As an undergraduate I was fascinated by the idea of history as “becoming”. At the time, the future seemed open-ended and life undetermined, that is, if we could only ignore the Cold War. Whatever was considered as ‘present’ moved on with a sense of restlessness, certainly far more so now considering the immediacy of our digital and ‘global’ world fixated as it is on things at the moment. But in my history classes at the time, I began to think – and maybe was invited to think - of the French and Industrial Revolutions as having unlocked the floodgates to this never-ending constancy that pervades the world today.
In my fourth year I was attracted to the thought of Henri
Bergson, the world’s first ‘popular’ philosopher, who drew to Paris admiring audiences
from even across the Atlantic. His book,
Creative Evolution (1907), generated considerable attention among the educated
at the time. Bergson lectured on ‘intuition’
and spoke of a life-force, or élan vital – notions that broke
with the prevailing scientism and positivism in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, ideas which had bolstered the secular ideals of the Third
Republic. Indeed, Bergson may have helped prepare Frenchmen for a predisposition
towards war in the years leading up to 1914.
Bergson was born in 1859, the same year Darwin published his
Origin of the Species. In other
words, any understanding of Bergson’s “becoming” cannot be considered apart
from the impact of the Englishmen Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, along
with the respective Theory of Evolution and ideas on social Darwinism. While evolution, as Darwin conceived it, is
essentially nature’s mechanism of “becoming” devoid of any end purpose, Bergson
offered an alternative approach to life and thought that was anti-deterministic
yet, still, all about “becoming”. This nuanced connection of ideas had escaped
me as an undergraduate.
If we look further, Bergson, Darwin and Spencer, each in
their own way, owe a huge debt to Hegel, the last ‘universal’ thinker of the
nineteenth century, a German with his own major influence on Marx, and whose
philosophy of history – marked by convoluted writing - is all about
“becoming”. Some of this, too, assuredly,
had eluded me as a young student. My textbook
at the time was Franklin Baumer’s Modern European Thought: Continuity and
Change in Ideas, 1600-1950 (1977). Hegel’s idea of history, in Baumer’s
words, “was never static and was characterized by change, by perpetual novelty,
and by progress toward perfectibility, the nature of which, however, was still
‘undetermined.’”[1] This essay explores some of these themes.
Parenthetically speaking, Baumer’s book, Modern European
Thought, is replete with references to the idea of history as “becoming”.[2]
Each individual section of the book has headings, in order: “From Being to
Becoming”, “Being over Becoming”, “Being and Becoming”, “Becoming over Being”,
and finally, “The Triumph of Becoming” in the twentieth century. As an enraptured undergraduate, I
subsequently applied to Harvard to study the subject. But I was not aware of
its Hegelian imprint, nor of the academic significance that Baumer was an
historian at Yale, who may – or may not – for my sake have adequately
acknowledged the role of Hegel’s thinking in this particular work. At any rate, I didn’t get to Harvard.
