the form of their constitution was a matter of choice. But this is merely setting up the private conceit of individuals against the work of Absolute Reason, and thus marks the disintegration of a state rather than its existence. Other peoples have tried to found the government on the consent of the governed, unwitting of the fact that it is the government, the _specific_ realization of Reason, which makes a state out of what is otherwise an anarchic mass of individuals. Other peoples have made a parliament or representative body the essential thing in government; in philosophic reality this is only a consultative body, having as its main function communication between classes (which are indispensable to an "organic" state) and the real government. The chief function of parliament is to give the opinion of the social classes an opportunity to feel it is being considered and to enable the real government to take advantage of whatever wisdom may chance to be expressed. Hegel seems quite prophetic when he says: "By virtue of this participation subjective liberty and conceit, with their general opinion, can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to count for something." Finally, the State becomes wholly and completely an organized Individual only in its external relations, its relations to other states. As his philosophy of history ignores the past in seizing upon the national state as the unit and focus of history, so it ignores all future possibility of a genuinely international federation to which isolated nationalism shall be subordinated. Bernhardi writes wholly in the Hegelian sense when he says that to expand the idea of the State into the idea of humanity is a Utopian error, for it would exclude the essential principle of life, struggle.

Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the march of God on earth through time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by which unique place passes from one nation to another. War is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement. The idea that friendly intercourse among all the peoples of the earth is a legitimate aim of human effort is in basic contradiction of such a philosophy. War is explicit realization of "dialectic," of the negation by which a higher synthesis of reason is assured. It effectively displays the "irony of the divine Idea." It is to national life what the winds are to the sea, "preserving mankind from the corruption engendered by immobility." War is the most effective preacher of the vanity of all merely finite interests; it puts an end to that selfish egoism of the individual by which he would claim his life and his property as his own or as his family's. International law is not properly law; it expresses simply certain usages which are accepted so long as they do not come into conflict with the purpose of a state--a purpose which always gives the supreme law of national life. Particularly against the absolute right of the "present bearer of the world spirit, the spirits of the other nations are absolutely without right. The latter, just like the nations whose epochs have passed, count no longer in universal history." Since they are already passed over from the standpoint of the divine idea, war can do no more than exhibit the fact that their day has come and gone. World history is the world's judgment seat.

For a period Hegelian thought was almost supreme in Germany. Then its rule passed away almost as rapidly as it had been achieved. After various shiftings, the trend of philosophic thought was definitely "Back to Kant." Kant's greater sobriety, the sharp distinction he drew between the realm of phenomena and science and the ideal noumenal world, commended him after the unbridled pretensions of Hegelian absolutism. For more than a generation Hegel was spoken of with almost universal contempt. Nevertheless his ideas, loosed from the technical apparatus with which he surrounded them, persisted. Upon the historical disciplines his influence was peculiarly deep and abiding. He fixed the ideas of Fichte and fastened them together with the pin of evolution. Since his day, histories of philosophy, or religion, or institutions have all been treated as developments through necessary stages of an inner implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling law. And the idea of a peculiar mission and destiny of German history has lost nothing in the operation. Expressions which a bewildered world has sought since the beginning of the war to explain through the influence of a Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, or through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy of power, have their roots in the classic idealistic philosophy culminating in Hegel.