J. Glenn Gray’s study asks a single, tightly delimited question: which values did Hegel take to be characteristic of Greek culture, and how did holding those values shape his verdict on modern civilization? Its governing ambition is correspondingly restrained — to separate Hegel’s historical and cultural criticism from the metaphysical apparatus in which that criticism was cast, so that it may be examined on its own terms and learned from rather than adhered to. The book therefore proceeds by reconstruction, moving from Hegel’s general conception of history through his youthful manuscripts to the mature lectures on religion, art, ethics, and the history of philosophy. Its distinctive value as an object of study lies in the discipline with which it holds that separation open while recording, in its own text and apparatus, the points at which the separation fails.
The question is announced in the preface with unusual precision, and the precision is worth dwelling on, because everything the book subsequently permits itself follows from it. Gray states that he has undertaken to review the values which Hegel considered preeminently characteristic of Greek culture, and to trace the way in which those values helped to determine his judgment of modern civilization. Two things are thereby fixed. First, the object of study is Hegel’s estimate, and not Greece; the book is explicitly uninterested in factual discrepancies between Hegel’s Greeks and the Greeks recovered by nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnology and historiography, and it says so directly, conceding at once that Hegel’s understanding of classical culture necessarily suffered from the limitations of the knowledge and research methods available to him. Second, the reason for pursuing that estimate is comparative and diagnostic: what interests Gray is the philosophical wisdom lying behind what Hegel said about the Greeks, where wisdom means the capacity of a determinate historical construction to illuminate the present that constructed it. The preface thus performs a double delimitation. It removes one class of objections from play — the empirical-historical class — and it simultaneously commits the book to a criterion of assessment that it must supply for itself, since fidelity to the Greek record has been declared inapposite. Much of the internal pressure that the work later generates arises from this initial move: having set aside the most obvious standard by which Hegel’s Hellenism might be judged, Gray must construct another, and the construction is never completed in a single formulation.
The substitute standard is offered immediately, in the form of the book’s boldest methodological wager. The permanent value of German idealism, Gray writes, lies in its poetic apprehension of empirical phenomena, its artistic appreciation, and its religious insight; the idealistic school was preoccupied with the meaning of events and their bearing on human experience. The metaphysical systems in which Hegel and his contemporaries cast their thought may accordingly be called philosophical mythologies, whose claim was to comprehend in creative vision the meaning of the natural, human, and divine world. Such systems are true as a work of art is true, and the comparison offered is Dante’s poem. The idealists themselves, Gray adds, were subtle enough to recognize the symbolical character of their attempts. This is the enabling premise of the entire monograph, and it does four distinct kinds of work at once, which is why the book returns to it so often and with such varying emphasis.
It functions, first, as a genre determination: to call the system a mythology is to specify how its propositions are to be read, namely as articulations of meaning rather than as descriptions to be checked. It functions, second, as an apologetic device: the four-epoch scheme of world history, which Gray concedes omits important peoples and periods and oversimplifies the diversity within any people’s development, is rescued by being reclassified — taken as mythology, as a means of revealing Hegel’s faith in the advance of human ideals, the vision is said to be less fantastic and arbitrary than it has often been thought. It functions, third, as a constraint on the book’s own ambitions: if the system is a symbolic whole, then no part of it can be verified piecemeal, and Gray accordingly refrains from attempting to adjudicate the system as such. And it functions, fourth — this is the most consequential and the least explicit — as a license for the book’s central structural claim, that Hegel’s historical insight may be extracted from the logical machinery without essential loss. For if the machinery is symbolic, then what it symbolizes may in principle be reached by another route.
That structural claim receives its most direct statement later, when the mature Hegel is introduced. Gray asserts that the social and cultural motives of Hegel’s philosophy were conceived long before they were reduced to systematic formulas, and states the consequence in a sentence that governs the remaining chapters: Hegel was a philosopher of history before he became a metaphysician. From this he draws the inference that the relation of the dialectical structure to the historical content is less close than has often been asserted, and that it is therefore possible to follow the development of Hegel’s estimate of Hellenic culture in relative independence of the system. The qualifier — relative — is load-bearing and is never withdrawn. In the same passage Gray concedes what the separability thesis must survive: that the application of Hegel’s peculiar logic to historical development did affect his understanding; that attempting to comprehend the past in triadic terms and to read history as a necessary progress according to a logical pattern could not fail to determine to some extent which values and events he found significant; that too often his historical judgments and his keen empirical sense for the actual were sacrificed to the metaphysical scheme; and that the later Hegel gives constant evidence of an internal conflict between his historical intuitions and the demands of his dialectic, a doubleness that would later divide his followers into opposed camps. The thesis is thus advanced together with its own strongest counter-evidence, and the book’s subsequent movement can be read as a protracted test of whether the thesis survives contact with the material. It survives in the chapters on religion and social ethics; it is severely strained in the chapter on the history of philosophy; and it is reasserted at the end by an argument of a different kind, which I will come to.
Before that test can begin, the book must establish what Hegel’s vision of history was, and here the exposition begins from an affective rather than a doctrinal starting point. Gray opens with pathos. Hegel’s sense of history, he writes, was permeated with a sense of the pathos of human experience; innumerable passages reveal the sadness of a mind that had contemplated the record of the past with something like the fervor of participation. History regarded as spectacle failed to be self-explanatory, and as drama it contained insufficient meaning to satisfy. The long passage from the lectures on the philosophy of history describing the display of passions, the unreason associated even with good designs, and the retreat of the reflective mind into the quiet shore of private interest is reproduced as the book’s initial datum. What follows is presented as a chain of answers, each of which is found partial and is superseded, and the chain is the reader’s first encounter with the specific rhythm of Gray’s exposition: a position is given its full force, its insufficiency is located from within, and a further position is generated as the response to that insufficiency.
The first answer is natural regeneration. Death is the issue of life and life the issue of death; peoples fall and new peoples take their places; the Phoenix supplies the image. Gray then locates the insufficiency exactly: the myth describes only the life of nature, in which there is eternal repetition and an eternal sameness of individual forms. Something more is required for spirit, whose past is retained and used as the means to a more adequate life. The universality of change must therefore be supplemented by the certainty of progress, and reason must be posited as sovereign. Gray is careful about what this positing is. Reason, in Hegel’s usage, means both an aspect of the individual mind and a characteristic structure in the objective social world, an intelligibility comparable to physical law. Viewed as a continuity of mind, history becomes a comprehensive teleological process deriving its unity from an inclusive end, which is human freedom. And then the decisive characterization: this conviction is a philosophical faith. Gray writes that Hegel required events to contain their own justification, since as a modern thinker he could not take literally the hope of a Christian transcendentalism that located the meaning of history beyond the human sphere; reason as teleological continuity supplied the need, and became for him a primary presupposition, a plausible intuition, essentially a philosophical faith. The word faith is not used dismissively. It is used to specify the logical status of the premise, and it prepares the conclusion’s claim that the system is a mythology. There is a fine consistency here that repays attention: the book’s final characterization of Hegel’s metaphysics is already contained in its account of the first premise of his philosophy of history.
From that premise the exposition unfolds a series of paired terms whose relations Gray tracks with care. The first pair is reason and passion. Passion, understood as the energy of will in pursuit of personal and selfish aims, furnishes the driving force of history; Gray connects it to what Aristotle called orexis, the desire for self-realization, and notes that its power derives precisely from its scant respect for the discipline of morality and justice. All vital activity, on this account, is first of all personal activity, and Hegel had only scorn for Enlightenment talk of disinterested service. The problem is then posed as a problem of relationship: idea and passion furnish the material of the philosophy of history, and their interdependence is the philosopher’s problem. Gray identifies two distinct solutions in Hegel and declines to fuse them. On one construal, universality is a result: though all action is selfish and all satisfaction personal, the final results fall outside the particular and achieve universal significance, and reason works through determinate means, directing the passions and putting them to work while remaining in the background — the tendency of reason to conceal itself in the conflicts of particular desires being what Hegel called the cunning of reason. On the other construal, taken from the standpoint of the whole, particular passions are blind while passion as an integral part of the all-inclusive whole is at one with world-reason, which Hegel sometimes called Providence and sometimes Necessity; on this view reason and passion are aspects of a single thing. Gray sets the two side by side and moves on, and it is worth registering that he does not treat the duality as a contradiction requiring resolution. He treats it as an oscillation characteristic of Hegel’s procedure. That treatment is itself a methodological decision with consequences for the whole book: Gray’s recurring finding will be that Hegel maintains two accounts of a relation where a single account is expected, and that the maintenance is deliberate rather than negligent.
The second pair is the individual and the objective world, and it yields the book’s master concept. Freedom, for Hegel as Gray reconstructs him, consists in overcoming the dualistic relation between the ego and the objective world; the free man is the one who has made himself most completely at home in his world. To be free is to divest the outer realm of its strangeness and to find in it an adequate spiritual home, to see in the social world the reflection of one’s own substance. Gray offers a compressed formulation of what he takes to be the fundamental theme of Hegel’s philosophy: that wisdom’s final word is the recognition that man’s good lies in finding his powers realized and himself at home in the objective world, and that such satisfaction should issue from acknowledgment and penetration rather than from resigned submission — freedom lying in a voluntary peace with reality. He supports this with the contrast that recurs later: Novalis defined philosophy as homesickness, while Hegel understood it as being at home with oneself and one’s world.
I want to mark this concept because of what happens to it across the book. At-homeness is introduced as the definition of freedom in the first chapter. It reappears in the third chapter as the characterization of the Greek relation to nature, where the artist finds in the natural world material for a spiritual home. It reappears in the fourth as the description of the Athenian citizen’s relation to his city, whose object was not the state in the abstract but this actual Athens, these temples, these altars, this union of fellow citizens. It reappears in the fifth as the metaphysical culmination, where Hegel’s deep desire to find harmony between the individual and the objective world discovers in Aristotle’s self-thinking thought the condition under which the thinking self can entirely appropriate its object. And it appears one final time, negated, in the conclusion: we have not yet learned to be at home in our world, which Gray calls Hegel’s fondest dream. A single concept therefore traverses ethics, aesthetics, politics, metaphysics, and diagnosis, changing its material each time while retaining its form, and terminating in a statement of failure. This is the clearest example in the book of a term whose office migrates across contexts, and the migration is one of the strongest warrants for reading the work as an articulated whole rather than as five studies.
The concept of freedom immediately generates a further requirement, which Gray marks as such. Freedom so understood is not native; it is farthest from a state of innocence and involves rebirth into what Hegel called a second nature. Gray invokes the words spoken to Nicodemus and insists that Hegel meant them to apply beyond the narrowly religious sphere, to the whole of life in society. Man in his first nature is only potentially distinguished from the animal; actual humanity lies in a development that comes only through gradual initiation into the established life of society, and until the individual arrives through moral discipline at reconciliation with the objective ethical order he cannot actualize the potentiality of freedom. Education is accordingly identified with liberation, and defined as training in wisdom rather than the acquisition of technical skill — a putting at man’s disposal of the experience of the race in art, morality, politics, religion, and philosophy. This installs education at the center of the argument, and it should be noticed how much later work the installation does. In the fourth chapter education becomes the operative cause of the dissolution of Greek ethical life, since it is precisely the individual’s coming to consciousness of what he had taken for granted that severs him from the objective whole. The same faculty that liberates dissolves. Gray does not present this as a paradox to be resolved; he presents it as the specific mechanism by which Hegel’s philosophy of history advances, and the reader who has absorbed the first chapter’s account of education is prepared to find, in the fourth, that the Sophists’ pedagogy is at once an advance in the consciousness of freedom and a presage of ruin.
The third pair is nature and spirit, which introduces dialectic. Nature is the realm of organic unfolding in what Gray calls a linear process, relatively harmonious and continuous; spirit adds to organic unfolding a dialectical movement, so that its development presents a stern working against itself rather than the tranquil growth of organic life. The triad is described in its standard form — immediate unity in which a latent disunion persists, the open break of otherness, and a higher unity that becomes in turn the point of departure for a new dissension. Here Gray makes an interpretive decision that he knows to be contested, and he relegates its defense to the apparatus. In a back-note he acknowledges that his contrast between an organic conception and a dialectical one is denied by many Hegelian scholars, who point out that for Hegel organic life is itself dialectical; he grants that Hegel attempted to apply dialectic to all phenomena; and he maintains nonetheless that in the philosophy of history the dialectical and the organic conceptions are set over against each other, the former as peculiar to spirit and the latter as characteristic of nature and of cultures considered separately, that is, apart from historical progression and interrelation. He then adds that the problem is central to the Hegelian point of view and that the limits of this study permit only its indication.
That note deserves emphasis for reasons that extend beyond its content. It exhibits a pattern that recurs throughout the book’s apparatus: the notes are where contested claims are defended, where the author’s disagreements with the scholarly consensus are registered, and where limits of genre are invoked to terminate a line of inquiry. The main text of the monograph presents a relatively smooth surface; the notes systematically roughen it. Any reading that attends only to the running exposition will miss the fact that the book’s most destabilizing observations are deposited in the back matter. A second instance will appear in the treatment of the concrete, where the diagnosis of Hegel’s fundamental doubleness is placed in a note; a third in the dismissal of Hegel’s triadic ordering of Greek philosophy as half-hearted and fairly irrelevant, which is likewise a note; a fourth in the observation that Hegel’s account of Platonic ethics rests almost wholly on the Republic and takes no real account of the Laws, particularly on the question of private and subjective freedom. Each of these is a load-bearing judgment. Each is placed outside the argument’s visible line.
The paratextual conditions under which this apparatus operates are themselves stated at the front of the volume and are worth reading as interpretive instructions rather than as bibliographic incidentals. The publisher’s note explains that King’s Crown Press is a division of Columbia University Press organized to make certain scholarly material available at minimum cost, that every reasonable economy has been adopted short of interfering with legibility, and — this is the operative clause — that the work is presented substantially as submitted by the author, without the usual editorial and typographical attention of Columbia University Press. Three consequences follow for how the text should be read. The compositional decisions are authorial, including the placement of notes at the back, the absence of internal subdivision within chapters, and the density of quotation. The genre is that of an academic monograph proximate to its dissertation origin, a reading confirmed by the preface’s acknowledgment that Horace L. Friess supervised and greatly assisted the study, that many of the ideas set forth derive from the instruction and suggestion of J. H. Randall, Jr., and that the publication was facilitated by a grant from the National Council on Religion in Higher Education. And the author’s own description of the work as a short study and as a monograph, offered as a step toward the re-examination and reinterpretation that Hegel is said to require, establishes a scale of ambition against which its self-limiting notes are not evasions but genre-appropriate declarations. The signature line places the composition at Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania, and the preface records assistance there in revising the manuscript and checking proof.
The citation protocol, likewise stated in the apparatus, has philosophical as well as scholarly consequences. Gray declares that he has substantially followed the accepted English translations, with the exception of the youthful manuscripts, for which none were then available and where the translations are his own; that he has taken the liberty of making occasional changes, especially in lowering upper-case letters; and that he cites in every instance both the English and the German, using Hermann Glockner’s Jubiläumsausgabe except where otherwise indicated, while acknowledging that Glockner’s text does not in every case agree with the edition from which the translations were made, though the differences in the selections quoted are not great. The stated rationale for lowering the capitals is that many of the older translators seemed to read Hegel in terms of capital nouns only. This is a small remark with a large implication, and I mark the following as an inference rather than as something the text asserts: the typographic decision is continuous with the book’s central thesis, since de-capitalizing Hegel’s substantives reduces their appearance as hypostatized entities and supports the project of reading him as a cultural critic whose categories are interpretive rather than as a metaphysician whose nouns name substances. The warrant for the inference lies in the stated rationale itself, which criticizes a reading practice rather than a mere convention of printing, and in the preface’s declared aim of displacing exclusive emphasis on the metaphysical system.
