History 9
Presented on: Saturday, August 28, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History Nine and we move to a new pair. A new pair of books, Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, and Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Two of the most powerful books in the modern world in terms of repositioning human consciousness in a Historical line of development. And the very term line of development is incorrect. There is no such thing as a line of development. And part of the problem with the twentieth century is that we inherited the idea of a line of development. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, around 1900 one of the most famous of the English historians, professor J.B. Bury, who had made fantastic translations from the classic historians, available in English, wrote a book called the Idea of Progress. And the expectation in the twentieth century was that we were now going to make progress. Not the naive progress of the nineteenth century, because the nineteenth century also had the idea that things were going to improve. In fact the nineteenth century was famous for starting with a fantastic overblown melodramatic expectation that, not only will things improve for man in History, but that it's going to be radically better, it's going to be millennial.
And so the French Revolution in the 1790's re-dated the entire calendar and put it back to year one. We're no longer concerned with the fact that it's 1790 something, it's the year 1; we're starting over; we're radically going to make all the changes, not just huge changes, but all the changes now. And as we know, not only did the French Revolution sour quickly and become an authoritarian period called the directorate, but at the same time it became a terrifying experience so that the era folded into, what became The Directorate is also called The Terror. So that the French Revolution quickly showed that millennial expectations of radical change completely turn inside out and upside down, they become their opposite. And to a world wide audience watching the beginning of the nineteenth century with such fantastic expectations, quickly sour into almost its exact opposite, produced a suspicion in the nineteenth century that all is not well with the world and with man.
And during the course of the nineteenth century, that suspicion, that doubt which had gained a kind of an impetus, mostly in France because of a man who lived in the previous century, not the nineteenth century but at the beginning at the eighteenth century, in fact he was a seventeenth century thinker who's works became famous in the following century, the eighteenth and his name was Pierre Bayle. And Bayle is famous in European History as being a refined skeptic. Someone who doubts authority on very good grounds because the more that you knit pick the more that you find that they are not only dissembling; not only is it not true and this is a bogus bill of goods that we've been given, but they purposely lie. And the lies register most poignantly in History. They've not told us the truth about our History. And so that kind of Bayle skepticism which was encapsulated in a whole huge tome of his, a dictionary. And Bayle's dictionary was the forerunner of the great philosophic dictionary that Voltaire brought out at the apex of the eighteenth century at a time which was called The Enlightenment. The German term for it Oufplerank. The Enlightenment. And The Enlightenment was a new improved edition of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance had been the rediscovery of the past, the Enlightenment was the discovery of the unlimited future. The Renaissance looked back to antiquity with awe, the Enlightenment looked forward to the future with awe. And in between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was a watershed, the seventeenth century. And what made the difference was that in the seventeenth century what was developed was science. Yes there had been sciences before but they were never powerful because they couldn't do much. Whereas by seventeen hundred it was apparent that man could do a great deal.
When Newton's great Principia Mathematica came out in 1887, thirteen years before the turn of that century it was apparent to the few who could read that that it was all over. That the helplessness of man was finished forever and that the beginning of human capacity had arrived. That we no longer had to look to the past for greatness but we could look to the future for greatness. And so the Enlightenment is this enthusiasm.
Samuel Johnson, in the middle of the seventeen hundreds says what's wrong with man is his capacity for false enthusiasm. And it was that kind of phrase that people remembered when the French Revolution turned sour. And so the fantastic doubt, the Pierre Bayle doubt that came back into play when the French Revolution soured, that kind of skepticism about there being a progress, about there being a line of development, about there being a future that was fantastic; all of this came under a skeptical glare, at the same time as having this tremendous enlightenment confidence. And so the confidence was that somehow we must go deeper. That things have not worked out because we have not gone deep enough. And just as Newton had gone into the mathematics of physics; there must be a deeper symbolic structure to History, to the personality of Man. And so we have to learn to go into the mathematic of the structure of History and Man. And that somewhere in that mathematics of the structure of History and Man, Art was central. And that what was bull's eye centered in the center of Art was the capacity to have a transformative visionary language. The short form for it at the time was poetry. We would say now with a little critical acumen developed in the tragic twentieth century that it's not so much poetry but it is a poetic, a poetique. That means a language, a visionary language capable of poetry but also at the same time capable of a theory of poetry, capable of a criticism of poetical literature. And that all of this matures at the same time. And that somehow the whole beautiful form of higher mathematics is linked to a vision of the Cosmic sublime. Only it's not teachable to almost anyone or everyone. Very few can master that.
And so we have at the end of the twentieth century a complete plate of spaghetti completely confused about ideas of Man and History and Art and capacity and almost nowhere do you find anyone anywhere who can comb through it. And our confidence now is that there is no idea of progress, there is no idea, no confidence at all in an idea of progress that combing through the spaghetti of complications is going to help. What good does it do to straighten every strand of spaghetti when the whole thing is to eat the spaghetti and gain the nourishment. It doesn't matter that it's confused at all. You don't have to straighten the spaghetti on the plate to enjoy the meal and gain the benefit from it.
