Let us start with history, one of the characteristic central topics of continental philosophy. Just a quick reminder: the early philosoph-ical discovery of history as philosophphilosoph-ical topic did keep it in the vicinity of matters divine. With authors like Eusebius and Orosius the history of Christianity is interpreted as the testimony to the truth of the Christian faith, and with Augustine, the story of Fall, Redemption and Salvation, becomes the philosophical model for understanding history. After the important secularizing and nat-uralizing interlude Hegel will stress again the man role of the tran-scendent, in a way re-transcendentalizing the story of the Fall and Salvation. Hegel is aware of the basic tripartite ontological struc-ture of basic matters dividing them those pertaining to subjectiv-ity, those to object or external reality (and the foundation), and the third, intermediate layer, tied to the subjectivity – the phenomena, or the veil-of-perception, or something similar, that threatens to alienate our minds from reality. But his interest is different. It is not only that the deep reality is somehow spiritual; this has already been proposed by Fichte. The new idea is that the basic structure itself is historical. History is the medium of fundamental ontology. Subject (mind) and the external world do not stand in a basically static, structural relation; their relations change with history. And the his-tory is at the same time cultural, political and spiritual. The deep ontology of the world changes with historical events; to mention the
event favored by Kojève, one of the most successful interpreters and popularizers of Hegel in the 20th century, the success of Napoleon changes, so to speak, the very ontological structure of the world.
Of course, such events are not contingent, they are part of the deep history of Spirit, and its journey to itself.
Let me illustrate the claim with a few very famous passages from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, taken from the very beginning and very end each. In the well-known opening section of the Preface, Hegel first talk about “the true shape in which truth exists”,7 namely
“the scientific system of such truth.” He speaks of his goal of bring-ing “philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing”.8 Then he passes to implicit criticisms of those who would replace knowledge of the Whole with feeling or intuition, and continues with criticising their demand:
If we apprehend a demand of this kind in its broader context, and view it as it appears at the stage which self-conscious Spirit has presently reached, it is clear that Spirit has now got beyond the substantial life it formerly led in the element of thought, that it is beyond the immediacy of faith, beyond the satisfaction and secu-rity of the certainty that onsciousness then had, of its reconciliation with the essential being, and of that being’s universal presence both within and without.9
A naive reader might think at this point that Hegel is talking meta-phorically of the spirit of time, or some such framework for thought.
What follows will free her from her naiveté:
Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has 7 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology Of Mind (Blackmask Online: 2001), 3.
8 Ibid.
9 Hegel, Phenomenology…, 4. Here is the continuation: “It has not only gone beyond all this into the other extreme of an insubstantial reflection of itself into itself, but beyond that too. Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, and of the finitude that is its own content. Turning away from the empty husks, and confessing that it lies in wickedness, it reviles itself for so doing, and now demands from philosophy, not so much knowledge of what it is, as the recovery through its agency of that lost sense of solid and substantial being.”
hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward.10 Later, he continues:
But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth-there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born-so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dis-solving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.11
Clearly, the history just briefly narrated is the history of the Spirit with capital “S”, it is the Absolute. And the Absolute has a biography and a history, which happens to culminate in our time. The Abso-lute itself, the very ground of all things, “has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited”; and is working on its own transforma-tion. Moreover, this dynamics is not accidental to the Absolute: it
“is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward”. We know from context and later development, that Hegel really means his historical time, roughly the turn of the century, and arguably the time of Napoleonic wars and even particular battles, at Jena and vicinity. We shall return to Hegel in a moment, but now let us put the thesis in a wider context.
The radical character if the thesis is clear if we consider any, I repeat any, contemporary analytic metaphysics or indeed the clas-sical Aristotelian, or materialistic, or Spinozistic, or Berkeleyan or Kantian idealistic ones, and contrast it with the view proposed. Imag-ine a mainstream physicalist arguing that the fundamental struc-ture of space-time plus fundamental forces, has drastically changed with September 11th, given the radicalness of the US response to it.