The bibliography completes the picture of the book’s conditions of production. The primary works are the Glockner edition, Georg Lasson’s Philosophische Bibliothek edition, Hermann Nohl’s collection of the theological manuscripts of Hegel’s youth, and Glockner’s then incomplete Hegel-Lexikon. The translations listed are the standard anglophone set of the period — Wallace on the philosophy of mind and the encyclopaedic logic, Haldane and Simson on the history of philosophy, Speirs and Sanderson on the philosophy of religion, Baillie on the phenomenology, Osmaston on the philosophy of fine art, Sibree on the philosophy of history, Dyde on the philosophy of right, and Johnston and Struthers on the science of logic. The critical works are overwhelmingly German: Dilthey, Haering, Nicolai Hartmann in two titles, Haym, Rosenkranz, Rosenzweig, Glockner, Lasson, Leese, Hoffmeister, Rehm, Stefansky, Stenzel, Falkenheim, Fischer, and Bratuscheck, against a smaller anglophone group including Foster, Sabine, Stace, Royce, Reyburn, Loewenberg, Adams, and Maier. The profile is legible as a working condition. The book is written from inside the German Hegel-philology of its moment and addressed to a readership equipped chiefly with translations produced decades earlier, and this asymmetry explains a persistent feature of its manner: the exposition must simultaneously introduce material the reader may not possess and criticize a reception the reader may have inherited.
With these framing elements in place, the substantive reconstruction proceeds through the doctrine of national spirit, which supplies the unit of historical analysis. A people, on Hegel’s account as Gray relays it, is known by its deeds and is what its deeds are; the popular spirit represents the totality of the spiritual powers that live in a people and rule it, and these powers are arranged in a hierarchical ascent from physical needs, trades, and commercial life, through law, civil rights, family, class, government, and state, to religion, and finally to the sciences, in which the intellectual demands of a national spirit are satisfied. The state, understood as constitution and organization of government, occupies the central position as the basis and middle point of all concrete aspects of this many-sided life; Gray glosses the resulting conception as a state of culture, in which the political is used as a wide category comprehending diverse spheres of social and institutional life. Here again a note performs decisive work: Gray records that he has used the order of hierarchy found in the lectures on aesthetics rather than the somewhat different arrangement in the philosophy of right, on the ground that it seemed more relevant to the concept of national spirit. The choice is transparent and its rationale is stated, and the effect is to present the doctrine in the register of cultural morphology rather than of political philosophy. This is a small but exact instance of how the book’s expository decisions shape the doctrine they expound.
Above the state stand the ideal spheres in which national spirit objectifies its values — religion, fine art, and philosophy — and religion in the widest sense is identified as the sphere in which a nation gives itself the definition of what it regards as true, so that the conception of God constitutes the general basis of a people’s character. Within this wide interpretation, art portrays the divine in sensuous external form as unmediated concrete representation, philosophy portrays it in the freest and wisest form with no need of a visible medium, and religion in the narrower sense of faith and worship adds devotion and reverence, producing the subjective feeling of community. This tripartite arrangement is important for the book’s economy because it supplies in advance the framework within which the Greek achievement will be located and limited. If art is the mode of the divine appropriate to sensuous immediacy, and philosophy the mode appropriate to thought, then a culture whose supreme achievement is artistic is thereby specified as belonging to an earlier moment of spirit’s self-consciousness — and the whole of the argument about the insufficiency of the religion of beauty is already implicit in this classification. Gray does not announce this implication at the point where the classification is given; the reader recovers it retroactively when the third chapter concludes that the inadequacy of Greek religion lay in the sphere of art itself.
The morphology of national life is then supplied with a temporal shape by fusing an organic with a dialectical account. Cultures pass through growth, blossom, ripeness, and decay; nations, like individuals, eventually die a natural death, and after a people has achieved its purposes the need for struggle disappears, the spirit rests, and existence becomes custom, which Gray glosses through Hegel’s phrase describing custom as activity without opposition, leading to a life of vegetating without universal significance. Dialectically construed, the same history is a movement between identity and contradiction. The period of identity is the happy level at which the individual is in harmony with the social whole and finds his own fortune in the common good, and it is precisely at the peak of that harmony that the first intimations of decline appear, since the rise of reflective consciousness and the progress of individual education destroy the temporary equilibrium. The real world becomes contrasted with the ideal; individuals isolate themselves and flee into a private ideal world.
Then comes the formulation that organizes everything the book will later say about Greece, and it is stated as a paradox: it is in such periods of opposition and outward decline that national spirit attains its finest expression in ideal creations. As the end of a cultural cycle approaches the spirit is ripe in wisdom; unable to express itself in public service, it turns within; and the message of that ripened wisdom reveals a principle higher than the period of harmony had known. Yet this wisdom cannot save the people that produced it, and indeed contributes to their decline — the fruit of a people’s life becoming a poison-draught which it cannot let alone, whose taste is annihilation and at the same time the rise of a new principle. This single figure supplies the logic of the entire treatment of Socrates, of the Sophists, of Plato’s Republic, and of the closing image of Minerva’s owl. It is the reason the book can present the highest Greek philosophy and the ruin of Greek ethical life as the same event described twice. And it is also the source of one of the work’s deepest unresolved tensions, since it implies that the conditions of philosophical insight and the conditions of ethical flourishing are inversely related — a proposition which, if held consistently, would place Hegel’s own achievement under the same description and would make the ripeness of his wisdom an index of his epoch’s exhaustion. Gray does not draw this consequence explicitly. I note it as an inference invited by the text’s own materials, warranted by the fact that the owl passage is applied without qualification to all great periods of history and by the conclusion’s insistence that the synthesis Hegel envisioned was not accomplished in fact.
The four world-epochs — Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Christian-Germanic, with Germanic glossed in a note as medieval and modern European — are then presented in terms of the relation between spirit and nature. In the ancient East the union was unequal, spirit being lost in nature at a sub-rational level within the human being. The Greek world achieved a harmonious and equal union in which the natural was spiritualized and the spiritual grounded in the natural, and this union was produced through immediate artistic imagination. The Roman epoch witnessed estrangement, spirit asserting its right in abstract independence while the natural displayed its crushing force as a universal state power. The Christian world arrived at reconciliation by acknowledging the superiority of the reflective spirit and its consequent capacity to appropriate the natural for its own ends. Gray’s assessment follows immediately and is carefully staged: from the standpoint of modern criticism the theory is not literally true; it omits peoples and periods, oversimplifies internal diversity, and creates in the interest of a monistic logic a single web of history sometimes bearing little relation to actual events; Hegel did not do full justice to the empirical facts in the life of any people. And then the reclassification: taken as mythology, as a means of revealing a faith in the advance of human ideals, the vision is not as fantastic and arbitrary as it has often been considered. Gray adds a statement of his own position — that it is the part of despair or barren scepticism to believe there is no advance and no pattern of development, and that to have no mythology and no vision is to disbelieve in the capability of humankind to achieve ideals.
This is the first place where the book’s evaluative standard becomes visibly double, and the doubling should be described precisely rather than resolved. Two standards are in play. The first is fidelity: does the interpretation answer to the evidence, as that evidence is now constituted? By this standard the four-epoch scheme fails, and later the pre-Socratic reconstructions, the treatment of the mystery cults, the reading of Heraclitus, and the separation of Platonic content from Platonic form will also be found wanting, with the failures registered in each case. The second is fruitfulness: does the construction disclose relations otherwise unavailable, and does it enable a culture to understand its own situation? By this standard the same scheme succeeds. Gray’s implicit rule of distribution is that fidelity governs details and fruitfulness governs wholes, and this rule is applied consistently, but it is never argued for, and it is vulnerable at exactly the point where a whole is composed of details — which is to say, everywhere. The strain becomes visible in the fifth chapter, where the details at issue are Hegel’s own historiographical practice, and where a failure of fidelity therefore threatens the credentials of the whole. I take this to be the book’s principal methodological instability, and it is one that the concluding chapter addresses by a manoeuvre I will describe in due course.
What the philosophy of history contributes positively, on Gray’s account, is a form of relational understanding whose influence he judges to have been the most profound of all Hegel’s legacies. All the manifestations of a nation’s life are brought onto the same plane and interpreted on the basis of their interrelationships: the political and the artistic, the religious and the ethical, the legal and the philosophical are seen in the light of their temporal and social context, and none can be properly understood when removed from the limitations of its time and place or divorced from the spirit of the people from whom it arose. The corollary is that no principle — political, religious, or ethical — is absolute or unconditioned; each cultural principle has fulfilled its destiny when it has served its time and satisfied the consciousness of the people from whom it sprang; each cultural synthesis is absolute in its own time, and each code of laws is truth for its age and people, all of them yielding in time to other codes. Gray records that this insight had not been realized by Hegel’s predecessors and has met with the general agreement of those who came after.
And then, in the same breath, the counter-movement. Hegel did not understand this as an endless succession of cultural principles without significance beyond their own time. Though the products of spirit are relative and temporal, the life of spirit is unending and absolute; each cultural form possesses an eternal quality that is retained and rendered ever present by the activity of self-conscious thought. Gray notes as a compositional fact that Hegel was in the habit of closing his introductory lectures on the philosophy of history with this emphasis, and reproduces the passage in which philosophy, occupying itself with the true, has to do with the eternally present, so that nothing in the past is lost, spirit is immortal, and the grades spirit seems to have left behind it are still possessed in the depths of its present.
Here the book’s governing antinomy is laid down, and it should be named with care because it recurs in three distinct registers. In the register of historiography it is the tension between the relativity of principles and the permanence of their content. In the register of ethics it is the tension between the historical specificity of Greek social custom and the claim that its insight remains the only approach to the ethical problem. In the register of the history of philosophy it becomes explicit and is called a paradox: how could true thought have a history, how could the absolute be relative? Gray’s formulation there is unusually direct — he writes that in a real sense the paradox remained an unresolved problem of Hegel’s thought. It is worth observing that the antinomy is introduced in the first chapter without being named, is operative throughout the middle chapters as a pressure on their categories, and is named only in the fifth, at the point where it becomes unavoidable because the object under discussion is philosophical truth itself. The book’s architecture is therefore one of deferred naming: a difficulty is exhibited long before it is identified, and the identification, when it comes, retroactively determines the sense of what preceded.
The turn to the youthful manuscripts is prepared by a statement of what such a turn can and cannot yield, and the preparation is more restrictive than the practice of the chapter might suggest. Gray situates Hegel’s generation within a double revolt — against the imported worldly doctrines of the Enlightenment and against a religious heritage grown inflexible — and describes the resulting search for a new basis of faith, a new mythology, a new vision, which found a compelling ideal in ancient Hellenic culture. He notes that this neo-Hellenism was often accepted uncritically and, among the more romantic enthusiasts, freely compounded with foreign elements, and that it became for a time the dominant force in German intellectual life. He records that all the writers from Lessing and Herder to Schelling and Hegel were marshalled under the standard of the ideally human, and he cites Nietzsche’s remark that the Germans belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, having as yet no today, glossing it as follows: the men of Hegel’s generation were striving for a today, living for a tomorrow, and drawing the inspiration of their vision of the future from a yesterday, a large part of which was the Hellenism transmitted from Winckelmann and Herder through Goethe and Schiller. The framing is thus generational and comparative, and it establishes at the outset that young Hegel’s Hellenism is a shared inheritance rather than a personal discovery — a claim that will matter later, when the mature Hegel’s divergence from that same generation becomes the pivot of the third chapter.
The archival evidence is then introduced together with a sustained caution about its use. Gray records that Wilhelm Dilthey began the research on young Hegel by studying the difficult holographs in Berlin, that Hermann Nohl a year later published the manuscripts from which Dilthey had drawn, and that this publication with Dilthey’s commentary awakened an entirely new interest in Hegel, generating an increasing number of critical works on the genesis of his ideas — Franz Rosenzweig on the political ideas, and Theodor Haering’s two-volume biographical analysis whose first volume alone runs to nearly eight hundred pages on the early years. Hegel, he remarks, is now receiving the kind of scholarly attention long given to Kant. And then the restriction: emphasis on these youthful essays may be carried to an extreme; it is hard to sympathize with Haering’s word-by-word analysis; it is misleading to find in the fragments, as Kuno Fischer professed to do, all the main currents of the mature system. The manuscripts do not form a harmonious whole and cannot stand alone as an independent portrayal of a philosophical position; too often scholars have passed over contradictions and incompatible ideas within them. Gray’s own construal is that Hegel was there seeking a point of view and trying to become clear in his own mind, rather than expressing his thought for others, and he adduces a decisive piece of evidence about the manuscripts’ status: Hegel never showed any intention of publishing or completing them, did not preserve a clean copy, lifted out portions for use in lectures, revised them at will, and made no attempt to keep them intact. They should be regarded, Gray concludes, as a record of Hegel’s struggle toward a consistent understanding, a diary of his development — private, careless, unsystematic, incomplete.
Two further constraints follow. In a note, Gray records that the genetic studies fail to agree on the chronology of the manuscripts, that Nohl’s collation disagrees with Dilthey’s critical analysis and Haering’s study with both, and that it is difficult and perhaps impossible to determine which fragments belong to the Bern and which to the Frankfurt years; accordingly he has not considered the passages chronologically but has arranged them in the order best suited to his purpose. This is a candid declaration that the chapter’s order is thematic and that the developmental narrative it conveys is imposed rather than found. It also entails a dependence on Nohl’s editorial work that runs deeper than citation: the titles under which the fragments are grouped — the collection’s own title designating them as theological writings of Hegel’s youth, and the individual headings on folk-religion and Christianity, on the positivity of the Christian religion, on the spirit of Judaism, and on the spirit of Christianity and its fate — are editorial constructions, and Gray works through them while noting that Nohl entitled the collection appropriately. The consequence, which I state as an inference supported by Gray’s own remark that almost all these writings concern religious problems and by his acknowledgment of the fragmentary and untitled state of the manuscripts, is that the thematic unity attributed to young Hegel’s religious concerns is partly a function of the editorial apparatus through which those concerns are accessible. Gray registers the dependence without pressing it.
The second constraint is evaluative and is stated with unusual bluntness: the early works appear immature in their tendency to overstate and suffer from an almost idolatrous reverence for Hellenic civilization, gaining in boldness, wealth of ideas, and warmth what they lose in balance. Gray reports Dilthey’s judgment that Hegel wrote nothing more beautiful and allows that there is truth in it, adding his own observation that Hegel’s genius for historical insight and cultural criticism was at its best before the logical system had weighted down his thought. It should be noticed how this observation interacts with the separability thesis. If the early writings display the historical genius in its purest state precisely because the system is absent, then the separability of insight from system is exhibited biographically as well as argued for methodologically. The genetic chapter thus does double duty: it supplies the content of Hegel’s first Hellenism and it supplies indirect evidence for the possibility of the book’s own procedure. That the same chapter must also discount the reliability of its materials is a strain the book absorbs without comment.