And so at the beginning of the twenty first century we have a different, radically different outlook about what is radical. It's very similar to the ancient parable of the Buddha's begging bowl. That the discipline, twenty five hundred years ago with the begging bowl, a bowl that fits the two palms of the hand. One hand reached out is a hand to grasp or to take, whereas two hands held out is the reach not to grasp and not to take but to receive. So the begging bowl is not a begging bowl it's a receiving vessel. And a receiving vessel in its deepest symbolism is a crucible for transformation. So that the food bowl of the Buddha was the symbol that you transform the world. That means anything in the world. And the traditional story is that one time the Buddha's bowl was being held out and a leper put some food in and the thumb of the leper fell off into the bowl. And the famous fable, parable, did the Buddha eat the thumb? And the answer is yes. Because it doesn't matter about the world at all. The transform transforms. So that man is no longer an object within a realistic world and that that's the hard nosed fact. Man is a threshold of transform through which the entire world could be funneled and changed. This is called a sublime understanding.
And the whole notion in The Enlightenment was that sublimity was the true nobility of man. The story of the Buddha and his food bowl was meant to illustrate that when you put the Four Noble Truths, or the paired form of The Four Noble Truths which is the Eightfold Path, that when you center the Four Noble Truths onto the pattern of the Eightfold Path, the mutual center of those two when they are aligned is a realization. And the realization is that man does not belong as an object in the world, he is a threshold of transformation by which the entirety of the world becomes a Cosmos. And that as long as man is uneducated, as long as man is undeveloped, as long as he is untutored, as long as he is uninspired, not unfolded, not taken out of the given ordinary, until man becomes extraordinary, he doesn't become real, and man is just an animal in the world. But that this is not the truth of man at all, man is a spirit who's essential functioning is not to have attributes of things but to have capacities of reordering, to have qualities of spirit.
And so one of the central ideas in the Enlightenment was that Man can teach himself to do all of these things and that's why the future is possible. The glitch was that it didn't go deep enough. And so with the French Revolution being a failure, there was not a giving up on the part of the Enlightenment figures, but of a deepening of efforts, an intensifying of the quality and the Enlightenment, when it became intensified, instead of being the clear balanced transparent outline of future possibility, became the impassioned flaming energy of commitment to penetrate through the resistances. And that became the Romantic Revolution. So that the failure of the French Revolution invited a response from the Enlightenment to make a Romantic Revolution. Very well then, if we cannot reform a whole tradition, a whole people, a whole nation, we'll go deeper, we'll reform man himself and reformed man will then do all the rest of it.
And so the invitation was to become heroic, heroic. Here in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History one finds this kind of statement, this is from 1830: "Simple faith can well dispense with a fuller understanding of history and make due with the general notion of a Divine world order. And we ought not to condemn those who take this course, so long as their faith does not become a polemical one" [that is seeking to change us by coercion and force] "but it is also possible to defend such views in a spirit of prejudice and the general proposition by virtue of its very generality can also be given a specifically negative amplication so as to suggest that the Divine being is remote from all human things and transcends human knowledge. Those who adopt this attitude reserve the right to dismiss the claims of truth and rationality with the added advantage of being able to indulge their own fancies at will. If God is placed beyond the reach of our rational consciousness, we are no long obliged to trouble ourselves about his nature or indeed to look for reason in world history. The way is then open for any [any any any] arbitrary hypothesis. Pious humility knows very well what it stands to gain from its sacrifices."
And so during the last three to four hundred years world history has been convulsed with a disjunctive polarity. On one side there are those who have the confidence that man can learn about himself realistically and on the other side that the real is beyond man's capacity so you needn't trouble yourself about it. That in fact the whole realm of ideas is a trouble. As long as we don't have to deal with these issues, well then we're better off. We can live in a good well managed Disneyland without having to discuss Hegel or anybody else for that matter. This disjunctiveness does not mesh together; they do not go together. Hegel and Burckhardt present us, as a pair, with an opportunity, a rare opportunity to see that these are not just a pair of texts but that they have a juxtaposition which has a very curious quality to it. Rather than Hegel's Lectures on World History being parallel, it's actually perpendicular. And that the two works together make a right angle. The right angle of a pristine angle of vision to understand history; to understand what it is that's going on.
And yet this understanding is not possible by ordinary language, there's no way. The language of the street of 1999 is incapable of talking about any of this. And so I use a different language. I use a twenty first century language. I use a style of delivery, I use a rhetorical patterning, I use a vocabulary, I use a syntax, I use a kind of language that you might expect people to use maybe a hundred years from now on the street, when streets extend throughout the entire star system. So these presentations are not lectures in an old instructional sense at all. That kind of sense went out of play long before the twentieth century even began. In fact long before the nineteenth century even began. In fact it was out of date in the seventeenth century. In fact it was challenged in antiquity already two thousand years ago very effectively. It's because we were never taught anything real in a real way that no one knows. No one on the planet understands and knows a more realistic outcome and outlook. But we can have a chance to work on it.
