Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History

Michael Allen Gillespie

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226309866
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this wide-ranging and thoughtful study, Michael Allen Gillespie explores the philosophical foundation, or ground, of the concept of history. Analyzing the historical conflict between human nature and freedom, he centers his discussion on Hegel and Heidegger but also draws on the pertinent thought of other philosophers whose contributions to the debate is crucial—particularly Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche.

1

The Question of History

What is history? Such an important question ought to have a straightforward and unambiguous answer. This, however, is not the case. As we understand it today, history has two different but related meanings: it is on one hand the totality of events, the res gestae, that constitute the unfolding of human civilization, and on the other the account or report of these events, the historia rerum gestarum. Thus, even on the most rudimentary level, we encounter ambiguity. How are we to understand history? Is it fundamentally the whole of events of which a posteriori an account is given, or is it only in and through the account that these events become history? Does history, in other words, have an objective reality, or is it only a story that has a relationship to events and perhaps even in some sense gives them meaning but that is not in or of the events themselves?

This ambiguity is in fact only a reflection of a deeper disagreement. In antiquity and even in early modernity history was understood as the historia rerum gestarum, while the events themselves were thought to be governed not by rational or causal laws but by an incomprehensible destiny. Since the Enlightenment, however, the opinion that history is the human actuality or res gestae, which historians merely describe or reconstruct, has grown and solidified. To come to terms with this ambiguity and the question of history, it is thus necessary to examine the debate about the nature of history itself.

History originated with the Greeks and was closely related in their view to philosophy and poetry. Indeed, at first these three were hardly distinguished from one another: the earliest philosophers often wrote in verse and apparently called their works histories. Nor is this very surprising, since the word itself derives from the same root—eidenai, ‘to know (through having seen)’—as the philosophic term eidos, idea, ‘form’. This close relationship is likewise evident in its early usage, where it generally means ‘witnessing’, ‘knowing’, or ‘enquiring’. Heracleitus, for example, used the term to describe the thought of Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecateus, clearly suggesting a sort of knowing that is akin to both philosophy and poetry.¹

In the fifth century, however, the conception of history became more specific and differentiated. History for Herodotus still meant ‘enquiry,’ but his was an enquiry only into human affairs.² The same might be said of Thucydides, although he did not use the word ‘history’, since it was a foreign word in classical Attic. On this basis Aristotle characterized history as a story or account of human affairs.³ Fastening on a different aspect of the original conception of history, Plato and Theophrastus understood it as natural history or enquiry into nature, i.e., as the science that “brings the flowing to a stand-still.”⁴ While history was still the general name for the enquiry into and account of the motions of nature and the actions of men, a clear and decisive divergence into two genres, natural history and political history, was thus already apparent in the fourth century and led to the later isolation of natural history as a specialized discipline separated from political history. Despite this divergence, however, the original meaning of history and its close attachment to philosophy and poetry were not lost. The historian was the witness or judge of events, and as such his activity depended upon his having seen or at least having enquired of those who had seen the events in question.⁵ Such seeing was rudimentary not just to history, however, but to all the ways of knowing. For example, it was just such a desire ‘to know through having seen’ (eidenai) that characterized poetry and that Aristotle described as peculiarly and naturally human and philosophic.⁶ History was thus in a fundamental way bound up with philosophy and poetry and along with them constituted the essence of Greek thought.

Reality for the Greeks is a conjunction of the actual and the eternal. The transience of human life and the deeds of men, in their view, can only be understood in conjunction with the eternity of the gods and nature. The gods exist in a realm beyond both death and change and are the embodiment of individual immortality and perfection, while nature is the realm of constant change which is governed by a teleology that produces the eternal repetitions of the heavens and the species. Time in this sense is, as Plato’s Timeaus asserts, the moving image of eternity. By contrast, man is a lamentably finite being. He is chiefly characterized by death, and his deeds are even more fleeting than his life. He is lifted up for a moment onto “the coasts of light” to struggle for preeminence and contemplate the radiant beauty of nature and the gods only to be crushed by these gods for their sport or to be devoured by a dark and omnivorous destiny. In contrast to the orderliness of nature, human affairs are governed by chance, subject to such sudden and unpredictable reversals that even the most powerful men and the greatest empires are never secure. All that is certain is that everything that has come to be will also pass away, that today’s victor will on some tomorrow lay in the dust under the heel of a new master upon whom fortune has momentarily smiled.

Both the goal and the limit of human striving are thus established by the eternal.⁷ Man constantly seeks but can never attain immortality. He is of course vouchsafed the species-immortality of nature, but this does not satisfy him since it is something he shares with all other life. He desires the individual immortality of the gods, but this is beyond him, and the hubris that characterizes the attempt to attain it is the worst of all crimes and is met with the most terrible of all punishments. To know thyself for the Greeks is thus to know that you are not a god, and to do everything in measure is to act as a mortal man rather than as an immortal god. Despite these limitations man is granted a certain sort of immortality, an immortality that lies between the immortality of nature and that of the gods, between the species and the individual. This middle ground is the polis.