The doctrinal core of the early writings is the distinction between a folk-religion and a private religion, and Gray reconstructs it as a functional rather than a doctrinal distinction. A true folk-religion serves the people, expressing and conserving their best values while satisfying their aspirations; since a people’s life is grounded in the senses, in feeling, and in imagination, religion must be similarly grounded to have vitality. Private religion, by contrast, aims at cultivating the morality of isolated individuals. Folk-religion is by nature a public phenomenon that cannot be thought apart from the other phases of a people’s life; it permeates political and moral, private and sensuous motives alike, and Gray transmits Hegel’s simile of the spirit of a people, its history, its religion, and the degree of its political freedom as three colleagues so united that none can act alone and each limits the others. Against the rationalists’ project of a religion purged of superstition and myth, young Hegel’s vehemence is directed at the sundering of what is vital and joyful; and Gray identifies the relation to Kant with precision, reporting Dilthey’s view that the two were in fairly consistent agreement on fundamentals and judging that the fragments do not on the whole support it, since Hegel’s quarrel lay with the Kantian dualisms of reason and sense and of duty and desire rather than with the primacy of the ethical in religion. The formulation is careful: opposition to a sundering process rather than to a doctrine.
Greek religion then enters as the concrete exemplar that the concept of folk-religion had all along presupposed. Gray states this as a finding about the order of thought — that Hegel’s ideal religion was no figment, and that his gaze was fixed on one concrete example — and supports it by pointing to the recurrence of Greek religion in glowing contrast to Judaism, the early church, and modern Christianity throughout the treatise and its related fragments, and above all to the passage he calls a hymn to the Greeks, in which a people of genius appears as a son of fortune and an elect of fair fancy, chained like others to the earth by necessity yet so elaborating and beautifying that bond through feeling and imagination as to be satisfied with fetters that seemed his own work and a part of himself. The image of necessity accepted because aesthetically transfigured will return, transformed, in the mature account of Greek serenity, where limitation accepted with finality and if possible with joy is the ground of Greek self-possession. That is a recurrence with altered valence: what is in the youthful text a lyrical celebration becomes in the lectures a structural condition, and eventually the very thing whose insufficiency requires Christianity.
The polemical materials are transmitted with equal care and with an explicit warning about their status. Against modern Christianity: the charge that it failed to become incorporated in the imagination or the living ideals of the peoples who adopted it, warring against their history instead of garnering it, depopulating Valhalla and destroying the sacred groves, substituting for a cultus drawn from a people’s own past the legends of a race whose climate, laws, and persuasions were alien, so that in place of Charlemagne or Barbarossa the Germans received David and Solomon. Against Christian worship: the comparison of the sacrament with the Grecian sacrifice, the mourning clothes and lowered eyes, the fear of contagion in the common cup, the coin fetched from the pocket during the celebration, set against Greeks approaching their altars laden with the gifts of nature and crowned with garlands. Against the Christian doctrine of Providence: the claim that it bids man suffer in silence in the conviction that all is for the best and that misfortunes are punishment, while the Greeks, whose faith rested on the recognition of natural necessity, treated misfortune as misfortune and did not brood, since their fate was blind — a resignation that Gray reports Hegel as finding humanly conformable to the sublimity of the divine and the weakness of man.
The treatment of Judaism is transmitted with the strongest of the chapter’s caveats. Gray notes that here the measuring rod changes: the criterion becomes the degree of harmony with the natural order attained by the two civilizations, and he says so explicitly, observing that if one adopted the categories opposite to those by which Hegel judges the Jews one would arrive at his estimation of the Greek. He relays the reading of Abraham as the wanderer whose separation and opposition were the significant elements of his life, who could win no relation to the land and for whom nature was an enemy, contrasted with Kadmus and Danaus, who also left their fatherland but sought a country where they might be free to love the soil; the resulting characterization of a religion of need, in which dependence finds comfort in an all-powerful deity; the contrast of Mosaic with Solonic and Lycurgan legislation on the restriction of inequality, outwardly similar and originating in wholly different conceptions of life; and the closing comparison of the fate of the Jewish people with that of Macbeth. And then the corrective: Gray states that the value of this contrast for his purpose lies in the light it throws on Hegel’s Hellenic ideal and that it should not be taken as his final judgment; that Rosenkranz observed Jewish culture to have remained a vexing problem for Hegel throughout his life; and that the lectures on the philosophy of history later ranked Jewish monotheism, with its conception of justice, higher in the sphere of consciousness than Greek polytheism and necessity.
This is the book’s characteristic device of layered valuation, and it deserves a name because it recurs at every level. An early position is reported in its full polemical force; its status as early is marked; the mature revision is recorded; and the reader is left to hold both, with the later determining the sense of the earlier without erasing it. The device is used for Judaism, for Christianity, for the mystery cults, for the assessment of modern civilization, and finally for the Hellenic ideal itself, which passes from being the standard to being the point of reference by which another standard is assessed. The device is also what allows the book to avoid a sequential developmental narrative while still being developmental: the exposition can return to the same material at different levels of determination because it has established in advance that Hegel’s own positions are stratified.
The most philosophically consequential of the early materials, on Gray’s presentation, is the explanation of Christianity’s victory over paganism, and its consequence is that a religious change is derived from a political one. The question is posed sharply — how an ancient indigenous religion, established in the state, credited with the origin of cities and constitutions, under whose banners armies fought, could have been supplanted by a foreign cult — and the conventional pious answer, that the peoples saw the folly of their myths, is rejected as inadequate, with the striking concession that the adherents of the pagan faith remain so superior in everything great, beautiful, noble, and free that they can only be marvelled at as a generation wholly strange. The answer is located in the spirit of the age and in a quiet, secret revolution that must have preceded the transition. Gray transmits the causal sequence with precision: successful wars and the increase of riches and luxury gave superiority to a few who asserted supremacy by force; the individual began to dominate the social; democratic equality and independence disappeared, and with them the idea of freedom as self-determination; the image of the state as a product of his own activity vanished from the soul of the citizen; the right of the citizen became only a claim to the security of property. Deprived of an objective content of life, the unattached individual could no longer face death with equanimity, and there arose the longing for the soul to be something eternal. The old gods, who had shown the frailty of men when every man had the eternal within his own breast, no longer sufficed; with the loss of reliance on human power came the need for an absolute and omnipotent godhead to whom alone goodness and freedom could be attributed; subjective religion became objective, the religion of imagination gave way to a positive faith authenticated by signs and miracles.
Gray marks the tone by observing that one could easily imagine these to be pages from Feuerbach or Nietzsche, and identifies the voice as that of a complete humanist for whom the loss of freedom meant incapacity for independence. He also identifies the contemporary application, noting that in the midst of the historical analysis the contemporary problem keeps asserting itself in the call for a more humane religion, and quoting the sentence in which the age is said to have laid claim, at least in theory, to treasures formerly squandered on heaven, with the question left open as to which age will have the strength to make the claim valid.
Several structural consequences follow from this analysis, and they organize the later chapters. The mechanism it establishes — that a religious form is the expression of a political condition, and that the loss of public freedom generates the demand for a transcendent guarantor — is the same mechanism that will be invoked in the fourth chapter to explain the transition from Greek social ethics to modern individual morality, and in the fifth to explain the withdrawal of Hellenistic philosophy into the self. The early Hegel’s account of the origins of Christianity is thus, in Gray’s presentation, the prototype of the mature Hegel’s account of the decline of Greece. What changes between them is the valuation attached to the outcome, and this change is the single most important fact about the transition from the second to the third chapter. The early account treats the transition as a fall from freedom into slavery and depravity; the mature account treats it as an advance in the consciousness of freedom purchased at the cost of harmony. The same sequence of events is described twice, and the difference lies entirely in the evaluative frame, which is itself supplied by the doctrine of dialectical progress. This is as clear an instance as the book provides of the metaphysics doing evaluative work upon historical content that was established independently of it — which, I note as an inference, complicates the separability thesis in a way Gray does not fully confront, since the separation of insight from system is easiest where the system merely reorders and hardest where it revalues.
The chapter closes with the poem to Hölderlin on Eleusis, presented as the most concentrated expression of the young Hegel’s vision of folk-religion. Gray describes the walk in the evening stillness, the imagined return to the shrine, the silence of the priests whose ritual no searching can recover, the insistence that even to her worshippers words were faint symbols who declined to dishonour the goddess by confining infinite nature in empty phrases, and the contrast with the verbiage of Christian dogmatism; and he renders the closing lines in which the goddess is said to have lived in her worshippers’ lives and deeds rather than on their lips, appearing as the spirit of their acts. Two things should be marked about the placement of this material. First, it is the chapter’s terminus and its most lyrical page, which gives the youthful Hellenism its maximum rhetorical force immediately before the third chapter withdraws it. Second, and more consequentially, the mature Hegel will deny the significance of the mystery religions altogether, treating the Orphic, Pythagorean, and Eleusinian cults as Asiatic survivals representing a return of the Greek spirit to its beginnings before the natural gods had been overcome, and insisting — in spite of his early poem, as Gray pointedly notes — that the Athenians set no real store by their official mystery, since they were well aware that the true reconciliation of divine and human could not rest in symbol or secrecy. The poem is therefore quoted at length and then, forty pages later, repudiated by its author. Gray records the repudiation without adjudicating it, though he does register a cost by noting that modern scholars find in precisely these cults significant indications of other tendencies in Hellenic life. The episode functions in the book as a compressed emblem of what the mature system exacts: the symbol that had been the young Hegel’s chief image of the wordless truth of a people’s ethical life becomes, once symbolism has been theorized as a deficiency, evidentially inadmissible.
The third chapter opens with a declaration of discontinuity — that in turning to the mature Hegel one enters a new world — and then immediately qualifies it in a manner that is characteristic of the book’s refusal of clean breaks. The romantic mood of longing after distant ideals has been supplanted by a sober and even hard realism; the later writings are studded with gibes at the romantic idealists who found the everyday world uncongenial, with harsh words for the subjectivity of the beautiful soul and for formless yearning; to a large extent the later system represents a reaction against romantic distance-sickness. Yet the cool habit of taking things as they are had not been absent from the youthful Hegel either, and Gray adduces Hölderlin’s epithet for his friend at the height of their intimacy — a calm man of the understanding — as evidence that the disposition preceded the doctrine. What has changed, on this account, is the resolve: to be reconciled with his age, to desire nothing better than the present while having the present in its best fulfilment. The dream of a blissful primeval state is judged a delusion; every man and every opinion is a product of a particular age and society; the attempt to warm up the old is futile and even impossible; the past has been superseded, and the problem is to live in the present and make a vital peace with the real.
The doctrinal change that accompanies this resolve is stated as a change in the number of world-views Hegel is prepared to recognize. Where the young Hegel had appreciated one great outlook in the history of human values, the mature philosopher added a second, broadly denominated Christian, and admitted that a realistic thinker must live in this second world. Formerly the whole period from the rise of the Roman empire to the present had counted as deterioration, with the modern world at best a preparation for the readoption of Greek ethics; now the present is regarded as a higher synthesis of truths the past had discovered. And the crucial formulation follows: the Hellenic became a point of reference for the evaluation of Christian ideals and values. The change is thus a change in the office of a term. The Hellenic ideal ceases to function as a goal and begins to function as a measure — and since a measure need not be recoverable in order to measure, the impossibility of return ceases to be a source of grief and becomes a condition of use. This single reassignment resolves the melancholy that pervaded the youthful writings while preserving their content, and it is the hinge on which the book’s whole account of Hegel’s development turns.
The qualifications that follow are as important as the thesis. Hegel always remained a rebel toward his immediate background; the loves and hates of his youth and the deep imprint of Greek studies coloured his whole philosophy and determined its general outline; his mature philosophy consisted, speaking generally, of a modern content poured into Greek moulds; in intellect, temperament, and dominant emphasis he seems closer to the Greek philosophers than to his fellow Germans. Gray finds it ironic that a man now preaching reconciliation with the present should be so out of sympathy with the persuasions of his time, and offers as the most revealing indication of Hegel’s preference a passage from the opening lecture on Greek philosophy, delivered nearly every year until his death, in which the European mind is said to have passed through a long discipline whose instruments were Roman law and the Church, and in which, when man began to be at home with himself, he turned to the Greeks to find enjoyment in it — the lecture closing with the wish, were an aspiration permitted, for such a land and such conditions. The evidentiary status of this passage is worth noting: it is a habit of teaching rather than a doctrine, and Gray treats the repetition itself as evidence. This is a recurring feature of his method — symptomatic repetition is read as testimony about disposition where doctrine is unavailable or ambiguous.
The chapter then supplies the contrastive frame within which the mature interpretation of Greek religion is situated, and the frame is intellectual-historical rather than philosophical. The neoclassical inheritance from Winckelmann is described together with its restrictions: its adherents did not look back to the Greece of Hesiod, were at first almost unaware of the religion of the common people, and hardly saw the actual political or social history of Greece at all, concentrating on the tragedies, on Homer, on Pindar, and above all on the then available remains of classical sculpture, so that the Hellas they obtained was an idealized picture of the few, the exceptional, and the perfect. Gray declines to leave the matter there, adding that the history of the movement from Winckelmann and Lessing to Schelling and Hegel presents a growing awareness of this very idealization. He records the terms in which the movement understood itself — the compressed formula of noble simplicity and serene greatness, the image of the depths of the sea remaining calm however the surface rages, the ideal of rest in movement and permanence amid change, the sign of Apollo connoting serenity and contemplation — and the reason such a vision meant something radical for Germans, whose cultural heritage had been permeated by a sense of man’s inadequacy before the divine and in whom the world-denying aspect of Christianity had persisted longer than elsewhere: to find a culture that placed man at the centre and located his worth in his own attained independence.
Against this stands the Romantic counter-movement, which Gray describes as arising within the same ranks and not always clearly separated from them. Its ideal was a boundless catholicity rather than a plastic self-contained individuality; the admired man was the one who could live in any world and find more experience; and because the Romantics kept discovering new ideals, their interest in the past changed accordingly, so that they perceived the night side of Greek life, took Prometheus for their symbol in place of Apollo, and replaced Iphigenia and Helen with Penthesilea and Medea. Their religiosity explored the Orphic and Pythagorean mysteries; their needs carried them behind Greece to the Orient, to India and Egypt; Klopstock and to some degree Novalis directed attention to the symbol and allegory of the Christian Middle Ages; and Friedrich Schlegel is offered as the exemplary case of the heterogeneous compound. Hegel’s position is then located precisely between these camps: his sympathies were with Winckelmann and Goethe, and his delineation of Hellenic art and religion developed in conscious opposition to the clouded ideals of the Romantics, though he brought a wider and fuller knowledge of historical fact than any of the others, and though the values of Christian philosophy increasingly asserted themselves as his thought developed.
The differentia that separates Hegel from his own party is then stated, and it is the most important single claim of the chapter. Herder, Humboldt, Hölderlin, and others were inclined to see Greek art and ethical values in the light of a new Germany, to stress the likeness of the two peoples, and to uphold the possibility of a new Periclean age; they hoped for a rebirth of Greece in Germany, and many looked to Goethe as the harbinger of such a day. Hegel’s interpretation arose from a sharp antithesis instead. The classic world was dead and its rebirth impossible; antiquity had gone to ruin on the very principles for which the modern age stood; and though Hegel was far from approving many of those principles, he was certain that they differed from those of Greece. The problem was accordingly one of understanding and appropriating rather than of imitating or reviving, and Gray records that Hegel quoted with approval the conclusion of Schiller’s poem on the gods of Greece, in which what was immortal in them lives in song while all other life must go.