What's interesting about Burckhardt? Burckhardt's book is written about two thirds of the way through the nineteenth century. It comes out about the time that Lincoln was president in the 1860's. Yet it's subject matter is the Renaissance, the Renaissance in Italy, the beginnings of the Renaissance in Italy. So the book comes out about two thirds of the way through the nineteenth century but is about the Renaissance at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the early 1400's to the late 1400's, that period. So even though it's written at a time when Lincoln was president, it's about the development of history before the discovery of the Americas, before 1492.
In fact it turns out that there are many paradoxes. That when one begins to see history historically, that is to say as a recognition field, that historical consciousness is not about cognition but about re-cognition. That what is functional in history is memory, but a memory which has exchanged its position with imagination. That this exchange of memory and imagination, so that even though memory operates within a differential mode and imagination operates within an integral mode, they exchange places. Memory doesn't become integral, it's still differential but it operates very easily in an integral mode. And imagination which exchanges place with it operates very easily in a differential mode. Now this would be puzzling beyond belief except that we have a symbol which expresses this, it's like the Chinese Tai Chi. In the middle of the light is the circle of dark and in the middle of the dark is the circle of light. Those two have exchanged places and that's why the Tai Chi symbol is dynamic and also is a complementarity. To think that the Tai Chi is a symbol of Yin Yang is also an intellectual faux pas of the first order. The Chinese Tai Chi is a symbol of Tao Te. Yin Yang are operative polarities within Te, they don't operate in Tao at all. They don't exist in Tao. There's no Yin Yang in Tao, sorry. I know that all the books teach you this and all the experts teach you this, it just simply isn't so. It's a lack of sublimity on the part of those who would teach Taoism. It's famous in Chinese philosophic history. This kind of scam goes all the way back, in fact already by the time of Chong Zu, twenty three hundred years ago. He's making fun of those pretenders who think they understand Lao Tsu, who think they understand the Tao Te Ching, who think they have a bead on this. And out of that, in Chong Zu's time rose a thinker named Su Yen, you never heard of him. Su Yen is the maker of the Yin Yang school of thought in Chinese philosophic history. There's no Yin Yang school before that. Su Yen is very much a Chinese Descartes, is very interesting. And Chong Zu makes fund of him and in the inner chapters of Chong Zu you find all kinds of ways in which Chong Zu is having sport with, having fun with the clumsiness of thinking that an idea of Tao is Tao.
The same thing happens with Hegel. Hegel is one of the most misunderstood figures, he's misunderstood like Chong Zu. And so we're trying to understand something complex like Hegel but also why it is that Hegel is perpendicular to Burckhardt. Because Burckhardt's continuum is the time of Lincoln and in the milieu of Burckhardt's time, at that time in European philosophy, the great philosophic genius with energy was a very close friend of Burckhardt's named Friedrich Neitzsche. So that when we use Burckhardt we're also using Burckhardt and Nietzsche. And here Burckhardt is writing about the Renaissance in Italy at the beginnings of what? What was the Renaissance? The Renaissance was the revival of classical learning; of the essence of going back. And what was the essence of classical learning? They call it the Greco Roman world. The first word in there is Greek. So that the Renaissance is the rebirth, it's the revival in Italy of the Classic world, which was yes Roman, but was essentially powered by Greek ideas. And so the contemporary of Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, when he's young he's all consumed with the Greeks. One of his earliest works, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. And perhaps one of his most famous books, The Birth of Tragedy, the birth of Greek tragedy. He was a Greek Scholar.
So Burckhardt goes back to the Renaissance from the later part of the nineteenth century. He goes back to the 1400's but our friend Hegel comes in between. Burckhardt writes in the nineteenth century about the fifteenth century but Hegel is right in the middle. He's at the beginning of the Romantic period at the cusp when the Romantic period was beginning, but he's the culmination of the Enlightenment in many ways. Except it's hard to see Hegel as an enlightenment figure because there was already a powerful figure who was, who's always been thought of as the archetypal Enlightenment philosopher and his name is Kant. Immanuel Kant. But when you look at Hegel and Kant, when you look at the Enlightenment, one of the qualities that the Enlightenment is famous for is its ability to appreciate and emulate the classics, especially the classical Greeks. And so in Burckhardt and his friend Nietzsche, you have them ultimately going back to the Greeks but in a different mode from the way in which Kant and Hegel went back to the Greeks. They go back to the same nexus but in different tones. Kant and Hegel go back to go deeper into the process, deeper into the way in which the mind works, deeper into the way in which a logic structure operates because we need to know about ourselves and to know about ourselves, we need to know especially about the mind, and to know about the mind we need to know how the damn thing works. What's going on here? What are its processes? Let's lay them out. Let's lay them out on the table and let's look at these. Let's make a science of the operations of the mind. Let's make a language of the science of the operations of the mind. Let's lay out a logic which allows us then to be clear about the mind's operative structures and functions before we apply to anything else. Whereas Burckhardt and Nietzsche come at the culmination of the Romantic period where it isn't so much the function of a structure of logic but it's the figure of the Hero, of the Heroic quality in man that makes use of whatever is found and it's much more primordial to see the artist as a hero, is of more interest to Burckhardt and to Nietzsche. The great book by Hegel is called The Phenomenology of Spirit. Let's look exactly in an enlightenment way of how the spirit works; its workings, its structure, its functions. We can do this; we can look at this and we can understand this. Where Nietzsche's great work is on Zarathustra, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
It's a totally different quality which comes out even in musical examples. If you're looking to hear the Enlightenment you will listen to a sonata by Mozart. If you're looking for music to Thus Spake Zarathustra you have to go to the opening chords that Kubrick used in 2001, Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra. There's a world of difference between a Mozart Sonata and the music for 2001. It's a whole world of difference.
