Published in 2008, Northern Spirits by Robert Sibley is an ambitious work that is unlikely to reach a broad audience – for good reasons, political philosophy aside. The book deals with three Canadian thinkers John Watson (1847-1939), George Grant (1918-1988) and Charles Taylor (b. 1931) who all share a common inheritance in Hegel. Sibley is not alone in suggesting that Canadians are “unconscious Hegelians,” and to add weight to his argument he points to the numerous Canadians who live in Hegel’s intellectual shadow.
Since beginning at the beginning can be a good idea, we find that one of the problems with Sibley’s book is that he fails at the start to contextualize the work of Hegel. Frederick Beiser (once a student of Charles Taylor) has written an excellent introduction in Hegel (2005), and he clarifies a central issue: “contemporary Hegel scholars, especially those in the Anglophone tradition, have failed to individuate Hegel. They assume that certain ideas are characteristic of Hegel that were really commonplace of an entire generation.” In other words, one reason why Hegel might possibly have had a deep impact on Canadian intellectual culture is because we share a common debt to early German Romanticism. And when referring to Hegel’s thought, Sibley identifies household names like Allen Wood, Ken Foldes, Robert Wallace, Vasanthi Srinivasan and, of course, Alexandre Kojève ... but no Hegel. There are few, if any, textual references to any of Hegel’s writings, and Sibley seems to rely on English sources when interpreting Hegel’s thought himself.
This derivative nature of the book is especially notable in the section on John Watson. A number of these early chapters summarize, with a minimum of interpretation and imagination, Watson’s work The State in Peace and War (1919). It is important to acknowledge that Watson was a student of the British Idealists (who were inspired by Hegel), in particular T.H. Green, but it is also important to elaborate how “religion plays a central role in Watson’s work.” (p. 43) Watson founded the United Church of Canada, but there is no discussion of how Idealism might have worked together with Christianity, except to say that Watson debated the topic with Josiah Royce at the University of California at Berkeley in 1897.
The section on George Grant is more interesting, possibly because he is more contemplative, or maybe simply because his Lament for a Nation created a national sensation when it was published in 1965. Or maybe it’s because Grant is Michael Ignatieff’s uncle. In any event, Grant had no free will, and he was an “unconscious Hegelian even before he encountered Hegel.” (p. 121) George Grant’s grandfather was George Munro Grant, principal of Queen’s University at Kingston from 1877 to 1902. It was the latter Grant’s close friendship with John Watson which filtered down over the generations, making George Grant a Hegelian, before anyone in Canada had ever heard of Alexandre Kojève, the dominant interpreter of Hegel in the twentieth century and early proponent of the European Union. According to Sibley, George Grant was still a Hegelian, even though he later recanted, only to identify with Leo Strauss.
In a similar vein Trudeau is “arguably” considered Hegelian because he admired T.H. Green’s thinking and his defence of the individual (which one also finds in J.S. Mill), giving him intellectual fodder for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But Sibley does not offer much analysis here. Do we have the Charter because of Trudeau’s rationalism, because of the Americanization of Canada’s political culture, because Trudeau came to admire the ideals of the French Revolution, or because of British variations on Idealism? These issues need to be resolved – or better yet, Trudeau’s supposed Hegelianism could better be dropped. Even Grant admits, and Sibley seems to forget this point, though he documents it, that Kojève is considered closer to Hegel’s originality than the British Idealists. (p. 172) In other words, Trudeau’s British “Hegelianism” (that he read a book) is inferior to that of Charles Taylor, who studied and wrote books on Hegel, at length.
The section on Charles Taylor deals with the interrelationship between the individual and the community; it is a tug of war denoted by political scientists as the struggle between liberalism and communitarianism. Frederick Beiser explains that the attempt to synthesize liberalism and communitarianism is not uniquely Hegelian - it is also Romantic. Moreover, the central reason for Hegel’s alleged popularity in Canada is his “principle of reconciliation”, yet Sibley fails to articulate this aspect of thought in any detail. Sibley has written a book on Hegel’s so-called influence, but his conclusions lead him far from Hegelianism.
In my view, the one Canadian thinker who best reconciles liberalism and communitarianism, in Hegelian terms, is Charles Taylor, this nation’s leading expert on Hegel and author of a major study in 1975, but Sibely attacks him as “illiberal”. In essence, Sibley attacks Quebec’s language laws (Bill 101), the fact that French is the official language of the province and, of course, the failed Meech Lake Accord. In other words, Sibley prefers the supposed “Hegelianism” of Trudeau’s Charter to the Hegelianism of Taylor’s early “two-nation” approach for Canada. According to Sibley: “English-speaking Canada is supposed to sacrifice English-speaking culture in order to accommodate Quebec?” (p. 203) Because Charles Taylor supports the distinctiveness of Quebec, Sibley sees a “downgrading of personal choice” (p. 265) and “results that can oppress the individual” (p. 283). And Sibley writes “when push comes to shove, Taylor is unable to defend liberalism” (p. 249), but what he means by “liberalism” is really liberal individualism. Sibley even goes so far as to question the validity of the Quebec “we”, and here he resonates with Margaret Thatcher, who once declared famously “there is no such thing as society.”