It should come as no surprise that Hegel is simplified by Baumer, and in order to better understand Hegel’s thinking in The Philosophy of History, one needs to appreciate the context of the “World-Historical” events of the French Revolution, to which Hegel himself was a witness. As Hegel explains: “The final goal of the world, we said, is Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom, and hence also the actualization of that very freedom.”[3] Hegel continues in much the same vein in his Philosophy of Right, where freedom serves as the foundation of right.[4] The many events of the French Revolution can also be seen as inspiration for Hegel’s famous dialectic. Hegel believed that every thesis – he was clearly a man of Ideas – contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, or antithesis, which in turn created an inevitable reconciliation, or synthesis. Hegel’s own life chronicled numerous revolutionary happenings: first the Fall of the Bastille, then War, then the Terror, then the Thermidorean reaction, then Napoleonic authoritarianism and, of course, more War, and then the Restoration of the Monarchy, and so on. One way of putting it, perhaps more politically, is that Hegel’s history looks to both “activity and retro-activity,” something that may seem more apparent to us today.[5] Put more simply: history is – using Hegel’s words, shared by Baumer – guided by “The Principle of Development.”[6]
It is important to understand that Hegel’s thought - along
with that of Marx, in part – was an expression of German Idealism and Romanticism,
considered the third point in the trinity that accompanied the French and
Industrial Revolutions. Later interpreted through the lens of not only the
First World War, but also the Second World War, Hegel came to be disdained and was
inevitably linked to the dreaded notions of a “German Becoming.” This term is mentioned in Thomas Mann’s Doctor
Faustus (1948), but expressed more pointedly in Karl Popper’s chapter
“Hegel and the New Tribalism” in his The Open Society and its Enemies
(1945). As a counter-example to this, keeping
in mind the problem of Left Hegelianism and Right Hegelianism, we see in
today’s dialectic-afflicted Canada a progressive version of Hegel as
precursor to our growing multiculturalism.
This brings us to yet another idea that needs to be
disentangled from the phenomenon of the nineteenth century mind: “becoming” as
“progress”. It was especially prominent
among English Whigs and liberals, and historians such as Macaulay, but, as I previously
indicated, it can also be found in our protean friend Hegel, who made the case
for “perfectibility.”[7]
Looking at England in the light of its Empire and economy, the nineteenth
century – and English history in general – was considered a ‘success story’, with
the Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution viewed as self-evident standouts. Today, however, there is little wonder at the ‘strange
death’ of liberalism following the Great War. With this in mind, perhaps
Herbert Butterfield’s classic essay, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931),
should also be couched in the context of liberalism’s decline over the twentieth
century. In addition, we can speculate that there may indeed be progress in
science, but the idea of humanity’s inescapable moral progress seems to me rather
dubious. We need only to glance about our globe in the post-Covid era.
Here I make the conjecture that, in many ways, we seem to be returning to an era similar to the pandemic of 1918-1919, also known as the Spanish Flu. I think of this as a kind of “re-becoming,” or “retro-activity”. There is, for example, much the same sense of decline and degeneration particularly in the U.S.A. post 9/11 that pervaded France following its humiliation at the hands of Bismarck in 1871. And while historical events are not known to follow each other in consecutive order, we can – broadly speaking – also compare the Great Recession of 2008 with the Great Depression that began in 1929. The economic threats to the middle classes were clearly made manifest in both instances. (Just consider, as an example, today’s friendly neighbourhood homeless count). And both financial crises were characterized by an even greater flourishing of widespread populism that followed. While space in the proverbial ‘middle’, as we can see, continues to be vacated, extremes are developing on both sides of the political spectrum, most notably on the Right.
What has this digression to do with an essay on the idea of “becoming”, you may ask? My answer is: absolutely everything! Hegel’s “becoming” was originally born of dialectics, and, as such, may have served as the ‘middle’ in a twentieth-century, bipolar world now considered outmoded, though it is still helpful in a multi-polar universe.[8] Darwin’s evolutionary theory as “becoming” may still resonate today, and we find it, for example, in Boris Johnson’s notion of “herd immunity,” as well as in our current batch of international conflicts. “Becoming” considered as an inevitable form of “progress,” however, can today seem rather dim witted. Yet we really need to appreciate how the far Right, in an effort to reinforce its own sense of “becoming,” has latched on to the pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus as its intellectual cornerstone.
Heraclitus is the philosopher of universal flux, and he is perhaps
best remembered for his aphorism: “The river where you set your foot just now
is gone – those waters giving way to this, now this.”[9] Another memorable maxim is: “By cosmic rule
as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine./All things
change./Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining of bodies die and
rise again in smoke called incense.”[10]
Of course, Heraclitus is admired by avatars of change, for example Nietzsche
who had a similar fondness for aphorisms.