So that Burckhardt and Hegel have a very peculiar quality. In a way Burckhardt leap frogs back over Hegel to the Renaissance and sees the artist as a hero. Whereas in Hegel, he's not really seeing art like Burckhardt sees art. When Hegel looks to see art, he looks to see what is an aesthetic that we could use trustworthily to appreciate what's really there and what's really in us. So Hegel as an Enlightenment figure, cusping on the Romantic Hero but at the beginning Hegel's Romantic Hero is one that has in youth the vision in order to see the method clearer. Whereas in Nietzsche the youth has the clear vision but learns to set it aside to manifest the Romantic outcome. This is a completely different kind of a quality. And the key to it, if one is looking to understand quickly. Of course it's complex; of course the entire issue, all the issues, it's a plate of spaghetti with fifty different sauces on it. But you don't have to worry about the fact that that's confused to the point of a culinary nightmare. You're in a situation, you're in an education that's thousands of years beyond the Buddha's receiving bowl but does the same sort of thing. This education is like that bowl, it receives whatever is there, wherever you are. And we work its digestive transform. You don't have to worry about whether it's confused or not.
This quality in the Enlightenment, in Hegel, is there pristinely in Kant at least thirty years before Hegel begins to discover it for himself. Kant is older than Hegel. If someone is going to teach you Kant, they usually jump to the Critique of Pure Reason. Or use a couple of his philosophic monographs to step you quickly up to that. But the book that was not translated for 150 years by Kant is the true beginning. It's called in translation Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, written in 1764, a whole generation before he wrote Critique of Pure Reason. And Kant's writings on the Beautiful and the Sublime, observations, and not just observations of the beautiful and the sublime, observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime. Perfect Enlightenment document. It's like a manifesto of the Enlightenment that we are sophisticated enough, we are present enough, we are confident enough in our method of inquiry, in our stages of reconnoitering and digesting and bringing back into play, we're capable enough as enlightened men and women to look at something so mysterious as beauty and sublimity, and the feeling toned sentience that comes with that, and to do that all in the function of an observation which is scientific. That we are being scientifically observable of massive feeling toned complexities about the most mysterious ideas that man can have. And that in a peculiar way, there is, as Kant says, a very peculiar quality to beauty and sublimity, that they're interspersed and interchanged. He emphasizes here that the qualities of femininity and the qualities of masculinity, masculine and feminine, have an interpenetrative wholeness together which has something to do with the mysteries of beauty and sublimity.
And so Kant in 1764, because he's struggling with this to express this. Not easily expressed at all, ever. He writes: "The fair sex has just as much understanding as the male, but it is a beautiful understanding. Whereas ours [male] should be a deep understanding, an expression that signifies identity with the sublime". Now it's completely reductive to say, well women are the beauty and men are sublime. That's not what he's saying at all, this is enlightenment. This is not grade school Roman Empire junk, this is very very powerful. Why would Kant write something on the beautiful and the sublime as the beginning position for a whole critique of what the mind was all about, and what history is all about? The secret of it, the key, the quick way to get into it is that one of the classic documents that comes down to us is a book which is entitled, out of tradition, Longinus On the Sublime. Here's a Penguin Classic edition, they put The Poetics of Aristotle, the Classical Greek, they put the understanding of art, by Horace, The Hours of Poetica, the classic of aesthetics of the Romans, together with the third, Longinus' On the Sublime. Because Longinus is the essence of the Hellenistic outlook. Aristotle of the Greeks, Horace of the Romans and Longinus, so called, of the Hellenistic.