This is the point at which the book’s own thesis about Hegel becomes fully determinate, and it is worth stating in its strongest form because everything that follows depends on it. Hegel’s Hellenism is a Hellenism organized around impossibility. Its cognitive value is a direct function of its irrecoverability: because the Greek world cannot be resumed, it can serve as a fixed measure of what the modern world has gained and lost; and because it was ruined by principles the modern world affirms, the measurement it permits is a measurement of the modern world’s own cost. The ideal is preserved by being placed beyond reach, and the placing beyond reach is what converts nostalgia into analysis. Gray does not put the matter in exactly these terms, but the elements of the formulation are all supplied by his text — the denial of palingenesis, the identification of the ruinous principle with the modern principle, the redescription of the task as appropriation, and the endorsement of Schiller’s consignment of Greece to song. I mark the synthesis as my own, and note that the fourth chapter’s treatment of the impossibility of imitating the city-state, and the conclusion’s insistence that Hegel held no illusions as to the possibility or desirability of reviving the objective social ethos while holding it to be the only approach to the ethical problem, both confirm it.
The mature doctrine itself begins from the sentence of Herodotus that Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their gods, which Hegel takes as the starting point for understanding Greece. Its meaning, on his reading, is that poets and artists were the teachers and seers of the Greeks, that prophecy in Greece was poetry, and that when the Greeks sought explanation of natural phenomena by reference to spiritual powers, artistic imagination answered with the myth that all things are full of gods. Gray then isolates the discrimination on which everything turns. Modern readers are likely to infer from this that the gods were invented as a likely explanation, and Hegel denies it: Greek religion grew out of a general experience rooted in the spirit and faith of a people and an age rather than out of the isolated experience of poets, and artistic fancy is in no sense equivalent to the fictional. The formula is given in German because it is untranslatable without loss — the gods were not fabricated but poetically brought forth — and the whole weight of the interpretation rests on the difference between the two.
The consequences are worked out in three directions. First, the scholarly dispute about the foreign origin of the Greek gods is set aside as insignificant, and the manner of its setting aside is philosophically instructive. Gray reports that early German scholars had shown Herodotus to contain a basic contradiction, since he wrote in one place that Homer and Hesiod created the theogony and in another that most of the gods were of foreign origin with Egyptian prototypes; that Creuzer especially had laid the basis for establishing the second assertion; and that Hegel accepted and acknowledged Creuzer’s work while finding far more significant the un-Egyptian function and character these divinities assumed in Greece, holding that Herodotus would have been astonished to be told his two statements contained a contradiction, since the artistic spirit of the Greeks had used the foreign only as stimulus and raw material while the finished product was entirely their own. What is exhibited here is the conversion of a genetic question into a functional one, and it is the same conversion that the whole book performs upon Hegel: origins are subordinated to the office a material comes to occupy in the life of a spirit. Gray reports the conversion without endorsing it, and its cost is registered elsewhere in his acknowledgment of what Hegel’s dismissal of the mysteries excludes.
Second, the reciprocity of divine and human honour is developed as the distinctive structure of the religion of beauty. The gods are the work of men and no less divine and venerated for that; the Greeks as artists recognized the gods they formed as their own product and yet honoured them as something more than themselves, as substantially and objectively valid; the gods are at once man’s innate will and objective powers, and the artist could fashion them in plastic form while knowing his work to be more than he. Gray transmits the passage in which man is described as the womb that conceived the political and ethical laws and the breast that suckled them, so that he contemplates them calmly and is not merely free in himself but conscious of his freedom, the honour of the human being taken up into the worship of the divine, and the divine receiving its honour through the respect paid to the human. It should be marked how exactly this structure instantiates the definition of freedom given in the first chapter: to be free is to see in the objective world the reflection of one’s own substance. Greek religion is thus specified as the form in which the definition of freedom is first satisfied, and the specification is what licenses the entire evaluative架 of the book — Greece matters because it is the historical instance of the concept that governs history.
Third, the relation to nature is developed under the categories of wonder and presentiment. The Greek as artist could not view the world as foreign or indifferent; he felt an intimation of confidence in it, a sense that the natural world afforded material for a spiritual home; the Greeks watched nature and surmised regarding her, and everything had to have a human and comprehensible meaning. From the thrill that pervades us in the silence of the forests came Pan; the fountains were the origin of the Muses; nature answered the questions put to her, and yet the answers were the products of the spirit that found in the external material for its own creative fancy — the immortal songs of the Muses being productions of the thoughtfully listening spirit, creative while observant. Gray then supplies the comparative frame: the Greeks had found harmony neither as some Oriental peoples had, by disregarding spiritual forces and allowing the natural to rule, nor as the modern Christian world had tried to, by suppressing the natural. Kant is named as the exemplary case of the modern procedure, asserting that the individual attains full stature only by putting down the natural and the sensuous and acting in accordance with rational law, and the religious tradition is said to have encouraged a rigid and discordant dualism in which man becomes wholly man only through rejection of components of his natural self. The metaphor Hegel offers for the Greek alternative is that of the plastic artist forming the stone, in which the stone does not remain mere stone with a form superinduced from without but is made an expression of the spiritual even contrary to its nature, while conversely the artist needs stone and colour and sensuous form to become conscious of his idea at all, since it cannot become an object to him in thought alone. Gray calls this a fine metaphor for the harmony of the Hellenic soul, and I would add that it is the exact aesthetic analogue of the political doctrine of the fourth chapter, where the citizen is formed by institutions that are themselves the deposit of spirit — the same reciprocal formation described once in the language of material and once in the language of custom.
The category of the ideal is then given its Greek determination, and this determination is one of the book’s most carefully staged reversals of ordinary usage. To the modern man, Gray writes, an ideal involves something unattainable, a vision in the clouds, something opposed to the real and existent and thereby assuming the character of a mere ideal; to Hegel’s Romantic contemporaries it was forever an object of vain striving and indistinct yearning. In the Greeks Hegel found a freer conception of the ideal as a spiritualization of the natural and the real: to have an ideal in that world was to realize it, to embody it, to give it form, the ideal being a sane vision of the possibilities of life freed of accidental irrelevancies. Gray connects this directly to the sculpture, in which the essential nature of the Greek gods came to full expression, since they were spiritualized ideals expressing in essential form the traits the Greeks considered most characteristic and desirable in human life. The corollary is a horror of the indefinite: the Greeks had no place for abstractions, could not endure the formless and unclear, and shuddered at the vast and limitless imagination of the Orient. Hegel’s evidence is the punishment of the Titans, which he reads as the false type of infinity — the yearning of indefinite aspiration and the unsatisfied craving of natural desires that in eternal repetition discover no rest — and Gray transmits the pointed observation that the Greeks regarded mere extension into the indefinite as a damnation relegated to Tartarus rather than, as some modern votaries of such longings do, as the highest human attainment.
The polemic against symbolism follows and is one of the chapter’s most consequential passages, because it establishes a term that will be made to do opposite work in two places. Creuzer’s volumes on symbolism and mythology had become a kind of bible to the Romantics, as Winckelmann’s work had been to the neoclassicists, and had attempted both to trace the Asiatic origin of the Greek divinities and to interpret them symbolically as representations of natural or abstract human powers; Friedrich Schlegel had asserted that all art is symbolic by nature and merely an inadequate sign of an inexpressible reality. Hegel opposed this, especially in application to the Hellenic gods. The Orient, in his judgment, had been dominated by symbol precisely because the human spirit there was incapable of expressing itself adequately either in sensuous form or in clear concepts; nothing in that art carries its meaning stamped on its face, and one always needs a key. The symbol is by nature ambiguous and abstract, since many abstract qualities can be represented by a single sign, and the Oriental world had never arrived at a clear determination of its own nature or of what it wanted to say. The counter-formulation is transmitted in Hegel’s own words: only what is spiritual demands the light, and what fails to reveal itself and expound its own interpretation is the unspiritual, which fades again into obscurity. For the Greeks significance and form had been perfectly wedded, and the sculptured gods expressed exactly what they were; Gray writes that it is difficult to overemphasize this conviction either in Hegel’s interpretation of the Greeks or in the determination of his own philosophy, since the Greek world represented for him the precise opposite of romantic indeterminacy and mystical absorption.
The second use of the term arrives at the chapter’s end, and its valence is inverted. Modern artists inevitably find form inadequate to content and therefore turn to symbol, ambiguity, and abstraction; Hegel granted this and wanted to find a justification for it within art’s realm; and the justification is that romantic symbolism is an implicit confession that the spiritual ideal in its furthest reach has advanced beyond art’s confines. The symbol thus names a deficiency at one end of the historical sequence and a surplus at the other — spirit not yet adequate to itself in the Orient, spirit exceeding its sensuous medium in modernity — and the two are distinguished by nothing internal to the sign, only by their position in the development. This is the clearest instance in the book of a single category acquiring opposite meanings through placement, and it shows with unusual clarity how the developmental scheme functions as an interpretive operator: it converts a formal similarity into a difference of principle. Whether that conversion is warranted independently of the scheme is a question the book does not raise, and its unraised status is itself significant, since it is exactly the sort of question the separability thesis would need to answer.
The account of worship completes the positive picture. Worship had been central in the theological meditations of Hegel’s youth and remained central in the mature system, understood as the union of universal and particular in which deity descends and man ascends; Gray transmits Hegel’s characterization of it as a continuous poetry of life, and notes his rejection of the menial connotation carried by the German word for divine service. For the Greeks, religion lifted the whole of existence rather than one aspect of human life, and the divine, as the hypostatization of ideals, was inherently connected with the real and existent. Gray identifies this as the source of the deep attraction the people and their religion of beauty possessed for Hegel. Christian faith was born in an epoch characterized by a deep cleft between the real world and men’s ideals, and religion was for Roman Christians a necessary bond and a comforting refuge; the Periclean Greeks, on Hegel’s account, knew nothing of this, since need had not created their theogony and there was no salvation for man because none was necessary — man being supreme within his own sphere, and the inexorable powers of necessity, though they had the final word, being unmoved by his wishes, so that he paid them homage out of abundance rather than need, in a worship uncaused by fear and unmixed with tears. The passage Gray quotes describes this religion as one of humanity, in which concrete man finds in his gods the content of his own nature, and in which there is nothing that cannot be understood, so that a man’s confidence in the gods is at the same time his confidence in himself.
And then the reversal, introduced with an explicit warning that stopping here would be unfair to Hegel’s final meaning. Because the Greek view is developed against a background of modern ideals that Hegel opposed, it can appear that he gives it wholehearted approval; but he knew there was in all Greek life a pathetic and defeated element. The demonstration is conducted through tragedy, and Gray states that it is in the treatment of tragedy and its relation to necessity that Hegel brings out most clearly the difference between the pagan and Christian world-views. The serenity that so appealed to the struggling Germans is explained by the different claims the two ages made: unlike modern men, the Greeks made no absolute demand that the world conform to their will, recognized a sphere of their own dominion and a sphere that was not theirs, and found in such limitation the way to dominion over things and over themselves. Serenity arises from a conviction that things are so and that the individual must be content; man could be free only within limits which he must accept with finality and if possible with joy; inexorable necessity ruled over men and gods alike.
Necessity itself is then given a development, which is a fine instance of the book’s attention to Hegel’s habit of historicizing his own categories. In the Homeric epics fate is blind; in the tragedies of the Periclean age this concept is replaced by the idea of the rationality of fate, and the whole basis on which the tragic conflict turns is the rationality and intelligibility of the outcome. The collision — and Gray notes the restriction of Hegel’s attention to Aeschylus and Sophocles rather than, generally, to Euripides — is a conflict between objective ethical powers, resolving into the opposition of a limited or family code to the more universal requirements of the state; the struggle is located between objective spiritual powers rather than within a character. The pathos arises because both parties are right in their own sphere and both are inevitably one-sided, and absolute justice decrees that both should fail in the interest of the ethical order as a whole; the individual, representing special interests and colliding with a totality, must perish, and in his destruction the total rational order triumphs. Gray then identifies the reflexive point: in this interpretation of ancient tragedy Hegel approached an essential motif of his own philosophy, since the individual cannot measure himself against the objective whole and cannot assert freedom by opposition but only by bringing his will into harmony with the real, injustice arising when a person sets his subjective conviction against the ethical totality that determines him, and individual will alone being the irrational because it stands in isolation.
The insufficiency of the religion of beauty is then located precisely in this same conception. The force of absolute necessity that conditioned pagan life made for serenity and carried within it an infinite sadness, since in the last analysis there was no hope: man was as nothing and the world was all, and justice carried nothing of the human within its deadly abstractness. Gray adduces the saying, put in Socrates’ mouth, that we are after all like children crying in the dark. Against this the Christian story replaced that conception of justice with the relation of father and son, in which man bears the divine image; redemption and life in the spirit as a second nature surpassed the negative character of the older cult; the serenity ideally possible here was built on pain, yet the consequent reconciliation carried a wholly positive content, being born of union rather than renunciation. Greek tragedy could resolve conflict only by the individual’s destruction and by an equalization in which deeds were effaced, whereas modern tragedy could end in reconciliation and atonement, the individual losing his life without losing all, knowing the justice of his fate and seeing in it the triumph of a larger value.
Gray is careful to mark the interpretive status of what he says next, prefacing it with an explicit acknowledgment that he is offering his understanding of Hegel’s meaning rather than a reported doctrine: that Hegel wished to retain in its main outline the Greek conception with its emphasis on the social, the concrete, the objective, and the vital, which were needed in a modern Christianity where sacred and secular were too often distinct, while desiring a fuller picture than the Greeks had seen, in which man beholds a world ruled by love and forgiveness and is a member of a divine kingdom rather than a creature of nature. The hedging is worth noticing as a matter of method, since it identifies the precise point at which the book passes from reconstruction to construal, and it is one of several places where Gray marks his own inferences as inferences.
The systematic translation of this result is then given, and it is the passage that retroactively activates the classification of art, religion, and philosophy laid down in the first chapter. The new truth of Christianity meant, in the terms of Hegel’s formal philosophy, an advance from the level of beauty to that of thought, from art to philosophy. Greek religion, as a product of creative fancy, could not bear the scrutiny of thought and reflection, while Christianity was a faith to be grasped and known by reason and at the same time proved adequate to human passion and desire; religion no longer required sensuous embodiment or gods of marble, mankind having become capable of worshipping God as spirit. The famous consequence is transmitted with its full force: in the earliest beginnings of art mystery is still present, a secret longing persisting because art’s imaginative powers cannot envisage the complete truth of its content, and once the mind has succeeded in endowing such content with perfect outward shape it is driven away from objective realization toward its own free spiritual activity; art in its specific form has ceased to meet the highest requirements of spiritual life; we may wonder at the statues of the gods of Hellas, but our knees no longer bow to them.
The structure this establishes deserves to be stated in its own right, because it is one of the most elegant results the book recovers. The inadequacy of Greek religion lies in the sphere of art itself: it could not express the final truth of man’s own worth, and the Greeks had been supreme in the realm of art, beyond which there can be nothing more beautiful. Perfection is therefore the ground of obsolescence. The very completeness with which the Greeks matched form to content is what exhausted that mode of expression and forced spirit beyond it; had the fit been imperfect, the mode would have remained productive. The Greek achievement is at once maximal and terminal, and the two properties are the same property described from different sides. Gray does not formulate the point in this compressed way, but every element of it is supplied by his text, and the formulation makes intelligible a feature of the book that would otherwise look like inconsistency — namely that its highest praise of Greece and its account of Greece’s supersession occupy the same pages and rest on the same evidence.