The polis is the place of human life, and those who live outside it, as Aristotle maintained, are for the Greeks either beasts or gods. Man is the zōon politikon, the political animal, and whatever immortality is granted him as a man must be bound up with the polis. This immortality, however, cannot simply be due to the eternity of the polis itself, for every polis, as the Iliad made apparent and as every Greek well knew, had at one time come into being and would just as certainly pass away. Thus it is not the eternality of the polis that is the source of human immortality. Human immortality is rather bound up with the polis because the polis is the place of speech, the place in which the eternal is brought to light in the actual through speech. As the zōon politikon man is the zōon logon echon, the speaking or rational animal, and thus has access to and in a sense can participate in that which transcends him.

Although there are many different forms of speech in the polis, philosophy, poetry, and history are the highest because they most clearly reveal the eternal. According to Aristotle, philosophy aims at the revelation of the necessary, while poetry is concerned with the possible and history with the actual.⁸ Philosophy in his view thus explains what, for example, virtue and vice are in themselves, while poetry presents us with images of virtuous and vicious men, as they necessarily would be if they were. History, in contradistinction to both, is a putting into words of what has been seen in human affairs, for it is only thus that events last; it is only thus that they are remembered and have meaning. As Epictetus remarked, it is not through the deeds of men but through the words about these deeds that we are moved.⁹ History for the Greeks does not explain the logical development of events, because there is no such logical development, but rather makes static and thus comprehensible the highest moments of the ephemeral. These moments are the highest, however, because they most clearly reveal what is essential and eternal in human life. History thus calls back to memory what has been seen, not in order to describe or reconstruct actuality but to open up the eternal for man. The eternality that history reveals, however, does not depend upon the eternality of the written or oral record of events. Historical events are not eternal because they are remembered but are remembered because they reveal the eternal. They are thus eternal in the same sense that Achilles’ deeds are eternal—because they embody what is true about man everywhere and always. History in this sense reveals the source of human immortality.¹⁰

History, however, like philosophy and poetry, does not aim merely at the revelation of the eternal but also at the preservation of the polis. All three thus have both a theoretical and a practical goal, although philosophy and poetry often find it difficult to reconcile these two goals and tend rather to uncover an abyss between the conventional and the natural, or between the affairs of men and those of gods. Indeed, from a political point of view, philosophy and poetry tell man more often what he is not than what he is, emphasizing his mortality to indicate the source of his immortality. History, on the contrary, reveals the eternality of explicitly political actions, and consequently it guarantees an undying fame for the virtuous and valiant and an undying opprobrium for the vicious and cowardly, thus motivating men to sacrifice their ephemeral pleasures, their wealth, and even their lives in the service of the polis. In this way history sets the polis at the center of Greek life and immortalizes those deeds that are conducive to its preservation and glory. Such an immortalization of the actual, however, is only possible because the eternal shines forth out of the events themselves. This does not mean that the Greeks believed that the actual is the eternal. On the contrary, actuality and eternity in their view are for the most part fundamentally severed. There are, however, occasions when the shape of actuality approaches that of eternity, i.e., when the eternal appears in and as the actual. It is such occasions that the historian immortalizes and through them that he approaches the truth of philosophy and poetry. Thus, Thucydides, for example, could write a work “for all time,” because he had before him the “greatest war of all time.” Even in such a case, however, he did not merely describe the actual but also recomposed the speeches of the various orators to bring out what was appropriate to the occasion. The historian in this sense chooses an event or action that most clearly reveals or embodies what is essential or eternal in human life and reworks it in whatever way is necessary to bring out the truly real element in it.

It is precisely for such distortions, however, that we moderns often criticize ancient historians and question whether their work is really history. In this light it is often asserted that they were unable to develop a true historical science because they lacked a sense of history or of actuality, or because they had only a rudimentary or primitive conception of scientific methods, or that they were too encumbered with a mythological past to recognize the true causal connections between events.¹¹ While all of these assertions may in some sense be correct, they fundamentally misconstrue the Greek conception of history. The truth is not that the Greeks were unable to develop a historical science but that they did not want to, that their methodology was different than our own because their end was different than our own. History for the Greeks does not provide a logical and complete explanation of the actual, which is in their view impossible, but strives to reveal the eternal in the actual and thus to provide the ground for human immortality. The events themselves and the connection between them, which are of such importance to us today, are only significant for the Greeks insofar as the eternal is present in these events and can be extracted and preserved in words, i.e., only insofar as the glorious deeds of valiant men can be preserved from the oblivion that the necessity of their deaths would otherwise entail.