What's interesting is that the Greeks and the Romans are both subsumed under something which washed over the edges of both and that was the Hellenistic era. One is tempted to think that in Historical development the Greeks come first, then comes the Hellenistic period, then comes Rome. And yes on the surface, if you're following military accounts, newspaper accounts, a journalistic chronology, that's exactly what one would find except that the Hellenistic period goes back resonantly further than the Greeks and goes future forward further than the Romans. In fact Immanuel Kant is on the cusp of one of the farthest resonances of Longinus. And that Longinus is not the author of this at all. The Paris manuscript from the 900's says, attributed to pseudo Longinus. Longinus lived several hundred years after this was written. This was written in Alexandria at the white hot intensity of towards the end of the first century AD. It's contemporaneous with the Hermetic documents. On the Sublime is a Hermetic document from Alexandria, written about the same time as the Poimandres, with the most exquisite kind of insight. The insight is that there is an eternal recognition capacity in man. He doesn't have to stand in line behind other experts, behind demons, behind angels behind all of this long line on a pecking order of improved superior authority. That any man and woman has a direct access to truth, if they can but presence themselves, center themselves in eternity. Where is the line in eternity? Where is the geometry of pecking orders in Gods realm. Not there. Let's take a break.
BREAK
Hegel is about people, Burckhardt is about territory. Burckhardt's territory is expanded and maintained by the ruler, the Prince. In Hegel the territory is transformed into a sublime Cosmos; it's a completely different outlook. When you open Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, part one chapter one, it says right away, the headline says it: "The State is a work of art". But the Renaissance in Italy was rediscovering the Roman antiquity first so they got it about antiquity in a Roman way. And what was the Roman confidence? The Roman confidence was based upon where it emerged, not so much from the constant wars in Italy. The early Rome, the republican Rome was an Italian phenomenon, but the Roman Empire is not an Italian phenomenon; the Roman Empire is not made on the basis of Italy, the Roman Empire is made on the basis of Hellenistic civilization. The Roman Empire is a political form, is a state which captures the Hellenistic civilization. So right away on page 9 of Burckhardt: "But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system, and the merits of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth century were not without a more or less distinct consciousness of the brief and uncertain tenure of most of these despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions like these are naturally secure in proportion to the size of territory in which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly tempted to swallow up the smaller." So that the stability of empire is to expand its territory. So that the state as a work of art is powerful in its expansion. So that when one looks to Imperial Rome to look at the apex; what is the apex of Roman imperial power? And it comes in the reign of Trajan who already died in 117 AD. Trajan comes into power 97-98 AD. So that the apex of Roman Empire power, that is to say the farthest expanse of its territory, of its geological control was at the end of the first century AD, at the beginning of the second century AD, right at the very beginning, at the cusp.
The reconstruction in the last couple of years by the Getty of Trajan's forum; they did a virtual reconstruction of the great Forum. Not the Forum Romanum, not the Roman Forum of traditional republican Rome or even the forum of the Caesars, Trajan redid the entire power structure of the center of Rome. He rebuilt the Forum to fit his largest scale Roman Empire power. And when you look at the Forum of Trajan you do not see a trace at all of republican Rome. What you see is the apex of Hellenistic ideas of power. That the power radiates out from this order, from this grid, this pattern of order and the consistent ripples of this power are what make the reality of the world. What are those ripples? Those ripples are the resonances of the architectural order that's imposed on the buildings, on the Forum as the central Acropolis of the Empire, of the way in which the resonances of architecture then go out and make a historical reality. That art makes History possible by its resonances. So that History, as a reality, are not the kings lists, the chronological orders. Those are archival documents. That's not even on level yet of bookkeeping. History is much more serious than that, much more formidable. And the most powerful operative center to History is Art, especially in architecture.
The building order sends out its resonances of style and proportion, create the language of relationality and judgement of form and appropriateness; and it is all of that, the resonances the frequencies of that. It's as if architecture as structures were like bells, like gongs, which when you rang the resonances of the ringing of those architectural gongs, those resonances made a recognition field out of which History was then possible and happening. So that what you had to do to control History is you had to control the central gong. You had to control the order of symbolic structure and who made that and who rang that and then who enforced that and kept track of that and made those histories. And for the Renaissance, for the Renaissance as Burckhardt saw it, it was the apex of Roman Empire power.
In the case of taking a look at the three classical statements of aesthetics, it would be Horace not Aristotle, but Horace and Virgil are the great poets. Virgil never wrote a theory of poetry, Horace did.
But Hegel, unlike Burckhardt doesn't look to Horace, he looks to Longinus. He looks to a Hellenistic aesthetic and not a Roman Empire aesthetic to be the fulcrum, to be the way the style in which the gong is rung. And while Burckhardt admires the way in which the Florentines remade Florence, or the Venetians remade Venice, or at least remade the central structures. When you think of Florence in the Renaissance, what do you think of? The first thing you think of is the fact, the geographical fact of the city. Of the great Cathedral. Florence Cathedral is the center of the city, of Renaissance Florence. What is the center of Renaissance Rome? The New Saint Peters. And in imitation, later on, in the London that developed in the seventeenth century, Saint Paul's Cathedral. It's these architectural bells, when rung in the right way, send out those frequencies, those reverberations and the field generated by those reverberations is the recognition field of History. That's what makes History. That's the reality of History.