And that with the advent of the first Afro-American president of the US the space-time has suffered another transformation.12 Or,
10 Hegel, Phenomenology…, 6.
11 Ibid.
12 To illustrate the force of habit, from Hegel to the present days, let me note that a continental French colleague has described September 11th as changing the very nature of the possible and actual; see Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Avions-nous oublié le mal ? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre (Paris: Bayard, 2002).
imagine an Aristotelian metaphysician arguing that the very nature of four causes has undergone a dramatic change with the death of Alexander the Great (or Richard Nixon, if you prefer the later). Or with some cultural change, the birth of avant-garde art, for instance.
Hegel’s move is a dramatic and spectacular announcement of a radi-cal alternative to these ways of thinking, the start of a geologiradi-cal rift of spectacular dimension. He was not alone. So, let me immediately bring in another great philosopher, standing in many respects at the opposite pole than Hegel, but sharing the idea that human history is intimately connected to the history of the fundamental reality. The philosopher is Martin Heidegger. Here is how he sees the history and the future of Being, the most fundamental reality there is.
Before Being can occur in its primal form, Being as the will must be broken, the world must be caused to collapse, the Earth must be driven to desolation, and men to mere labor […]. In the decline everything, that is beings in the whole of the truth of Metaphysics, approaches its end.13
The decline has already taken place. The consequences of its occur-rence are the events of the world history of this century.14
The two world wars are part of the scenario, important parts of the history of the whole truth of Metaphysics; fortunately they do prepare for us the occurrence of Being in its primal form! What is common to Hegel and to Heidegger is the principle linking the anthropological-cum-linguistic, historical and the deeply ontologi-cal. Let me call it Anthropo-Historico Ontological (AHO) principle:
(AHO): The anthropological and historical are deeply ontological.
The idea is that human life, language and history (politics included) belong to the fundamental level of reality, not to a higher-level of supervenient additions and embellishments. Call for the moment the fundamental level “Being”, as Heidegger does. Then a weaker form of AHO, typical, say of Heidegger’s Being and Time, will claim that human states (emotions, and the like) reveal the Being itself, that language does the same, and that the process of revealing is
13 Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press: 1973), 68.
14 Heidegger, The End…, 69.
deeply and essentially historical. The stronger form will go a step further: historical, linguistic and philosophical “interaction” with us is part of the very history of Being itself, something that happens to it. The strong AHO looks like the converse of AHO: the ontological is (immediately) anthropological and historical. For example, Being has a history, the history of Being is closely tied to human history, it has to do with humans forgetting Being, and so on. Now, one crucial methodological consequence of the acceptance of the strong AHO is the following: if anthropological matters, including the linguistic ones, and historical processes play a fundamental ontological role, then we, philosophers, can use, without further ado, various such human phenomena as direct models for understanding the funda-mental reality. For Heidegger, the very Being itself acts in a humanly understandable way, it hides from human beings or reveals itself to them, typically in the history of art, including primarily poetic expression, or in great political events (the grounding of a state), or in piety and experience of the sacred (Work of art). Post-structural-ists, above all Derrida, have taken seriously the idea that phenom-ena having to do with language, discourse and writing, serve as the model of the ultimate reality. The structuralist ideas about network of differences defining various levels of language, from phonology to syntax, are radicalized and projected onto the reality itself.
The other consequence is still more spectacular: not only do var-ious aspects of human reality (thought, language, art, etc.) stand in proximity to the fundamental reality itself; human historical under-standing of these aspects is the very history of the aspects them-selves and thereby the history of the fundamental reality itself. For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the most sophisticated level of the history of the Spirit itself, for Heidegger of the history of Being in its relation to human beings. For Derrida, the history of our understanding of language, from Plato through Rousseau to de Sau-ssure is the history of language itself, the sad saga of logocentrism.
The apparent meta-level of understanding coincides with the object level of the historical process itself, and the process is somehow part of the very history of the fundamental reality.
Let me restate the connection with history of philosophy. For Hegel it is the grand final stage of the history of the fundamental reality, the Spirit itself, when Presocratics present being as
some-thing material, the Spirit itself is thereby taking a material form, when Hegel presents it as spiritual, being itself returns to its own nature. This corollary plays a crucial role in legitimizing history of philosophy as part and parcel of philosophy itself, in a sense never dreamt of by analytic colleagues. It returns triumphantly in Heidegger, and marks almost the whole of German history of phi-losophy in the 20th century as well as the deconstructivist French current(s).