The chapter closes with a chiasm that repays attention as a compositional cue. Goethe had said that the highest cannot be spoken, and Gray takes this to express the essential spirit of the modern artist; for the Greeks the highest could be spoken and was spoken in their art; and for Hegel too the highest could be spoken, though the language of that utterance was philosophy rather than art. Hegel is thereby positioned as sharing the Greek confidence in expressibility while relocating the organ of expression, and this placement is the precise sense in which the third chapter’s title concept operates upon Hegel himself. His quarrel with Romanticism is not merely a preference; it is the claim to stand with the Greeks on the question of whether the absolute can be uttered, against his own contemporaries. That claim, once made, generates the burden discharged in the fifth chapter, where philosophy must be shown capable of what art could no longer do — and where the paradox of a philosophy that is both historical and true will accordingly become unavoidable.
The fourth chapter transposes the same material into the register of ethics and begins, as the third did, from a contrast with the modern principle. Hegel’s evaluation of the Hellenic social ethos is said to be most clearly understood when set against the individualistic ideal of the Enlightenment and the views of Kant and Fichte, who interpreted social life from the standpoint of the ego and of individual morality. Gray states Hegel’s diagnosis in strong terms: the doctrine of an individual imperative for conduct represented, for him, the cause of his people’s political tragedy, since the failure of the Germans to build a national state and develop a vital culture was largely attributable to an excessive individualism accentuated in his own day by romantic subjectivity in the direction of mystical religion and by Kant’s insistence on personal moral autonomy — two currents that appeared to flow far apart yet converged in carrying the individual to a position where he could assume the role of supreme arbiter of history. Against this Hegel set an ideal of social ethics developed from the Greek city, without wishing to replace the positive advances of modern times by a retreat to antiquity, believing rather that the contradictions of his day could be overcome by a synthesis of social ethics with individualism.
The doctrine itself is stated in terms already prepared. The individual is determined by social institutions — family, church, school, community habit, and state — and is formed by the social world rather than forming the world out of himself, transformed from a creature of impulse into a rational being; even conscience, which Kant and Fichte held to be the sole spring of moral action, is understood chiefly as a product of social training and habit. Objective institutions, bodies of custom, and systems of law constitute a second nature resulting from man’s struggle to give form and permanence to the requirements of his being, and as such they represent the higher reaches of self-consciousness; each rising generation finds its intellectual and moral habits first determined by them, and through education and discipline this living heritage is built into their life. Gray compresses the result into a formulation about the origin of duties: they are determined from without rather than from within, habitual rather than unique, discovered rather than created. The two terms are then introduced as the chapter’s organizing pair — individual morality as the principle of the modern, and social or customary ethics as the characteristic of the Hellenic world — and Gray notes that Hegel was keenly aware that this doctrine was essentially foreign to his own people, being a wisdom the Greeks had known, while his own was a day of individualism, subjectivity, and romantic passion for the personal and unique, whose doctrine of the individual had given rise to a modern ethics containing higher truth than the ancients had known together with the possibility of abstractness and abuse.
The evidentiary base is then narrowed twice, and Gray marks both narrowings. In common with the other early Hellenists, Hegel saw Greek culture as a unity to an extent modern research has made impossible; and in drawing his picture of Hellenic ethical consciousness he looked exclusively at Athens, and at Athens of the fifth century. Then the second narrowing: as his appraisal of Greek culture was derived from the Periclean synthesis, so his picture of the social ethos was drawn from an equally limited field, the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Gray supplies the biographical warrant — that Hegel had learned Greek well enough at school to attempt translating Sophocles, and that few of his later books and lectures lack Sophoclean reference, the tragic drama being always his first source when characterizing Greek ethics for his students — and then delivers the criticism, which he attributes to commentators generally and evidently endorses: to describe Athens in this way is roughly comparable to portraying the German ethos of the eighteenth century from the writings of Klopstock or Lessing or Schiller.
What follows is a defence, and its structure is worth isolating because it repeats at the level of ethics the manoeuvre the preface performed at the level of the system. Gray writes that this does not mean the portrayal of the beautiful ethical life of the Greeks was entirely unrealistic, since the Athenian dramatists did represent the ethical ideals of their time and people however far common practice may have fallen short of them, and it must be remembered that Hegel’s understanding of the past always took shape in terms of ideal values. The defence therefore proceeds by redescribing the object: what looked like a false generalization about Athenian conduct becomes a true report of Athenian ideals, and the objection is disarmed by a change in what the account is an account of. This is precisely the move by which the preface converted a false history into a true mythology. The manoeuvre is legitimate as far as it goes, and it is applied consistently; its cost is that the resulting claims become difficult to test, since an ideal that no practice instantiated remains an ideal, and the question whether Hegel identified the right ideals cannot be settled by the same evidence that established them. Gray does not address this cost, and the omission is one of the places where the book’s methodological wagers show their edges.
Antigone then enters as the concrete embodiment, and Gray’s handling of her is among the book’s most tension-sensitive passages. He records that one Greek drama was Hegel’s lifelong favourite and became for him the supreme masterpiece as a work of art, and that when he wanted to show some inclusive aspect of the Hellenic ethical ideal he always turned to it, describing its heroine as the noblest figure that ever appeared on earth. He adds, in his own voice, that there is a certain sentimentalism in this. And then he presents the doctrine, which cuts against the encomium. The laws Antigone obeys are the unwritten laws of heaven, not born today or yesterday, whose origin none knows; this is Greek piety, piety toward the unwritten religious compulsions of family and tribe, and reliance on custom and tradition is what avoids the one-sidedness and fanaticism of modern individualistic motivation, so that in Hegel’s polemic against Kant and Fichte it is this ideal of veneration for the inherited code that is held up as the indispensable basis of moral action. But Antigone represents only one side. The other is personified in Kreon, the lawful successor who forbade the burial of a traitor and exercised the state’s authority; the collision grows from the conflict of family piety with state authority; and both must perish, since the two sides have become involved in conflict and it is necessary that the ethical whole triumph rather than that either part should win.
The ranking that follows is the crucial move. It is important, Gray writes, to realize that Kreon stands for the more rational level of ethical consciousness. He supports this with Hegel’s own characterization of the gods Antigone revered as the powers of the underworld, the instinctive powers of feeling, love, and kinship, distinguished from the daylight gods of free and self-conscious political life. The family relationships rest on natural association and propinquity, and out of such bonds springs an elemental religious consciousness; the state embodies religious values in their more universal and rational form, its gods being more than the family gods, and Greek civil law was an advance over tribal regulation representing a widening of allegiance and a progress beyond the natural. Gray transmits the supporting analogy — that the love between sister and brother is a higher ethical bond than that between father and son or husband and wife, because no natural necessity requires it, and that duty to society or the state is correspondingly higher than allegiance to kin. Antigone represents the natural basis of the social ethos and Kreon its more developed range.
The friction here is real and Gray leaves it standing. The figure Hegel most admires occupies the lower position in the scale that Hegel’s own theory establishes; the aesthetic verdict and the systematic verdict diverge; and Gray’s remark about sentimentalism registers the divergence without dissolving it. I would add, as an inference the text supports rather than states, that this divergence is structurally identical to the one diagnosed in the third chapter, where the Greek achievement is supreme in art and superseded in principle. In both cases the object of highest admiration is assigned a subordinate systematic rank, and in both cases the admiration survives the assignment. The recurrence suggests that the pattern is not incidental to Hegel’s Hellenism but constitutive of it: the ideal is loved in the mode of what has been surpassed, and the surpassing is what secures the love against the charge of mere preference.
The chapter then asks after the origin of this fusion of natural and spiritual values and answers that it came from an imaginative consciousness of the past. Gray transmits Hegel’s description of the Greek fondness for objectifying and revering their own history — representing their existence as an object apart from themselves which manifests itself independently and is in its independence of value to them, so that they made for themselves a history of everything they had possessed and been: of gods and men and the earth and the heavens, and equally of fire and the offerings connected with it, of crops and agriculture and the olive and the horse, of marriage and property and laws and arts and worship and the sciences and towns and princely races, all pleasingly represented as having arisen in history as their own work. Gray marks the continuity explicitly: this vital consciousness of the past had impressed the young Hegel at his first acquaintance with the Greeks, and it is this characteristic that ultimately determined the older Hegel’s estimate of their ethical consciousness. The recurrence is exact — the young Hegel’s national imagination, whose absence he charged against Christianity, returns as the mature Hegel’s account of the genesis of Greek right — and it is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the book’s claim of underlying continuity across the break.
The ideal of public life follows, contrasted with the German romantic desire for seclusion and privacy. Pericles, who renounced private life altogether and devoted his genius wholly to the public good, remains in Hegel’s vision the finest exemplification of the Athenian ideal, and Gray recalls his judgment that a man who takes no interest in public affairs is to be regarded as useless rather than harmless. To esteem state and society before a private good was for the citizen of Periclean Athens no abstract patriotism, since this society had formed him and made him what he was; the Greeks had no word for conscience and did not know the modern principle of the good will; their conception of the good was formed by participation and their idea of virtue grew out of society’s ideals. Gray transmits Hegel’s own remark that consideration of the state in the abstract, which is the essential point for modern understanding, was alien to them, their grand object being their country in its living aspect — this actual Athens, this Sparta, these temples, these altars, this form of social life, this union of fellow citizens, these manners and customs — so that to the Greek his country was a necessity of life. The specification of freedom follows directly and is stated in Hegel’s terms as the opposite of individual caprice: freedom consisted in acting in accordance with something, unfreedom lay in subjection to the unpredictable will of an individual, and freedom was found in the rule of law and in the time-tested wisdom of the sages preserved and administered by the many.
The limits are then acknowledged, and Gray is careful to attribute the acknowledgment to Hegel rather than to himself. Hegel did not forget that slavery existed in Athens and that slave labour made it possible for citizens to attend to public duties, nor did he miss the significance of the diminutive size of the city-state and the corresponding homogeneity of interest — factors that conditioned the kind of democracy the Greeks enjoyed and made imitation in the modern world foolish and even impossible. Yet with all its limitations this polity produced a vital equality that stimulated the development of individual talents and fostered diversity of character to an extent unique in history. The concession is significant for the book’s economy because it establishes that the case against palingenesis is Hegel’s own and rests on institutional analysis rather than on nostalgia’s melancholy: the city cannot be repeated because its conditions were particular, and among those conditions were ones no longer acceptable.
The account of decline then repeats, in the ethical register, the mechanism established in the second chapter’s account of the rise of Christianity. Gray notes that Rostovtzeff blames the extreme democracy of Athens and that readers of Thucydides can see truth in the claim, and reports that Hegel would have agreed while insisting further that the democracy so effective in the fifth century was undermined by the pressure of a new conception of the individual, so that fourth-century Athens stood under the individualistic sign of the modern world and the principle of individual morality came as a presage of ruin to the harmonious, unreflective social ethic. Seen in terms of the philosophy of history, the opposition between the fifth and fourth centuries is an advance from the level of immediate experience, whether in art or religion, to that of reflection: the customary national ethos received in Ionian-Athenian philosophy a principle of criticism and an assertion of the individual right to examine tradition, and the individuality of beauty, which was an aesthetic union of man and society, was destroyed by the individuality born of reflection, since before the scrutiny of reason the natural and artistic authority could not stand. Gray records Hegel’s recognition that critical thought has the power to destroy before it rebuilds and to criticize before it accepts, and states the conclusion in Hegel’s terms: the Greek enlightenment begun by the Sophists and culminating in Socrates split asunder the immediate harmony of the ideal and real worlds and plunged Greek civilization into ruin, preparing the way for what Hegel called the unhappy consciousness, the painful rupture in the soul that made the initial acceptance of Christian faith possible.
Education is then identified as the operative agent, and Gray states the point in its most general form: it was not merely the particular kind of education made available by the Sophists but the very fact of education itself. The Greeks of the fifth century had been without individual discipline and their harmony had been natural; the poets and rhapsodists had been their teachers while fulfilling the function of seers rather than teachers in the modern sense; and with the rise of the Sophists the Athenians underwent their first training in individual intellectual discipline. Gray isolates the transition from seer to teacher as the moment that foreshadowed for Hegel the tragedy of Greece, marking the shift from objective to subjective and from social to individual standards. He connects this to the fortunes of the principle of mind that Anaxagoras had propounded, which the Sophists took in a subjective sense and from which they derived the doctrine that man is the measure of all things; under the sway of religious, political, and poetical ideals the Athenians had decided questions of right by reference to public laws and public oracles, and with the advent of education in dialectical and rhetorical proficiency the good and bad they had considered sufficiently certain were rendered doubtful, so that individual conviction began to assert its right over the authority of tradition.
Gray then records Hegel’s refusal of the conventional condemnation of the Sophists, and the refusal is instructive about the book’s own sympathies. Hegel did not agree with the historical critics who meted out unqualified condemnation on these teachers; they had known well how to make the worse appear the better cause, but it is always the temptation of the educated man to find a reason for everything; and their educational theory was characteristic of a certain stage in the life of every people. The Greeks impressed Hegel as young, and he sensed that youth in the Sophists’ zest for intellectual combat, in their thrill at the possibilities of many points of view, in their being lured to wider horizons and daring, released from the bonds of ancestral piety, to be intellectual radicals. Gray adds that Hegel, like other men of his generation, could not but be impressed by the example of these earlier questioners of the established. The observation is doubled: it reports Hegel’s sympathy and simultaneously explains it by reference to Hegel’s own historical situation, which is exactly the interpretive procedure the first chapter attributed to Hegel himself. The book’s method and its object here coincide, and the coincidence is not accidental — Gray has said in the first chapter that he will show how Hegel’s insights into Greek culture came from the knowledge, interests, and problems of his own time.
Socrates then appears as the pivotal figure, described as standing at the parting of the ways and looking, with two faces, backwards and before. Gray makes the crucial observation that Socrates’ character and opinions as set forth in the lectures reveal the double nature of Hegel’s own sympathies — the struggle between his classical leanings and the impact of Christian thought, issuing in a double emphasis that cannot be regarded as a complete antithesis. The doctrine follows: Socrates is celebrated as a teacher of morality, though he should rather be called its inventor, since before him the Athenians derived their ethical life from the ordinances and usages of the city and after him the rupture with existing reality was complete. In him the tendency to question the old virtue first appeared; he perceived that it had become doubtful and tried to establish a new principle of conduct whose standard was human intellect; he derived virtue from the inner and intellectual rather than from the objective and existent; he had understood the discovery of mind as the ruler of all and adopted the maxim of man as the measure, though for him it was man as thinker rather than man the creature of desire who was the measure. Thought had become emancipated and the individual as thinker asserted his claim to judge his own action, and Gray transmits Hegel’s formulation that Socrates sought in his own consciousness the universal spirit which had disappeared from reality. The result is that Socrates found a higher freedom than the ethic of beauty could offer, having arrived at awareness of freedom as intellectual insight and self-determination.