But to the Roman Empire idea and ideal the resonance of that is in the fact that we control the roads, that we control the laws, that we control the military, that we control the land. This land belongs to us and every road of importance belongs to us, every military garrison is ours and therefore all road lead to Rome. All roads lead to Rome on the basis of a geographic physicality, whereas in Hegel, he doesn't care about that kind of geographic physicality. For him there is a transcendent, a transcendental grandeur, a sublimity that's in the air of the spirit and that's where the historical resonances are. They're not on the roads, they're not in the laws, they're not enforced by the military. Instead of military generals deserving respect as makers of History. To Hegel, he discovered that it's the artists and the philosophers. They're the ones who make the resonances of History.
And when he was younger Hegel never understood any of this, he never knew any of this, he was an average kind of a student. When he was twenty-three, he'd been born in Stuttgart Germany, he had been educated at the seminary just south of Stuttgart at Tubingan. He got a job in 1793, he was 23 years old. He got a job in a terrain that was completely different from the one, from the flat German fields that he had known since he was born. He suddenly got a job at Bern in Switzerland in the mountains as the house tutor of a very wealthy family. And he was plucked out of this flat land Protestant Seminary-ville and dropped in the middle of the grand mountains of the Alps in Bern Switzerland. It blew him out. He had been dedicated, while he was a student to books. He kept what's called a taga book, a large series of notebooks in which he wrote out all the quotations of all the favorite books and famous sayings and all of his observations and this was like his homage to montagne. But when he went to Bern, all of a sudden, he puts his book down he looks out and there are these magnificent dramatic mountainous landscapes, these unbelievable skies and it sprang him out into a landscape but he didn't go into the landscape in a Roman Empire style, he went into the landscape in the wide world, the wonderment that the Enlightenment was incomplete. The Enlightenment was great for the libraries, great for the books, but there was something in man that had to be evoked by the wild Romantic landscapes. The term is picturesque. That there is an adventure, there is an adventure in consciousness, not just a logic, not just a logical structure, but there is a poetic that needs to not just be freed, it needs to be set loose and what will it do? It will become wild.
One of his closest friends was the great mystical Romantic poet Holderlin. Hegel and Holderlin were like buddies together. When they were students and the French Revolution happened, they sat down to have a meal to celebrate the French Revolution and Holderlin said we cannot eat until we fill our champagne glasses and go out and toast the French Revolution. And they went to open balcony and Holderlin being Holderlin shouted to the world something on the order of 'god damn it, we're ready, we're here and no one will take it from us ever again'. Holderlin spent the last thirty five years of his life as an insane imbecile. Like Nietzsche. But when he was young, when he was Hegel's best friend, he wrote this kind of a language, this is translated, this is his poem on the ancient Greek philosopher who was in his own time a mystical Pythagorean. The philosopher named Empedocles. And Empedocles was famous before Plato came on the scene. Empedocles was famous for his Cosmic cycle. Pythagoras talked about the structure of reality, but Empedocles developed, well when you put this structure into movement, into whirl then that's what the Cosmos is and that the whirling Cosmos should be philosophized about. And that was Empedocles. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy had a scathing little couplet about Empedocles who was famous for thinking that he could make these fabulous leaps into Cosmic eternity and unfortunately he leaped into Mount Vesuvius and so ended as a cinder. Russell saying you much watch out about these heroic leaps. Yes he did a double pirouette, uh, into the lava.
Here is Holderlin, a translation of just a smidgen of his poem from the 1790's, when he was Hegel's best friend, on Empedocles: "You seek life, you seek and a Divine fire wells up and gleams to you from deep out of the earth. And in shuttering desire you throw yourself down into Aetna's flames. Thus did the arrogance of the Queen dissolve pearls in wine. And let her, if only you oh poet had not sacrificed your own wealth into the seething chalice. You are holy to me like the power of earth which took you away. You bold victim. And I would like to follow the hero into those depths, if only love did not hold me back."
So, as my French spirit mother would say "And so". The Hegel of tradition that he's the driest of all philosophic system makes is not quite true at all. In fact the whole quality of Hegel at this time, after he had been three years in Bern, in the Swiss mountains, gaining wildness, he wrote a mystical poem called Eleusis. Can you imagine. Yeah so Hegel wrote a mystical poem called Eleusis. But before, this was in 1796, he had just heard from his friend Holderlin who was a house tutor in Frankfurt, Germany, far to the north of Stuttgart, and Holderlin said why don't you come here to Frankfurt and teach here. And so we'll talk next week about Eleusis, about the mystical poem from 1796, just before Hegel went back into the intellectual romantic Germany. Because by 1797 Hegel had gone more than one step into the Romantic from the Enlightenment.