But Heraclitus also plays an essential role in the minds of the far
Right, and we see this in Heidegger who draws from Heraclitus in Fragment 44:
“War, as father of all things, and king, names few to serve as gods, and makes
these men slaves, those free.”[11]
We can also add to our considerations Fragment 43, again reminiscent of
Nietzschean thinking: “The poet was a fool who wanted no conflict.”[12]
While Heidegger philosophized about Being – as opposed to “becoming,” he nonetheless attached himself onto Heraclitus’s notions of flux and war to build an understanding of our world as ‘relative’. It is worth mentioning here that Heidegger was a meteorologist during the First World War (in a weather balloon presumably monitoring, among other things, favourable winds for gas attacks) as was Sartre in the Second World War (minus the gas). Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) was his response to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), and both titles give a nod to Hegel.[13] In Sartre we see existentialism as “becoming” – yet another variation on our theme today – where man creates nothing but himself by means of self-projection.[14] In effect, man is responsible for himself, and in so doing he avoids falling into the abyss of ‘absurdity’.
Sartre’s famous lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism (1945),
as the title indicates, places his philosophy within the humanist tradition
unlike his almost-as-celebrated intellectual successors, Derrida and Foucault – and
postmodernism in general. The
postmodernist debt to anti-humanist figures like Heidegger – and to the flux in
Heraclitus – has been uncovered in a series of works by the intellectual
historian Richard Wolin.[15] Thanks to his research (and I concur from my
own readings) it now appears evident that postmodernist French philosophy on
the Left owes a great deal to early antimodernist fin-de-siècle
philosophers and thinkers on the Right.
What are the implications of all this? If our formative
philosophers consider each and every thing to be in flux, or as relative, then
(to use Derrida’s term, which has been co-opted by the Right) everything can be
“deconstructed”, including our constitutional liberties. There is, in other
words, no core, and like an onion one can – or even should, it appears, peel
away all the layers to behold nothingness. In effect, this means there is no
truth. No one can have knowledge. What,
then, is the difference between right and wrong? If Foucault is correct, then
knowledge is just a function of power.
But Western democracy was founded on the intellectual fulcrum of the 17th and 18th centuries: the science of Newton’s physics and Locke’s so-called ‘liberal’ (yet still empirical) concept of political rule as based on the consent of the people. However, French philosophers of late appear to neglect the role of the Scientific Revolution.[16] Instead they harken back to Descartes, a rationalist, while those in Britain look to Francis Bacon, an experimental thinker. There is a significant difference here. Nowadays, Newton has since ceded ground to Darwin, who does not account for fundamental changes in Nature – as seen in the anticipated “becoming” of our climate. Meanwhile a great many people on the Right nowadays seem enraptured by “Relativity”. Perhaps not incidentally, Heraclitus is seen – in a stretch - to anticipate Einstein’s famous understanding of Energy in Fragment 22: “… all things change to fire, and fire exhausted falls back into things.”[17]
At this point I would like to make the case that the idea of
Newtonian harmony, prefaced as it was by the scientific discoveries of
Copernicus and Galileo, served to underscore an Enlightenment (and enlightened)
appreciation for constitutional structures of governance. If the universe has rules, then they could also
be applied to guide our political forms.
We see this emerging, in part, in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws
(1748). We see this even more concretely in the French Revolution when
prominent figures in the events were actual astronomers by profession, for
example Jean Sylvain Bailly, who led the famous Tennis Court Oath (20 June
1789). And we see it, of course, in the
revolutionary formation and institutions of the United States of America, as
declared in 1776. But take away the Enlightenment, and we not only have
anti-Enlightenment thinking, beginning for example with Foucault’s noted Berkeley
Lecture in 1983,[18] but
we also now have as a consequence anti-constitutionalism along with the rise of
autocratic strongmen today: Putin, Xi, Trump, you name them.