The criticism that follows is what Gray finds even more significant for his purpose, and it is here that the chapter’s central tension becomes fully articulate. Socrates foreshadowed the accepted principle of the modern world and for that very reason was not without the one-sidedness of individual morality. The Athenians brought him to trial and found him guilty; Hegel had only scorn for the ocean of sympathy posterity poured over the end of his career; his fate was tragedy and perhaps the supreme example of ancient tragedy, though it was not martyrdom, since the martyr goes to his death innocent of doing wrong. Gray records the arresting fact that twenty pages of the lectures on the history of philosophy are devoted to the trial and condemnation and that most of them constitute a brief for the accusers, the reason being that Socrates, through his higher ethical apprehension, had brought into question the ancient customary ethics — so that the people were within their right in condemning him. The specific charges Hegel brings are then reported: that virtue is not solely the intellectual perception of the good; that in determining the ethical as universal principle Socrates approached what Hegel took to be the Kantian error of determining the good as an intellectual form of lawfulness apart from the particular, the sensuous, and the claims of concrete custom; and that Aristotle’s judgment applies, according to which Socrates tried to make ethics a science by placing all the virtues in the thinking side of the soul and disregarding inclinations and habits, whereas true morality is more a matter of acquired habit in which sympathies and natural impulses receive justification. Gray states the systematic upshot in a formulation that balances the two one-sidednesses against each other: as Antigone’s ethical judgment had been one-sided in recognizing as valid only the religious and traditional, so the Socratic ethic was one-sided in recognizing only the intellectual and universal, and the absolute ethic must include man’s alogical as well as his intellectual self, built on the basis of his sensuous necessities and crowned with the recognition of his spiritual nature.
The refusal of Socrates after conviction to acknowledge himself in the wrong is then treated as proof of his disloyalty to the ancient faith while revealing his moral greatness, and Gray transmits the two contrasts Hegel deploys: with Antigone, who goes submissively to her death saying that if this seems good to the gods she may be made through suffering to know her error, and with Pericles, who even as ruler submitted to the sovereign people and begged them for the life of his friends. The concluding argument is reported in Hegel’s own terms — that there is nothing dishonouring in bending before the general power, that the real and noblest power is the people, and that Socrates recognized the sovereignty of the people in a general way though not in this individual case, whereas it has to be recognized not only in general but in each separate case.
I want to mark the peculiar position this leaves the reader in, since Gray constructs it deliberately and does not relieve it. The chapter has established that individual morality is the principle of the modern world, that its emergence is an advance in the consciousness of freedom, and that Hegel affirmed the individual’s right to insight into the principles on which he acts. It has simultaneously established that Socrates, the historical bearer of that principle, was rightly condemned, and that the people who condemned him were within their right. The two propositions are consistent only under the tragic construction, according to which the advancing principle and the standing order are both justified and both must suffer. The construction is Hegel’s, and Gray reports that it forms the basic theme of the Hegelian interpretation of tragedy, noting in a back-note that Hebbel made use of the theory in two dramas that recall this conception of Socrates as a man who had advanced beyond the understanding of his age and fell victim, not unjustly, to the substantial powers of that age. What the construction costs is a criterion for present action: if the bearer of the higher principle is rightly destroyed by the lower, then the question of what one ought to do in a period of transition receives no answer, and the tragic form functions as a substitute for a practical conclusion. Gray does not raise this objection. He does, however, produce its equivalent a few pages later, when he turns from Hegel’s account of Greek ethics to Hegel’s own, and delivers the chapter’s harshest judgment.
That judgment is prepared by the treatment of Plato, which occupies the space between. The Republic is presented as an attempt at reconstruction of the fifth-century ethic of custom: aware of the new subjective principle and its destructive work, Plato tried to build a theory of the state that would make individual citizens entirely dependent on an objective order, having fully recognized Socrates’ discovery while desiring a return, on the rational level, of what had exercised implicit control in the older customary ethics. Gray records Hegel’s concession that Plato, aware of the harmful forces at work, went further in excluding individualism than a fifth-century Athenian would have done, together with his conviction that the Republic nonetheless represented the true spirit of the Periclean age. The supreme worth of Plato’s ethical philosophy is located in its recognition that the nature of justice and the moral virtues is to be found in objective institutions, in the state and its concrete laws, so that only in the concrete realization of the highest individual desires within such an organization can there be ethical life worthy of the name; the fiction of a state of nature positing the individual’s free will in relation to others is described as a modern delusion the author of the Republic did not admit, since for him the greatest freedom was the greatest communal life. Gray transmits Hegel’s account of Plato laying the substantial and universal as his foundation in such a way that the individual has this universal as his end and has his will, activity, life, and enjoyment in the state, which may accordingly be called his second nature.
The defect is then stated with equal force, and Gray gives it in Hegel’s words rather than his own: that Plato represents substantive ethical life in its ideal beauty and truth, and that with the principle of independent particularity which broke in upon Greek ethical life in his time he could do nothing except oppose it to a Republic which is simply substantive, so that he excluded even the earliest form of subjectivity as it exists in private property and the family and in the more expanded form of private liberty and choice of profession, with the result that the principle of self-dependent and infinite personality, the principle of subjective freedom, does not receive its due. The judgment is generalized: this absence of subjective freedom represented the basic defect in the Hellenic social ethos as such. Gray adds in a note that Hegel’s interpretation of Platonic ethics rests almost wholly on the Republic, that although there is a reference or two to the Laws he seems not to have taken account of their radical differences from the standpoint of the Republic, particularly in the matter of private and subjective freedom, and that for Hegel Plato represented the substantial idea in ethics and lacked entirely the concept of subjectivity as a valid part of freedom. The note is a significant qualification of the chapter’s main line, since it identifies a textual restriction that may generate the very defect diagnosed — and it is placed, characteristically, in the apparatus.
The positive side of Hegel’s difference from Plato is then developed and is important because it specifies what Hegel wanted the modern principle to contribute. Hegel approved wholeheartedly the emphasis on social and political organization and the priority of community over individual, while disagreeing profoundly with the assumption that the reasoning element is limited to the philosopher-rulers and is a property of rulers rather than of the ruled: in Hegel’s ideal state all the citizens were in this respect to be on a level with the Platonic rulers, and where the virtue of the ruled in Plato’s state was only submission, Hegel conceived obedience as insight into the rational nature of the relation between subject and authority, so that freedom was compatible with obedience — a conception Gray says Plato had not been able to allow or perhaps to understand. Michael Foster’s distinction between the principle of law, which guided Hegel, and the principle of custom, which forms the basis of the ethos in the Republic, is then introduced and adjudicated: law as a product of conscious thought implies rational mediation on the part of the person subject to it, whereas custom as the product of inheritance and accepted sentiment requires no such mediation and can operate without the subject’s awareness, determining action down to the minutest detail; custom is by nature concrete and particular, while law is general and requires individual judgment for its particular application. Gray endorses the distinction as relevant to the Republic and criticizes its extension, holding that Foster pushes it too far in generalizing Plato’s conception of ruler and ruled to the whole of Greek political theory and in maintaining that the Greeks never realized the difference between the ruled as subject and as instrument, and that Hegel would not have agreed to such a generalization, particularly in the light of his interpretation of Socrates and Aristotle — while allowing that the difference between custom and law and the widening of individual participation implied in the concept of law are wholly in line with Hegel’s critique of Plato. This is one of the few passages in which a modern secondary work does argumentative work in the main text rather than in the notes, and the adjudication shows the book’s critical apparatus operating on the literature as well as on Hegel.
The chapter’s most important conceptual result follows, and it concerns the distinction between what is created and what is discovered. Hegel could not agree with the predominant modern view of the state as an artificial product resulting from a contract; though law implied a more self-conscious level of understanding than custom, he was not prepared to grant that law arises solely out of individual intelligence and creative will. The difference between Greek and modern ethical conceptions lay for him in the difference between what is created and what is discovered: for the Greek philosophers the principles governing state and society were already existent in the universe rather than created by individual will, so that the state involved for Plato the discovery of rational forms and could be derived from rational principles because those principles were implicit in the nature of things; the state was therefore natural as social living is natural, and only the individual in isolation was unnatural and illogical. Gray records that Hegel heartily agreed with this fundamental conception and opposed the whole modern emphasis on the creativity of will as an independent, non-rational activity, adding the systematic consequence that will in Hegel’s philosophy is subsumed under intellect, and that the intellect is governed largely by the capacity to know and understand rather than to create.
And then the judgment, introduced without transition and stated in the author’s own voice: here lies a serious difficulty in Hegel’s ethical ideals. In reacting against the extreme individualism of his people in their political consciousness, Gray writes, he swung too far in the direction of the collective and absolute in ethics. The reader of the philosophy of right observes with surprise that its author could not conceive of any real situation in which individual and social interests might conflict, and that he recognized no ethical value of genuine worth that was not represented by the state. The conclusion is delivered as an unavoidable one: in the end one can hardly escape the conclusion that Hegel’s state would be as unsuited for happiness as Plato’s republic. A back-note refers the reader to Sabine’s chapter on Hegel as a recent and excellent treatment to which Gray is indebted.
This is the most evaluative moment in the book and it should be characterized precisely. It is not a passing aside; it is the terminal judgment on the doctrine that the chapter has spent its length reconstructing sympathetically, and it turns the chapter’s own resources against its subject, since the criticism is that Hegel failed to preserve the very tension — between individual and social claims — whose management he had identified as the ethical problem. It is also, and this deserves notice as a fact about the text rather than as a speculation about its author, delivered entirely in philosophical terms, without reference to any contemporary political situation, in a book published in 1941. The work contains no discussion of contemporary events, no application of Hegel’s theory of the state to any twentieth-century regime, and no acknowledgment of the polemical literature that had by then grown up around that question. Its preface asks only that the German idealists be read for their cultural criticism and enduring wisdom rather than for their metaphysics. I record the silence as a feature of the text and decline to interpret it, since the text supplies no basis for doing so; what can be said on the text’s own evidence is that the critique of Hegel’s statism is conducted immanently, from premises the book has established about Hegel’s own aims, and that its force does not depend on any external application.
The chapter’s closing paragraphs then perform a characteristic recovery, softening the judgment without retracting it and simultaneously restating the book’s governing thesis at a new level of determination. Whatever the difficulties in his own ethical doctrines, Gray writes, Hegel’s criticism of Greek ethics reveals two things: how deeply his sympathies were involved in his attitude toward the pre-Christian ethos, and how impossible a task he conceived it to be, even as a mature thinker, to build a positive social ethic on Christian culture alone. If the classical preferences of his youth were largely carried over into his later evaluation of Greek religion, the same holds hardly less in the moral sphere. And then the deeper point: Gray judges that Hegel had become thoroughly aware of the perplexity of the problem of the relation of individual and society, and was conscious that there had been no permanently satisfactory solution in either ancient or modern times; that he no longer rushed into easy generalizations about the Greek ethic, and no longer saw it as a simple, one-fold religious ethos, but as a synthesis of diverse elements containing definite limitations; and that though he held no illusions as to the possibility or desirability of reviving this objective, social ethos, it remained for him the only approach to the solution of the ethical problem.
The formulation deserves to be held in view, because it states the book’s mature account of what a superseded ideal can be for a thinker who denies its recoverability. The Greek ethos is at once impossible, limited, and indispensable: impossible because its conditions were particular and included slavery and smallness; limited because it lacked the principle of subjective freedom whose absence Hegel identified as its basic defect; and indispensable because no other approach to the ethical problem is available. That three-part characterization is the fourth chapter’s contribution to the concept named in the title, and it differs from the third chapter’s in an important respect. In the third chapter the Hellenic ideal functioned as a measure, a fixed point against which modern achievements and losses could be read. In the fourth it functions as a resource, the only available approach to a problem that remains open. The shift from measure to resource is a further alteration in the office of the term, and it prepares the conclusion, where the ideal will be described as something whose incorporation into modern ethics and religion has still to be decided — that is, as a task.
The fifth chapter subjects the separability thesis to its severest test, because its subject is Hegel’s practice as a historian of philosophy, and because philosophy is the domain in which Hegel’s own system claims to be the outcome. It opens by restating the concept of development in its most general form: the human world as a vast organism developing in history from the potential to the actual, from the implicit to the explicit, from the isolated to the free, containing within itself in germ all the content that is to become manifest — so that in this particular sense there is nothing new in history, nothing original or accidental, no content added that was not already implicit. Gray immediately marks the counter-weight: Hegel felt the difference between the potential and the actual to be enormous, and all the variation in human development grows out of that difference, which he illustrated by the difference between the child and the mature or aged man, between unconscious natural power and conscious ripened wisdom. Progress consists in the increasing actualization of reason and spirit; development runs from the natural toward the spiritual, from the slavery of blind desire toward the freedom of understanding; thought is the highest and final level, being spirit’s consciousness of the independence of its true nature; and the divine life itself is the highest development of pure spirit, the realization of complete self-dependence. Gray reproduces the formulation in which everything that has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time, is the struggle of mind to know itself and unite itself with itself, alienated and divided only so as to be able to find itself and return. And then he supplies the interpretive instruction that governs the entire chapter: this is the great Hegelian mythology and philosophic vision, and it should be so understood and interpreted.
The instruction matters because it is issued at precisely the point where the mythology thesis is most difficult to sustain. In the first chapter the thesis was applied to a scheme of world history, where the distance between vision and verifiable fact is manifest. Here it is applied to a doctrine about the nature of thought, where the distinction between a symbolic representation and a truth-claim is much harder to draw, since a mythology about the self-knowledge of mind is either a claim about mind or nothing. Gray does not address the difficulty, and its unaddressed presence is what generates the chapter’s characteristic oscillation between admiration and criticism.
The consequences for the history of philosophy are then drawn. There can be no really original philosophy and progress in the history of thought involves no new beginnings; we are what we are through history; every new system caught up and reinterpreted what had gone before, and every age developed its view of the world from traditions handed down. Gray marks a shift of image with care: tradition for Hegel was not a mere housekeeper preserving the spiritual treasures of the generations, but a mighty river increasing in size the further it advances from its source. Every appropriation of past thought involved superseding it; Goethe’s remark that what is formed continually resolves itself back into matter meant to Hegel that any form again and again becomes the material for a higher form; the inheritance of the past constituted the spiritual capital of each new generation, which on entering upon the legacy re-applied it to erect a more adequate spiritual home, so that the past was preserved within the present while being changed and enriched by the restless activity of reason. Every system grasped part of the truth and none was entirely adequate; one supplemented another, and the process wound upwards like a spiral, each turn complete in itself yet progressively attaining higher levels.
I flag here a compositional detail that repays attention, because it exemplifies the kind of internal cross-reference the book rewards. The image of the housekeeper is introduced in this chapter only to be rejected in favour of the river. In the conclusion, Gray writes that the fruits the Greek people had ripened were preserved and purveyed to the present by the venerable housekeeper, Tradition. The rejected image returns, in the author’s own voice, as the final characterization of what happened to Greek achievement. Whether this is a deliberate irony or an unmarked reversion cannot be determined from the text. What can be said is that the two images encode two different theories — the housekeeper implies conservation without alteration, the river implies accumulation with transformation — and that the conclusion’s return to the housekeeper accompanies its judgment that the synthesis Hegel envisioned was not accomplished in fact. If the transformation failed, then what remains is conservation, and the image reverts accordingly. I mark this as an inference; its warrant is the juxtaposition itself and the conclusion’s explicitly deflationary verdict.