But the impetus to that comes the year before. One of the most unbelievable episodes in world history is that Hegel is the first person to write a non-mythological life of Jesus. In fact Hegel's Life of Jesus, collected here with two other essays, one is called Burned Fragments, Burned Switzerland Fragments, the other is called the Tubingen Essay, and the third is The Life of Jesus. Three essays, 1793-1795. When he was in Tubingen he wrote essays, when he was in Bern he wrote fragments. Do you get it? The dutiful school boy of the Enlightenment made enlightenment forms; the essay is an enlightenment form. The archetypal essay of the Enlightenment is modeled on Sir Francis Bacon's essays. Just like the models of Renaissance thought go back to the kinds of literary qualities that were there in say Petrarch's, Petrarch's sonnets are Renaissance prototypes. Francis Bacon's essays are Enlightenment.
So that there's quite a difference. The Petrarchan sonnet is quite different from the Bacon essay and so the Enlightenment is quite distinct from the Renaissance. But the Romantic era, not just the Romantic era, it's almost always now called the Romantic Revolution; neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment were revolutions, they were not about revolution, but the Romantic period was about revolution. The Renaissance is about rebirthing, the Enlightenment is about perfecting, but the Romantic era is about scrapping everything that is useless and starting from scratch and building it all the way to where we want it to be. So that there's a completely different quality. Thomas Jefferson is an Enlightenment figure, Walt Whitman is a Romantic figure. It's a completely different emphasis.
Hegel begins in the Enlightenment, but very quickly becomes a Romantic Hero, but as he gains strength and traction, as a Romantic Hero, he goes back and uses Enlightenment forms and methods to do this with. So he is an enormously complex figure. His life of Jesus has no myth in it whatsoever. It begins in translation, 1795, and you hear right away the Immanuel Kant Enlightenment archetype working foremost in the 1795 that the 25 year old Hegel, he begins the life of Jesus by saying: "Pure reason transcending all limits is Divinity itself, whereby and in accordance with which the very plan of the world is ordered. Through reason man learns his destiny, the unconditional purpose of his life, and although at times reason is obscured, it continues to glimmer faintly even in the darkest age for it is never totally extinguished. Among the Jews, John reawakened the people to this. Their own dignity, not as something alien but rather as to something they should be able to find within in their true self." So that you get in 1795 already, Hegel is looking at Jesus as a Romantic Hero, not as a Romantic Hero in a Shelleyan kind of a way; not a Romantic Hero in a Wordsworthian kind of a way, or even in a Goethe kind of a way. He already has in place the Romantic Hero using an Enlightenment methodology. And for that, as we talked about at the beginning of the lecture today, one has to go deeper.
The best book on the philosophy of the Enlightenment is by Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, translated, and one finds here towards the end of the book, the chapters that are important here in Cassirer's book, out of seven chapters, chapter five is entitled The Conquest of the Historical World, chapter seven: Fundamental Problems of Aesthetics. That in the Enlightenment, History and Art were indissolubly linked and they were distinct especially from the indissoluble length that belonged in a different realm and that indissoluble link in a different realm was Myth and Symbol. For the Enlightenment Art and History are the deeper structures that one has to train oneself, one has to learn to appreciate. But it isn't just an acquired taste; one is not learning to appreciate in an acquired taste. There is a function of memory that's operative here. The Enlightenment is convinced that one is uncovering, as in dispensing with the veil, one is dis-covering, one is discovering what was more primal in the first place, what was there originally, what was there (and the Enlightenment insisting on perfection), what was there originally not in Adam but in heaven. What is not originally there for man but what is originally there for God. That one has to cut that deep. That if you go back to the man made world, the origins of the man made world, you begin counting with 1's. But if you go back to the eternal, then you count with 0's. Then the improvement in man is not by an arithmetical improvement by 1's, but of an ordinal improvement by 0's, by powers of achievement. That you don't have a progress which is linear, but you have an improvement which is asymptotic. That every improvement is an improvement everywhere of everything and so the improvements make further improvement possible. And so one grows not just geometrically or arithmetically, but one grows trigonometrically.
And so in Hegel you find, already in the young Hegel you find this curious dedication. He dedicates himself, he's only fourteen years old when he begins; he dedicates himself to be of service to this, to this exploration, this dedication. And his quality comes through in the mystical poem Eleusis, and Eleusis is published twelve years before his Phenomenology of the Spirit comes out. Just as Kant's Observations of the Beautiful and Sublime came out, seventeen years before The Critique of Pure Reason. If you take Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by itself, you struggle mightily with one of the worlds greatest abstract documents. You have to have commentaries. They had to have commentaries then. Kant had to have commentaries to read his own writing. But he had an advantage, he had already understood beauty and sublimity and the way in which they pair. Now it's impossible to emphasize this strong enough. The Sublime is not a Greek ideal, it is not a Roman ideal, it is a Hellenistic ideal. The Sublime belongs to Alexander the Great's Ecumene; belongs to a phenomenon where the entire world would only be just a family in an unlimited realm of the Cosmos. How many families there are, who knows, among the stars. It's not about geographical terrain being the basis upon which political power is made; that the institutions of human beings living together based on that are like counting by 1's. It's paltry, it has nothing to do with that at all.