Neither France nor Germany had a John Locke; hence liberal traditions outside of the Anglophone world appear in different guises (as less individualistic), and this is a point Sibley misses, who muses about its “civilisational foundations.” (p. 247) French liberalism is known to be paradoxically anti-individualistic, certainly in the nineteenth century, if one considers the work of Lucien Jaume.[1] This peculiarity might also help to explain the difference between Anglo Canada’s “procedural liberalism” (difference-blind liberalism) and French Canada’s “substantive liberalism” (culturally-specific liberalism). Moreover, liberalism, especially liberal individualism is not without its flaws, again something Sibley does not entertain. Colin Bird concludes his work The Myth of Liberal Individualism (1999) in a fashion that is well in tune with Charles Taylor’s position on Quebec: “the problem with liberalism is that by emphasizing the importance of choice, it condemns citizens to a perpetual restlessness about their social identity, and so undermines the stability of genuine community on which authentic self-discovery depends.” (pp. 206,207) Even Hegel seems to criticize notions of “freedom of choice” in liberalism when he explains in Philosophy of Right (1821): “When we hear it said that freedom in general consists in being able to do as one pleases, such an idea can only be taken to indicate a complete lack of intellectual culture.” In other words, Sibley’s free-choice theorizing drifts far from Hegel’s project of reconciliation.
Sibley offers a curious book which pays lip service to Hegel’s “principle of reconciliation” but ends up a doctrinaire text on liberal individualism. He also seems to suggest that Hegel’s principle is “not clearly detected by any previous thinker” (p. 89), but Sibley is not familiar enough with the thought of Augustine. He refers to Augustine by way of Grant (p. 143) and Taylor (pp. 193,194), but apparently has not read City of God or the Confessions on his own. As I have indicated in my earlier review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Augustine plays a major role in Hegel’s thought, as well as on Calvin and Descartes. Augustine thinks of man (over and over again) as an “intermediate being ... intermediate between beasts and angels” and he describes Christ as the “Mediator between God and man ... we must look for a mediator who is not only human but also divine.” Augustine also offers a form of personal reflexivity which is at one root of Western society’s critical culture. We can find his ‘middle path’ sentiments expressed in the twentieth century when looking at the thought of Simone Weil, who writes in Waiting for God (1951): “The Incarnation of Christianity implies harmonious solution of the problem of the relations between the individual and collective. Harmony in the Pythagorean sense; the just balance of contraries.” In other words, Christianity offers the “intersection” of both arms of the Cross, a point Weil notes.
If we look to the moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre (who also wrote on Hegel) and his penetrating Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (2003), we see a history of an Augustinian tradition lasting well into the Scottish Enlightenment, which is possibly how early notions of reconciliation (and Augustine’s other ideas, notably the notion of “will”) made their way into North America – via religion. In other words, there exist old moral traditions, “voices of tradition outside liberalism”, that are not readily considered by secular university institutions (and maybe their students) aspiring (in Macintyre’s words) to “fictitious objectivity.”
This brings us to the fundamental problem with Sibley’s book. It looks at Hegel’s political thought yet ignores dimensions of Hegel’s religious thinking and that (as I repeat myself) of John Watson. In his Philosophy of History (delivered as lectures first in 1822-23) Hegel the Lutheran literally transcends the Christian religion but makes a very specific point about its ongoing importance to civilization despite academic disciplines: “I have been unwilling to leave out of sight the connection between our thesis - the Reason governs and has governed the World – and the question of the possibility of a knowledge of God, chiefly that I might not lose the opportunity of mentioning the imputation against Philosophy of being shy of noticing religious truths, or of having occasion to be so.” The reason why religion is so important to Hegel is that the figure of Christ represents, in his view, a “world historical” first – “consciousness of freedom” among all believers in God, a notion to which at least some post-religious disciplines in university academies might at some levels seem impervious, their dawn being the Enlightenment. Put another way: are Canadians “unconscious Hegelians” – or have we really just masked our Christianity in the name of secularism? Do Canadians have an early spirit of reconciliation because of assumed, historic religious traditions, English and French, each with varying Augustinian strains? Have some Canadian intellectuals flocked to Hegel thinking he provides a political “dialectic” when, in fact, as Frederick Beiser suggests, he may have offered “a new religion”?
Unfortunately Northern Spirits does not consider these questions, but it covers just about everything else. The book tries to be a comprehensive overview but it fails to distinguish some salient points succinctly and originally (regarding Hegel). The topic is an excuse to write much about what people wrote in Canada – and nothing very meaningful on Hegel – or his so-called “influence”. It mentions Hegel’s principle of reconciliation but does not express it in any structured way, possibly because (if we look to his difference- blind liberal individualism) Sibley does not want (or no longer know how) to reconcile, given also his own unusually intense concerns over the future of the English language, apparently swamped by mass migrations, globalism and multiculturalism.
To conclude parenthetically, we note that up until the advent of Stephen Harper Canadians admired reconciliation, because they recognized the need to compromise. Like Hegel’s Germany, divided into many principalities, Canadians are fraught with divisions over space and cultural time. A point Sibley misses is that Hegel’s Germany is a lot like Machiavelli’s Italy which explains Hegel’s interest in realpolitik. Perhaps we can make an intuitive leap from Florentine Italy to the true potentialities of today’s Canada ... just witness our present-day Cesare Borgia, otherwise known (by some) as Mr. Prime Minister, also a Hegelian (if you recall the realpolitik of Hegel). In other words, everyone can be considered a Hegelian in Canada - even the ones who are not.
[1] Lucien Jaume, L’individu efface, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme française (Fayard, 1997).
Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor - Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought
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