The owl passage then supplies the chapter’s title and its governing thesis about the timing of philosophy. By the time Greek philosophy reached complete formulation in Plato and Aristotle the social and cultural synthesis was past; the Periclean age had become history; the break between thought and existing reality was complete; the philosophers had become private men, withdrawn into reflection, idlers in the people’s sight. Gray generalizes the observation as Hegel did, to all great periods of history: philosophy is always an end-of-the-epoch product, art and religion belonging to the spirit of a people in its emergence and up to its full bloom, while philosophy comes only after happiness and fortune have passed, standing helpless like the wisdom of an old man before the inexorable tide. The passage from the preface to the philosophy of right is given in full: philosophy as the thought of the world does not appear until reality has completed its formative process; only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real and apprehend the real world in its substance, shaping it into an intellectual kingdom; when philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has grown old and cannot be rejuvenated by grey but only known; the owl of Minerva takes flight when the shades of night are gathering.
The reflexive consequences of adopting this thesis are considerable and the book does not draw all of them, though it supplies the materials. If philosophy is constitutively late, then Hegel’s own philosophy is the thought of a completed form of life, and the diagnosis of modernity it delivers cannot be a programme. This is consistent with what the fourth chapter reported — that Hegel wished to be reconciled with his age and to have the present in its best fulfilment — and it is also consistent with the conclusion’s deflationary judgment that envisioning unity did not accomplish it. But it stands in tension with the same conclusion’s claim that the modern world cannot escape its contradictions without reference to the Greek insight, which is a prescription, and with the whole book’s stated aim of contributing to a re-examination of Hegel from which the present might learn. The owl thesis and the pedagogical aim are hard to hold together, and the difficulty is structural rather than incidental: a philosophy that can only know an aged form of life cannot also instruct a living one. Gray does not raise this, and I mark the observation as an inference drawn from materials the book supplies in separate places.
The doctrine of the concrete is then developed as the second organizing idea, and its treatment is among the book’s most carefully articulated. The true is always the concrete; abstractions are imperfect and even unreal representations of the actual; true thought concerns specific existent particulars in connection with their inherent universal relations and structures; the intelligible structure of things is to be apprehended by understanding their interrelatedness and mutual development rather than by reductive analysis. Gray locates the polemical target with precision: Hegel’s great desire was to escape the unresolved contradictions bequeathed by eighteenth-century rationalism and unorganic science, which he traced to the analytic method of reducing material to components and dividing in order to understand — a procedure he named with a term of contempt for mere reasoning, and whose most destructive products he found in the antinomies of the first Critique, where the intellect is perplexed and defeated by irreconcilable contradictions arising from failure to conceive the total nature of a content in its development. Analysis, as the instrument of understanding, breaks up living organic wholes and conceives them apart from function and development; synthesis, as the instrument of reason, perceives the underlying powers controlling the total structure and proceeds on the assumption that the whole alone is true.
The result is a striking redefinition of what concreteness consists in, and Gray states it in the form that makes its difference from ordinary usage unmistakable. In conceiving the concrete, Hegel identified it with development by dialectical process: the concrete alone is true, and the concrete is movement, developing structure, essentially the union of opposite determinations. This means that concreteness increases with inclusiveness of context. The early philosophers had been aware of comparatively few relations and conceived simple principles to explain phenomena, so that their concepts were separate, isolated, partial, and as a result abstract; as systems advanced in complexity and in recognizing the interrelatedness of ideas, they advanced in concreteness and truth. Gray marks the inversion explicitly: for Hegel this was not, as it has often been for others, a process of increasing abstraction but its opposite, the more inclusive context yielding the more concrete understanding.
And then the qualification that turns the doctrine against itself. For Hegel, Gray writes, the concrete was never the particular, never the empirical individual, and never a single idea; it was the complex of ideas, the union of individuals, the organism in its entirety. As conceived in the Logic, the concrete does not really allow for individuation as such: as a logical principle, the individual is inessential and lacks reality. Gray adds that the failure to do justice to the empirical particular has long been recognized as a cardinal weakness of this point of view, and then places the fuller diagnosis in a note, where Hartmann’s study of Aristotle and Hegel is invoked. The note reports that Hegel was attempting in the doctrine of the concrete to combine the speculations of Plato and Aristotle, maintaining with Plato that the truth of being is only the essence, the universal, and emphasizing with Aristotle the developing, immanent nature of all universals in concrete content; and that Hartmann rightly points out that in his conception of the inadequacy of the logical to exhaust the total nature of anything, Aristotle allows a place for individuality which Hegel on his premises cannot admit — since for Aristotle the definition does not reveal the whole nature of the real, while for Hegel the logical idea includes not only the common genus but all the differentiating marks of the species, so that the idea contains all that is real in any given content and individual uniqueness becomes merely phenomenal. Gray then delivers the judgment that this attempted union of Plato and Aristotle accounts, in his opinion, for a great deal of the doubleness of Hegel’s emphases.
That sentence is, on my reading, the deepest diagnostic claim the book makes, and it is worth stating why. The doubleness Gray has been registering since the first chapter — two accounts of reason and passion, two valuations of the Greek achievement, two verdicts on Socrates, two theories of tradition, an admiration for Antigone that conflicts with her systematic rank, a defence of Greek ethics conjoined with a demonstration of its basic defect — is here traced to a single source: an attempted synthesis of two ancient positions whose requirements cannot both be met. The claim thereby unifies the book’s scattered observations of tension under one explanation, and it does so by locating the source of Hegel’s instability in his Hellenism itself, which is exactly what the title concept would require if it were taken with full seriousness. The claim is made in a note, in a hedged formulation, with the argumentative work delegated to Hartmann. Its placement is a fact about the book’s architecture that any account of the work must register: the monograph’s most powerful explanatory hypothesis is deposited in its apparatus and never promoted to the main line of argument. Whether this reflects the self-limitation appropriate to a short study, or an unwillingness to make the whole exposition depend on a single hypothesis, the text does not say; what it does say, repeatedly, is that the limits of the study permit indication rather than development, and that formula covers this case as it covers the organic-and-dialectical contrast.
I will pause here at a natural break, before turning to the chapter’s detailed reconstruction of Hegel’s readings of the Eleatics, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the Hellenistic schools, and Neoplatonism, and to the concluding chapter’s final disposition of the book’s tensions. The remaining material is substantial: it includes the bibliometric argument drawn from the proportions of the Glockner edition, the catalogue of Hegel’s source-critical failings and the immanent character of Gray’s critique of them, the distinction between subjective, objective, and external dialectic, the treatment of Hegel’s separation of Platonic content from Platonic form and Gray’s rejection of it, the extended account of Hegel’s affinity with Aristotle in the psychology, the physics, and the twelfth book of the Metaphysics together with the counter-movement by which that affinity is shown to strain Hegel’s own evolutionary commitments, the explicit naming of the paradox of a philosophy that is both historical and absolute, the reading of Neoplatonism as an incomplete recasting that Hegel assigns to himself, and the conclusion’s decisive argument that Hegel’s inability to draw the result his logic required is the proof of his critical independence.
The chapter’s descent into detail begins with an argument whose form deserves notice before its content, since it is the only quantitative argument the book contains. Gray reports that the reader’s first impression on taking up the three volumes of the lectures on the history of philosophy in Glockner’s edition is that a disproportionate space is devoted to Greek thought, and he substantiates the impression by counting: of some seventeen hundred pages, one hundred and eighty are given to the introduction and a brief sketch of Oriental thought, over nine hundred and fifty are concerned with the Greeks, and only five hundred remain for European thought from the Middle Ages through to Schelling, with Leibniz and Spinoza alone among the moderns receiving what could be considered adequate attention. The first impression, he adds, is confirmed once one has gone through the volumes: the history of philosophy was for Hegel preeminently the history of Greek thought.
The argument is worth pausing over because of its evidentiary character. It is a material fact about a printed edition, and the edition in question is a modern editorial construction — Glockner’s jubilee arrangement, produced in 1927, which the preliminary apparatus has already identified as the book’s base text for the German. Gray’s strongest single piece of evidence for his central thesis is therefore mediated by an editorial artifact, and its force depends on the proportions of a text that Hegel neither composed as a book nor supervised through the press, since the lectures reach us through the compilations of his editors. Gray does not remark on this, and the silence is characteristic of the book’s handling of the lecture materials generally: the lectures on history, on aesthetics, on religion, and on the history of philosophy are cited throughout as Hegel’s, without discussion of the transcription and compilation through which they became texts. Whether this reticence reflects the state of the question in the scholarship available to him, or a decision that the issue lay outside a short study’s scope, the text does not say. What can be observed is that the book’s most concrete demonstration draws its force from a bibliographic protocol, and that a paratextual condition thereby becomes an argumentative instrument. I mark the observation as an inference; its warrant is the explicit citation of the Glockner edition in the apparatus and the explicit appeal to its pagination in the argument.
The chapter’s estimate of the lectures themselves is unreservedly high, and this is important for the calibration of what follows. Gray writes that in his treatment of the Greek philosophers the reader is constantly impressed by the thoroughness of Hegel’s knowledge and the keenness of his interest, that here he was most completely at home, that he devoted years to the preparation of these studies and reworked them repeatedly until they became the most adequate of all his lectures, and that they reveal his painstaking care and the intense devotion of his philosophic spirit. He adds a recommendation stronger than any other in the book: once a student has gone through them carefully he is no longer in doubt where to begin the study of Hegel, since they are the best introduction to his whole philosophy. The phrase most completely at home is not idle. It attaches to Hegel, at the moment when the book turns to Greek philosophy, the very predicate that has served since the first chapter as the definition of freedom, and it does so without announcement. Gray is reporting a fact about intellectual temperament, and simultaneously, whether by design or by the pull of a term that has organized his prose for four chapters, he is describing Hegel’s relation to Greek thought in the vocabulary Hegel used for the free man’s relation to his world.
The list of defects follows immediately, and its ordering is instructive. The first item is source-critical. Though Hegel dealt with the original sources to a greater extent than most scholars before him, subsequent research has revealed errors in detail and in larger issues, and an obvious illustration is his somewhat uncritical use of secondary Greek and Latin authorities for the pre-Socratics: Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, to a lesser extent Simplicius, and above all Aristotle’s historical references, consulted in an attempt to fill out the fragmentary picture of the lives and opinions of the early thinkers. Modern scholarship has questioned these sources with good reason; Hegel particularly relied on Aristotle’s opinions of his predecessors and championed those opinions at the expense of all conflicting evidence; and Aristotle’s statements on historical subjects are regarded with particular suspicion by scholars today.
The second item raises the criticism to a different level, because it becomes immanent. Gray records that because Hegel himself relied on the original works and insisted on the need for historical objectivity, he directed the full force of his harsh polemic against the then current histories of Brucker, a historian of the school of Christian Wolff, and Tennemann, a disciple of Kant, finding both flagrantly guilty of reading modern ideas into ancient systems of thought. And then the turn: it seems obvious to Gray that in spite of his consciousness of the problem, Hegel himself was not wholly free from the faults of which he accused his predecessors — that though on the whole he was governed by what was explicitly contained in the sources before him, his philosophical presuppositions sometimes led to implications hard to justify on the basis of the works themselves, and that this is particularly true of thinkers with whom he felt spiritual affinity. The illustration offered is Heraclitus, whom Hegel regarded as a forefather of his own logical system, and whose scanty remains he interpreted in a manner Gray calls thought-provoking without being critical enough to meet the modern standard.
This is the point at which the book’s argumentative responsibility completes a migration that has been under way since the first chapter. In the earlier chapters Hegel was assessed against standards the book supplied: the mythology thesis, the criterion of fruitfulness, the comparison with the neoclassicists and Romantics. Here he is assessed against a standard he himself formulated and enforced against others. The critique becomes immanent, and its force accordingly increases, since it cannot be met by the reply that the standard is anachronistic or externally imposed. Hegel’s own insistence on historical objectivity and on returning to originals is what convicts him. That the conviction is delivered in measured terms — not wholly free, sometimes, particularly true — does not soften its structural significance, which is that the separability thesis is now being tested in the one domain where its failure would be most damaging. If Hegel’s passion for logic corrupted his handling of the philosophers with whom he felt the deepest affinity, then the insight and the system are entangled precisely where the insight is deepest.
Gray names that general source without hesitation. The more general source of Hegel’s misinterpretations of Greek philosophy, he writes, was his passion for logic: Hegel believed the dialectical method had been discovered and developed in Greece, and his tracing of that development caused him to neglect and sometimes to misinterpret non-logical values; moreover, the attempt to apply his own logical structure to the course of Greek thought is responsible for most of the false theories so often lashed by critics. The most conspicuous product is identified as the assumption — Gray calls it impossible — that the historical order of appearance of philosophical systems was the same as the necessary succession of ideas in Hegel’s own logic, so that everything in the history of philosophy was a necessary progress according to logical schemata, each thinker providing a level in the unfolding of an inevitable pattern. This notion, which appears as early as the phenomenology, has been condemned too often to need further remark.
And then the reading protocol, which is the separability thesis converted into a practical instruction: if the modern student is to appreciate Hegel’s positive insights into Greek philosophy, as in other areas of his thought, it is necessary to pass over this personal idiosyncrasy and to seek to penetrate the more objective critical recesses of his historical judgments. The instruction is candid about what it asks. It asks the reader to perform, as a hermeneutic operation, exactly the separation the book has argued is possible in principle, and it characterizes the discarded element as an idiosyncrasy — a term that reduces the systematic ambition of the dialectical ordering to a personal quirk. The reduction is contestable, since Hegel’s claim that the history of philosophy exhibits a necessary succession is a claim about the nature of thought and is bound up with the doctrine that philosophy is the self-knowledge of spirit. Gray’s protocol treats as detachable what Hegel treated as constitutive, and the treatment is asserted rather than defended. This is the sharpest edge of the book’s central wager, and it is exposed here more clearly than anywhere else.
The counter-balance follows immediately and is more subtle than a mere concession. We can hardly quarrel with Hegel, Gray writes, for selecting those ideas in Greek philosophy that appealed to him as most significant; he was no friend of the type of historicism that insists a critic have no point of view of his own and attempt to judge the past dispassionately and objectively. When Hegel devoted special attention to dialectic and to the principle of mind, he was stressing two major motifs of his own thought, which he found to have been discovered and partially elaborated by the pre-Socratics; other philosophers to whom other ideas appeared central have chosen to emphasize other thinkers among the early Greeks. Two distinctions are thereby drawn that the chapter will observe throughout. Selection is legitimate and unavoidable; distortion is neither. A historian may organize his material around what he takes to be significant, and must; what he may not do is make the sources say what they do not say. The line between the two is the line between the second and third items in the catalogue of defects, and it is the line on which the whole assessment of Hegel as historian balances.
I would add, and mark as an inference, that this defence of selection is simultaneously a defence of Gray’s own procedure. The book has restricted its attention to the Hellenic strand in Hegel and has organized five chapters around it; it has arranged the youthful fragments thematically because the chronology is unsettled; it has chosen one of two available hierarchies of national life because one suited its concept better; it has declined to develop the organic-and-dialectical contrast, the consequences of the Aristotelian speculation, and the triads of Proclus, on grounds of scope. Every one of these is a selection of the kind here vindicated. The vindication of Hegel’s selectivity is therefore, among other things, a statement of the terms on which the monograph asks to be read, and the reflexivity is exact enough that I take it to be deliberate.