So Longinus' On Beauty and the Sublime is the kind of Hellenistic anchor which one has to appreciate before you can read Kant. Because one of the recognition fields that resonates from Kant is Transcendentalism; people like Emerson. It's this quality that comes out as a resonance from that and finally becomes one of the great synthesizing chords, I'm talking about a musical chord; one of the great synthesizing chords in the Romantic Hero. The Romantic Hero finally becomes a transcendental knight. And this is what Nietzsche was captured by. Not just the idea of it, but the feeling toned adventure of life that accompanies that. So that the last letters that were coherent by Nietzsche are not signed Friedrich Nietzsche, they're signed Dionysius. You get it? A friend of mine, a Gnostic Bishop, used to enchant, in wonderful inebriated moments about Friedrich Nietzsche, he used to say that Nietzsche drowned in the rivers where the Sirens chanted F.r.i.e.d.r.i.c.h. But this is not true. He drowned in an ocean that murmured to him D.i.o.n.y.s.i.u.s. It's a whole different scale.
And Kant is raised to an asymptotic scale by Hegel. It's the difference between the Spirit and mind. Yes the mind's extraordinary, it's powerful. It's dwarfed by the Spirit. Because the mind in its structure, in its transcendental structure, when it functions, functions in time. The Spirit functions always in eternity. So that there's always a peculiar common denominator in a Spiritual Hero. The demons of time are ineffective against such a Hero because they have no place to cling to such a figure. Such a figure is not there available for them to cling to or to make resistances to. And so the Spiritual Hero has only one problem and that is to realize their reality. The trouble that Parcival has as a spiritual knight is that he doesn't know who he is. That's his only trouble. And so his journey is not to perfect his ways of Conan with the sword, he already knows all of that. But he has to remember, he has to discover by memory his true eternal nature and then everything is possible, then victory is instantaneous. For the spiritual knight there's only one battle and only one movement of one sword ever needed. You don't have to fight the demons, you don't have to fight the bad guys, no matter how many there are, no matter how powerful they are, the only thing you have to do is cut the single puppet strand that holds you in the illusion that they're real. And when you break that single strand, all of it vanishes. I have the exact word that the Buddha used [thumb pops out of cheek]. It's no longer an issue at all to such an extent that it never was an issue in the first place.
So that the greatest logician in Asia, his name was Nargajuna; the greatest logician in Asia, he lived about 100 years from about 150 to about 250, he died about the same time as Plotinus, developed the logic of sunyata, emptiness, the void. It's not only that all things must pass. Passing itself must pass. That sunyata does not depend upon existence for it's "existence". The Tao does not have to have any Te to be Tao. 0 does not have to be 1 with 1 taken away from it to be 0. 0 is not a negativity, it's discoverable not by an abstraction process at all, or a subtraction process. It's discovered by allowing its recognition field to resonate uncontaminatedly. And when it resonates uncontaminatedly, what is the resonation, what is the recognition, what is the recognition field of pure 0, of sunyata? Eternal openness, such that even an idea of openness is a phantom wisp. On that kind of a scale, what then would an enlightenment methodology in the hands of a romantic philosophic knight, what would that be? And that turns out to be for Hegel what world History is all about.
And so toward the end of his life, he died of an illness going through Berlin in 1831, and this comes from right at the end of his life. The second draft 1830, The Realization of Spirit in History and the translations begins and read something like this: "After the creation of the natural universe, man appears on the scene as the antithesis of nature. He is the being who raises himself up into a second world. The general consciousness of man includes two distinct provinces [a pair], that of nature and that of the Spirit. The province of the spirit is created by man himself, whatever ideas we may form of the Kingdom of God, it must always remain a spiritual Kingdom which is realized in man and which man is expected to translate into actuality. The Spiritual sphere is all embracing." The language here reads very similar to the way in which in his Reason and Exiztence, Jaspers wrote about the encompassing. No matter what horizon of process, no matter what objectifization of stages one cares to entertain, to think about, to feel about, whatever, that horizon and those stages are contextualized by an encompassing-ness and this encompassing is very similar to what Hegel here is saying, he's writing "The Spiritual sphere is all encompassing. It encompasses everything that has concerned mankind down to the present day. Man is active within it and whatever he does, the spirit is also active within him, thus it may be of interest to examine spiritual nature in its real existence. That is spirit in combination with nature or Human nature itself."
That for Hegel, by 1830, man is a very curious complementarity. He has an enlightenment mind, but he has a Romantic soul. And that when he really stands up, he doesn't stand up simply to stand, he stands up to explore. Heaven is a landscape of exploration which the mature undertake spontaneously. More next week. Thank you.
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