God, nature and the end of history

Abstract

Alexandre Kojtve argued, in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, that Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness implied that history has an achievable tefos. The development of the philosophical understanding of the truth of consciousness culminates in the philosopher’s awareness of consciousness as the ground of the unity of thought and being. Hegel tried to solve the Cartesian problem of how thought and extension are commensurate by a historical phenomenology of consciousness. The realisation in philosophy of the unity of thought and being thus marks an end to the historical process of philosophical enlightenment. This also marks the end of history beyond which, “there will never more be anything new on earth.“’ As philosophy is one’s age grasped in thought, the achievement of the telos of philosophy is also the achievement of the telos of politics. Just as Hegel’s Encyclopedia ended the historical development of philosophy, so the Prussian state as described in Philosophy of Right terminated political evolution. The Idea was instantiated theoretically and practically in its most logically adequate form. The contradictions. which had impelled history forward had all been overcome, and, therefore, the story had come to its end.2 The metaphor for post-historical society will not be the struggle for recognition between master and slave, but, who knows what?j Kojeve has opened up to critics of modernity a fruitful avenue of thought. The absence of limit, of context and balance in modernity, its curious mixture of vanity and despair, are rooted in the horizonless freedom that comes from absolute self-mastery. Having achieved “Absolute Knowledge” and the fully rational state, we are left with the pure will as the well-spring of action. The irony in Hegel’s attempt to see history as the story of the achievement of absolute knowledge is that Reason, which unfolds historically and which revolves the dialectical tension between the freedom of the subjective will and the logical order, is replaced in the end by arbitrariness. We have become like gods.4 God and nature, which had been the positive and negative poles marking the boundary and context of human action, have been absorbed into the allencompassing presence of Absolute Spirit. Herbert Marcuse saw in the idea of the achievement of the telos of history, a collapse of the critical dimension. The post-historical world lies beyond criticism. In a fully rational state the Aristotelian distinction between the good citizen and the good man is overcome. Aristotle argued that a critical understanding of the political order required that citizenship and humanity not be equated. Politics is meaningful if enfolded into a higher natural and divine order. Criticising the juxtaposition of appearance and reality that was philosophy’s highest task,