Instead of being a series of largely random developments, history as Hegel portrayed it followed a necessary, rational progression, from ancient Chinese and Indian civilization, through the Greeks and Romans and the advent of Christianity, culminating in the establishment, in his time, of polities based on the principle of universal, legal freedom. Hegel argued that the sense of order that ancient writers had once found in nature could be located instead in the historical process, which had come to its completion in his own time. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution-which, partly under the influence of Rousseau’s Social Contract, unleashed a reign of unspeakable terror across the nation (such as Rousseau had never intended), culminating in Napoleon’s despotism-Hegel endeavored to show how such anarchy was not needed in order to establish a legitimate polity that would secure the equal rights to freedom of all human beings, while affording them a sense of community that bourgeois individualism could not provide. A more far-reaching and influential response, however, was offered by Georg W.F. One of Kant’s contemporaries, the poet Friedrich Schiller, presented as an alternative an "aesthetic" education through culture, inspired by the ancients, that would enable us to transcend utilitarianism, but without denying our natural desires. Yet Kant’s solution could not itself satisfy modern man’s need for completion, precisely because of its abstractness, or its repetition of the Rousseauean dualism between the natural world we inhabit and our longing for wholeness and meaningful freedom. The most influential of these in the late 18th century was Immanuel Kant, who endeavored to elevate human dignity, in the face of modern science’s removal of meaning from nature, by teaching an ethic of duty, through which, by obeying the moral command of pure reason-the "categorical imperative"-we transcend the natural world entirely, to enter the "noumenal" realm (a kind of replacement for the "Ideas" depicted by Plato’s Socrates) of genuine reality. Yet Rousseau saw no means of literally restoring the classical outlook, in Newell’s account, because of the impact of modern physics, which portrayed nature as a realm of meaningless matter in motion, in contrast with ancient writers’ "metaphysical cosmologies." He offered a set of partial solutions to the modern problem in the form of an egalitarian, democratic polity free from bourgeois economic competitiveness a "natural" education that would facilitate a familial life remote from "alienating" concerns with popular opinion and an individual solution, available only to a few people like himself, who are capable of withdrawing from society so as to devote themselves to the pleasure of the solitary contemplation of nature.īut while Rousseau saw the human problem as only incompletely soluble, his presentation of it encouraged subsequent thinkers to undertake more radical and comprehensive resolutions. Like his successors, Rousseau looked back with admiration at the ancient Greek city, supposedly devoted to patriotism and virtue, nobility and beauty, in contrast to the base "utilitarianism" and materialism espoused by the Enlightenment. He argued that their doctrines, which derived the standards of political legitimacy from a hypothetical "state of nature" prior to the establishment of government, while aimed at securing human beings’ inalienable rights, generated a dichotomy both within and among human beings, between individual and community, and between our longing for a lost natural freedom and the need to obey the commands of government for the sake of our security. While Newell sees the ultimate influence of this philosophy, once transformed by Hegel’s three major successors, as problematic-even, indeed, helping to inspire Communist and Nazi tyrannies in the 20th century, along with radical movements like Russian nationalism and Iranian jihadism today-he observes at its core a necessary corrective to the excesses of today’s bourgeois individualism and cultural philistinism, which might offer a needed pathway back to the greatness of classical Greek thought and culture, and to the sense of individual and communal "wholeness" that today’s liberal polities are felt to lack.Īs Newell recounts, in the late 18th century Rousseau initiated a reaction against the teachings of the great liberal political philosophers (most notably Thomas Hobbes and John Locke).
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