History thus recognizes and immortalizes the deeds that preserve and glorify the polis and, as such, is only possible in the context of the polis, for only in such a relatively small community are individual deeds significant. It is thus not surprising that the degeneration of the polis and the degeneration of history go hand in hand. This first became evident in the late Roman Republic when the political demand for glorification subverted the philosophic demand for truth in history. History was no longer written by those outside the regime “for all time” but by those involved in public affairs for the political necessities of the moment. In this way history became merely a rhetorical tool. As with all tools, however, it is still possible to distinguish a good and a bad use. Caesar, for example, wrote excellent accounts of his wars in Gaul, which, however, aimed only at his own aggrandizement. Cicero, on the contrary, sought to preserve history’s service to the state. History in his view is a branch of rhetoric that makes use of embellishments but also stresses the moral lessons of the story.¹² In this manner Livy, for example, consciously sacrificed the truth on many occasions for the sake of Roman glory and the preservation of examples of martial virtue for emulation. History as the unity of theoretical and practical wisdom is dissolved in favor of the practical. While it may retain a certain nobility, its higher philosophic character and thus its connection to the eternal are thereby lost.

Even this political task of history, however, disappeared with the destruction of the polis under the Empire. With the dissolution of the polis all men became, as Aristotle had earlier maintained, either gods or beasts, either divine and all-powerful emperors or private citizens with rights but no duties, with property but no capacity to perform noble deeds. In this context history degenerated into universal history on one hand and biography on the other. Universal history arose as the accumulation and coordination of the individual histories of the previously independent states that had been absorbed into the Empire and aimed at providing a basis of understanding for commerce and interchange. The ethical and political purpose that Cicero had still recognized as belonging to history thus came to an end. History was consequently reduced to little more than a tool of economics and administration that relied entirely upon the accounts of others and made no pretense to the contemplation and evaluation of contemporary events. Such an evaluation, however, was carried out in a different form: history became biography.

For the Greeks history was concerned with the noble actions of men in the context of the polis. The dissolution of the various cities into the universal Empire, however, put an end to noble deeds, since no ordinary citizen could ever play a truly significant role in so great a state. Indeed, the only persons capable of truly noble or ignoble deeds were the emperors, but they rose so far above their fellows that they were deemed divine and their actions could consequently be neither praised nor blamed according to human standards. It is thus hardly surprising that history should give way to biography and that the demand upon history for rhetorical glorification and flattery should supersede and dissolve the political demand for virtue and public spiritedness. This is already evident in the dissolution of the distinction of history and drama in late Hellenistic art as well as in Tacitus and the late Roman biographers.¹³ The way to history as a fictional story almost certainly follows from this dissolution.

Concomitant with the degeneration of Greek and Roman history under the Empire was the rise of Christian history. This new form of history was the result of the confrontation of Jewish or Christian thought with the work of the ancient historians. The first Christian histories, to be sure, relied almost exclusively on the accounts of ancient Judaism and the lives of Christ and the Apostles, but it would be a mistake to see the origin of this sort of history in the so-called historicism of the Old or New Testament. There is in fact no word in ancient Hebrew for history, and the concept is foreign to ancient Jewish thought.¹⁴ Christian history was rather the result of the encounter of theology and history. Confronted with the accounts of a glorious pagan antiquity, the Christian historians had to find some means of demonstrating that the actions and characters described by the pagan historians could in no way rival those described in Scripture in order to wean men from the ancient models of the good or noble life. Their task was not simply to deny classical antiquity but to subordinate it to the Christian world view.¹⁵

This synthesis of Christian theology and ancient history brought about a decisive and fundamental change in the conception of history itself. The original Greek sense of history as witness remains in Christian history, but it is no longer the knowledge of what is seen but the knowledge of God through the witness of the Apostles. History which had sought the eternal in the actual thus becomes the revelation of the eternal as such, the witness to the hidden truth or meaning of events as a whole, which comes to light and hence visibility in and through the Word, i.e., in and through Christ. History thus comes to rest not upon seeing or contemplation, i.e., not upon the immediate experience and apprehension of the eternal, but upon the authority and through the mediation of Scripture, i.e., through the Word itself. Thus history for Christianity is not the enquiry into or the account of events with a view to extracting and immortalizing noble deeds but the faith in the single event, the kairos, that reveals the hitherto hidden truth and order in all creation.

All Christian history in this sense is written sub specie aeternitatis. Time is no longer understood as the realm of transience, governed by caprice or destiny, but the unfolding of eternity backwards and forwards out of the moment of creation, i.e., out of the kairos in which Christ comes into the world. This single event is thus the key to all creation, since every other event follows from it and is only comprehensible in terms of it. History in this sense becomes prophetic, for just as the Old Testament prophets were able to foresee the coming of Christ by means of divine inspiration, so on the basis of this new dispensation the significance of the entire past and the entire future becomes comprehensible.

Henceforth it was not the experience of the eternal in the actual but the revelation of the eternal in Scripture that was the measure of all things. The fidelity to the original witness that characterized ancient history, however, remained and was in fact intensified in no small part because the witness was conceived as divine or at least divinely inspired. The importance of the immediately seen and thus of man, however, was thereby correspondingly diminished. Man, who is in any case a poor and untrustworthy witness in comparison to God, is rendered even less trustworthy by original sin, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Question of History
• 2. The Question of the Ground of History
• 3. The Ground of History as Phenomenology
• 4. The Philosophy of History and the Question of Its Ground
• 5. History as Being
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index