Science formed the epistemological framework for the
Enlightenment and democracy as we understand it. But how does one contend with Right-wing
paradigms which prefer to draw from the Theories of Evolution and Relativity, and which
at the same time are bolstered by Heraclitus’s visions of a warring flux? One answer is to be more ardent about Science,
to learn of its origins, its impacts on democratic thought (Locke, for example
was a physician), and its many great modern-day applications (as I sit and type
on my laptop computer). In effect, we
need to go beyond Darwin and Einstein as they are popularly conceived. Another answer is not to lose vision of the value
and possibility of Truths, if not the Truth.
While a Truth may not be absolute, we should remain receptive to the
idea that some Truths are undeniably more True than other Truths.
Yet another answer may be to turn to Aristotle, who famously
countered the principle of flux with his own “Law of Contradiction”.[19] Aristotle explains in The Metaphysics: “it is certainly the case
that there are some philosophers who hold both that it is possible for the same
thing to be and not to be and that it is possible for us to entertain beliefs
to that effect.”[20] He goes on to say: “the same thing cannot
at the same time both be and not be, and indeed we have gone on to show that
this is the securest of all principles.”[21]
In other words, Truth possibly lies somewhere between two
contradictions, and as such Aristotle – in his outsized and influential way -
may have stimulated Hegel’s philosophical oeuvre, among that of a great
many others.
This returns me to my undergraduate days. I chose to study
History and Philosophy because my thinking was backwards. In other words, I
knew what I didn’t like. The same goes for “Truth”: if I find a proposition to
be highly disagreeable, then I seek an opposite path … until I meet yet another
contradiction. Truth is not in flux, but
it may be arrived at, if Hegel is correct, by an endless series of contradictions.
So ends my brief history of “becoming.”
[1]
Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas,
1600-1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 299.
[2] Ibid.
[3]
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’, tr. Leo Rauch
(Cambridge: Hackett, 1988), p. 22.
Emphasis by Hegel.
[4]
Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of
Right (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 58.
[5] Emile
Faguet, Initiation into Philosophy, Indo-European Publishing. Reprint, p.
117. The sentence reads as, in part:
“the becoming is not a river which flows; activity is activity and
retro-activity.” See also Emile Faguet, Initiation Philosophique (Paris:
Hachette, 1918), p. 143.
[6]
Hegel, Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’, p. 58. Baumer, Modern European Thought, p.
299.
[7]
Hegel, Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’, p. 57.
[8]
See, for example, Chapter 4 “The Hegelian Middle” in Emil L. Fackenheim, The
Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1967). See also Susan M. Dodd and Neil G. Robertson, Hegel and
Canada: Unity of Opposites (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).
[9]
Heraclitus, Fragments, tr. Brooks Haxton (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 27.
[10] Ibid.,
p. 25.
[11] Ibid.,
p. 29. See Richard Wolin, The
Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to
Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2019), p. 7 and p. 269.
[12]
Heraclitus, Fragments, p. 29.
[13]
See for example Michael Moran, Metaphysical Imagination and Other Essays on
Philosophy and Modern European Mind (Peterborough, England: Fastprint,
2018), p. 240.
[14]
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, tr. Carol Macomber (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 37.
[15]
As previously mentioned: Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The
Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, 2nd
ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). See also Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins:
Between Philosophy and Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
[16]
Michael Moran, Metaphysical Imagination and Other Essays, p. 640.
[17]
Heraclitus, Fragments, p. 15.
[18]
See Michel Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 2010). Note the concluding words: “I do not know
whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in
Enlightenment: I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits,
that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.” (p. 50).
[19]
Also known as the Law of Non-Contradiction. See George Couvalis, “Aristotle on
Non-Contradiction,” Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial International Conference
on Greek Studies (Flanders 2009), online.
[20]
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, tr. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Toronto: Penguin,
2004), p. 89. See Book Beta 1006a.
[21] Ibid.,
p. 89. Emphasis is in the original translated text.
No comments:
Post a Comment