The two motifs are then pursued. Under dialectic, the Eleatics and especially Zeno, together with Heraclitus; under the principle of mind, Anaxagoras, the Sophists, and later Socrates. Parmenides and Zeno mark for Hegel the beginning of real philosophy, since in them thought became emancipated from the Ionic identification with nature and from the Pythagorean cult of numbers, beginning to reflect on its own nature and to think in concepts rather than in physical and objective terms; they were the first philosophers because they were the first speculative and the first dialectical thinkers.
The threefold distinction that follows is one of the chapter’s most carefully drawn and repays exact statement, since Gray marks the distinction between two of its members as important and treats it as terminological rather than incidental. The subjective or negative dialectic is the immanent movement of thought divorced from objective considerations; it attempts by reasoning to render the evidence of the senses contradictory, that is, to establish a universal proposition by refuting particular instances, and in it Zeno made himself the unsurpassed master. The objective or higher dialectic, to which Hegel was especially devoted and which he believed Heraclitus had discovered, is defined as the movement within the soul of the content of thought itself rather than as the outward activity of subjective thinking, and Gray supplies Hegel’s own formula from the science of logic, according to which dialectic names that higher movement of reason in which terms appearing absolutely distinct pass into one another because they are what they are, the assumption of their separateness cancelling itself. Both kinds are distinguished from a third, the external dialectic characteristic of eighteenth-century rationalism, which develops the conflicting sides of a general principle and arrives at unresolved antinomies, with the consequence that human knowledge is held to be only appearance.
A back-note extends the third member of the distinction and delivers one of the book’s rare unqualified endorsements. Gray records that in this connection Hegel drew important distinctions between the conclusions of Zeno and those of Kant, and between the scepticism of the later academies and that of the eighteenth century, on the ground that the Greeks never doubted that reason applied to existence and that its knowledge of the world was real, knowing no epistemological dualism between thought and being. Gray writes that Hegel correctly insisted on this.
The endorsement matters more than its brevity suggests, because it identifies the deepest ground of Hegel’s Hellenism as the book has reconstructed it. If the Greeks knew no split between thought and being, then they possessed in their very naivety the condition that modern philosophy has been labouring to recover, and the whole structure of the argument — beauty as the union of form and content, ethical life as the union of individual and community, at-homeness as the union of self and world — becomes so many regional expressions of a single non-dualism whose philosophical statement the Greeks never had to formulate because they never lost it. The historical claim thus doubles as a systematic warrant: it explains why a superseded culture can serve a later philosophy as a measure, since what the later philosophy seeks by reflection the earlier possessed without it. This also explains, I would add as an inference, why Hegel’s polemics converge on Kant with such regularity across all five chapters — in religion, in art, in ethics, and now in logic. Kant is the name in this book for the dualism that Greece did not have and that Hegel’s whole apparatus is designed to overcome, and the recurrence of that name at each level is one of the strongest indications that the five chapters describe a single structure from five sides.
Heraclitus is then given the position of greatest interest among the pre-Socratics, and Gray’s treatment of him exhibits with unusual clarity the alternation of admiration and correction that governs the chapter. Heraclitus had achieved greater concreteness by defining his principle of truth as becoming; he had developed dialectic as the rhythm of the objective world rather than merely as the movement of subjective thought; his sayings that all things flow and that being and non-being are the same contained a truth that had influenced Plato and Aristotle and endured to Hegel’s own day. He had reduced the static world of Parmenides to the fluid world of change and rendered objective what except for occasional hints had remained subjective in Zeno; he recognized that being and non-being are abstractions devoid of final meaning and that the first truth is to be found in becoming; he made the great discovery that any principle seen in isolation and at rest is illusion and the very soul of untruth; where Zeno had asserted that from nothing comes nothing, Heraclitus advanced to the realization that in the flow of all things opposites combine to form a unity and make a life. Truth as movement thus became the union of subjective and objective, of content and form, and Gray states plainly that in this concept of objective dialectic as the resolution of the abstractions of being and non-being in the idea of becoming we have the essential basis of Hegel’s system. Hegel’s own acknowledgment is transmitted: there is no proposition of Heraclitus which he had not adopted in his logic.
The correction follows in the same breath and is delivered in the first person, which Gray reserves for judgments he wishes to mark as his own: however far Heraclitus was from conceiving this developed idea — and Gray believes the Hegelian interpretation goes far beyond the implications of such fragments as we possess — it is unquestionable that this early philosopher played a suggestive role in Hegel’s development. The concession and the caution are held together, and neither is allowed to cancel the other. What Hegel found in Heraclitus is described accurately as what he found, with the question of whether it was there left open in the direction of a negative answer.
Then a second correction, this time internal to Hegel’s own assessment, which shows how the chapter’s expository technique works. The advance, Gray writes, was not so great as might at first appear, since change in itself without something that abides and maintains itself through change is without final meaning. The concept Hegel considered central in Greek philosophy was Aristotle’s idea of natural teleology, in which change becomes process and progress toward an end implicit in the organism that undergoes it, and Hegel applied this principle, much as Aristotle had, to judge the early thinkers: Heraclitus had conceived of change only, without direction or purposiveness, without the sense of realization and fulfilment of an immanent potentiality, and it was in this failure to determine the true nature of becoming that he fell short of concreteness and truth. The same criticism is then applied to Anaxagoras. The principle of mind was the second great discovery of philosophy and in a manner supplied what Heraclitus lacked, since if conceived aright it signifies purposiveness in nature and in man, meaning law, direction, and process as universal reason; yet for Anaxagoras, though he sought to understand it as the simple principle and essence of things, it remained formal and inapplicable to the natural world of human society. Hegel repeated and emphasized Plato’s criticism in the Phaedo concerning the abstractness of the doctrine: Anaxagoras had not conceived reason otherwise than as a universal form, nor applied it to determinate and concrete activity. Only Aristotle, on Hegel’s view, properly estimated reason as the origin and structure of the objective world while recognizing its subjective application to a determinate process; Anaxagoras conceived reason as static form, Aristotle as purposive, universal, and yet particular activity, thereby bridging the chasm between particular and universal, form and content, subjective and objective, by his insight into reason as teleological self-realization.
The structural result should be registered. Two of the three principles Hegel takes to be constitutive of his own thought — objective dialectic and reason as the structure of the world — are attributed to pre-Socratic discovery and then declared insufficient by a criterion supplied by a fourth thinker. Hegel’s genealogy is therefore not a genealogy of anticipations; it is a genealogy of partial anticipations judged by a standard that appears only at the end of the sequence. Gray states the general principle: the bare conception of these principles by the early Greeks was far from suggesting their concrete determination or the true relation between them; Hegel, unlike many German historians who followed him, did not set too high a value on the pre-Socratics, knowing that the originality and greatness of a thinker lie more in the use and application of the materials at hand than in the discovery of new and isolated truths; these early philosophers had accomplished little except to furnish material and a tradition for the greater thinkers to come; their efforts had not been lost, since the future preserved and expanded their meanings; and only in the light of later developments did these first attempts take on real significance.
That last proposition is the retroactive principle in its explicit form, and it operates at three distinct levels in this book, which is worth stating because it accounts for a great deal of the work’s shape. It operates within Hegel’s history of philosophy, where the earlier is intelligible from the later. It operates within Gray’s account of Hegel, where the theological manuscripts of the youth are declared to be a diary whose significance emerges only from the mature lectures, and where the meaning of the Hellenic ideal is redetermined at each stage. And it operates in the book’s own composition, since its guiding tensions are exhibited long before they are named and acquire their sense only when the naming occurs. The monograph reproduces in its own procedure the historiographical principle it attributes to its subject. Whether this is a considered mimesis or an unavoidable consequence of expounding a developmental philosophy developmentally, the text does not say; that the correspondence holds at all three levels is a fact about the work available to any reader who tracks the recurrence.
With Plato and Aristotle the chapter reaches what Gray calls the heart of the matter, and the treatment begins from Hegel’s quarrel with the received oppositions. Tradition, and especially modern habits of interpretation, had separated the two and had made Plato the patron of mere enthusiasm and Aristotle the progenitor of empiricism — Plato the fountainhead of all idealism and Aristotle the source of realism, Plato the originator of the ideal and the transcendent and Aristotle the explorer of the real and empirical, Plato the speculative thinker and Aristotle the sober research scholar. Hegel, approaching their thought at first hand in Greek, was convinced that tradition had been unjust to both; some reason could be found in their works for most of the opinions of subsequent centuries, and it was equally true that their successors had been blind to what they really taught, missing the total impression of their philosophies and fastening upon isolated aspects. For Hegel the difference between Aristotelian realism and Platonic idealism, so far as he admitted a difference at all, was superficial and inessential: Platonic idealism implied nothing transcendent or otherworldly, and Aristotelian realism denied none of the speculative reaches of intellect; Aristotle completed Plato and gave concrete and purified expression to what Plato had left abstract and mythical, Plato having opened the intellectual world through his insistence on the reality of universals and Aristotle having given that world concrete realization in his conception of organic purposiveness.
Gray’s verdict on this is finely balanced: with Plato, Hegel’s sense of the injustice of tradition, coupled with his own strong interests, led him partly in the right direction and partly astray. The right direction is the refusal of the dualistic caricature; the straying is the separation of content from mode of presentation. Hegel felt that the basic source of the misinterpretation of Plato lay in a failure to separate the two, since Plato had couched his thought in poetic dialogues and lacked systematic form, so that his philosophy had to be extracted from artistic metaphor and pleasing externalities; his meaning was more often concealed than revealed to an unimaginative posterity. Gray records the specific applications with approval: Hegel ridiculed, with real justice and insight, the moderns who had taken too literally the images concerning the division of the soul in the Phaedrus myth, the idea of knowledge as recollection implying a previous existence in the Meno, and the myth of the world’s creation in the Timaeus, insisting that these belonged only to the mode of presentation, were poetic metaphors never meant to be interpreted literally, and represented Plato’s way of giving popular and figurative form to philosophic truth, while posterity had fastened on the external and non-essential and made it the essence. Hegel attributed the habit of taking Plato literally to too little acquaintance with philosophy rather than to too much, holding that it is only ignorance of philosophy that renders Plato difficult to grasp.
The criticism then reverses the judgment at exactly the point where the principle is extended beyond its warrant. In his quarrel with tradition Hegel certainly went too far in separating Platonic content from Platonic form; he could not realize that Plato was artist as well as philosopher, and that the separation could never be complete; his absorption with logic prevented him from doing justice to Plato’s poetic insights; he objected to the Platonic language on the ground that it prevented its author from expressing himself conceptually, and impelled to reach the metaphysical and logical essence of the philosophy he brushed aside a form which many today regard as inseparable from the substance. Everything poetic, even the myths in which Plato tried to express truths that eluded logical form, Hegel set down to Plato’s inadequacy, an inadequacy overcome in Aristotle’s sober conceptual expression; and Gray transmits the doctrinal ground: myth belongs to the pedagogic stage of the human race, and when the concept has developed it no longer needs the myth.
That sentence produces the most acute reflexive friction in the book, and it must be stated carefully because the text supplies materials on both sides. Gray’s own governing classification of Hegel’s system, announced in the preface and reaffirmed in the conclusion, is that the metaphysical systems of the German idealists are philosophical mythologies, true as a work of art is true, whose claim is to comprehend in creative vision the meaning of the world; and that this is how Hegel’s dialectical system is to be appreciated, since he did not intend it to be understood in any literal sense. The Hegel reported in this chapter holds that myth belongs to a superseded stage and that the developed concept dispenses with it, and reproaches Plato for a poetic form whose retention he treats as a defect. The book therefore describes its subject in terms its subject applies pejoratively to another philosopher.
Gray has anticipated part of the difficulty. The preface adds that whatever their illusions, the German idealists were subtle and profound enough to realize the symbolical character of their attempts to interpret the deepest reach of man’s surmise about his world, and the conclusion insists that Hegel did not intend a literal reading, treating the system as a universal medium and a method of interpretation. The anticipation blunts the charge without removing it, for two reasons that the text itself supplies. First, the chapter reports that Hegel treated the poetic form of Plato’s philosophy as belonging to presentation rather than to content, which is precisely the separation that the mythology thesis, applied to Hegel, would refuse — since if the dialectical system is a symbolic medium, then its form is its content in the relevant sense. Second, the same chapter reports Hegel’s judgment against the Neoplatonists that their imagery sometimes took the place of conceptual thought, which is again a reproach that presupposes the distinction the mythology thesis denies. I take the friction to be genuine and unresolved, and I mark the identification of it as my own inference, warranted by the juxtaposition of the preface’s classification with the chapter’s report of Hegel’s doctrine of myth. Its significance for the book’s economy is considerable: the interpretive frame that makes the whole study possible is one that the subject of the study, on the study’s own evidence, would have rejected as a description of philosophy proper.
The remaining criticisms of Hegel’s Plato are recorded with less ambivalence. Hegel dismissed roughly and unjustly Schleiermacher’s attempts to interpret Plato as artist-philosopher, and was out of sympathy with his textual criticism and his efforts to determine the authenticity of dialogues, holding it superfluous for philosophy and belonging to the hyper-criticism of the age to treat Plato from a literary point of view, since the testimony of the ancients leaves no doubt regarding the more important dialogues. A back-note supplies the wider polemical context: in Aristotle’s case Hegel was at pains to trace the various traditions through Cicero, Alexandrian philosophy, the medieval period, and the modern, while in Plato’s case his polemic against tradition was generally unspecific; the modern false opinions regarding both thinkers were represented for him by the histories of Tennemann, Tiedemann, and Brucker; and he stood in direct opposition to Schleiermacher and to the Romantic religious interest in Plato. Gray adds that in this light it is hard to understand what Stace, in a recent book, means by calling Hegel’s interpretation of Plato traditional. A second note records that Hegel did not specifically defend his monistic reading of Plato nor specifically attack the dualistic tradition, though it is clear from his constant criticism of a too literal reading of the dialogues, especially the myths, where the dualistic conceptions have largely been supported; and that Glockner’s assertion that Hegel interpreted Plato as a dualist is inexplicable to Gray. The apparatus here is doing the work of adjudicating a contested question in the reception, and doing so against two named contemporaries.
The positive account of Plato’s contribution follows: that the true is the universal, and that the way to that truth lies through thought rather than the senses; that Plato opened the kingdom of the intellect and was the first fully to grasp that the rational, that is the spiritual, was the essence of the universe; that in this he followed and extended Socrates, who had maintained the absolute right of self-conscious thought, while giving that right objective existence and applicability in a way Socrates could not, subtracting from it all subjective character and conceiving it as the unified structure of the intelligible world. Socrates’ tragedy, Gray notes with a backward reference to the previous chapter, came about because he had not found the true relation of universals to particular existence — a formulation that makes the ethical catastrophe of the fourth chapter and the logical insufficiency of the fifth into the same fact described in two vocabularies. The theory of ideas is then reconstructed against two rival readings, the aesthetic-intuitive and the transcendent-substantial: against both, Hegel advanced the interpretation of the ideas as universals brought forth and realized through the process of conceptual knowledge, so that they are neither irrational poetic ideals nor independent entities, Plato endeavouring to express the truth that the particulars first in consciousness are not the basically real, while the universal forms of which the particular is a representative remain ultimate.
The Platonic dialectic is then divided as the pre-Socratic was, and the division is applied to the corpus. Plato used and extended both kinds: many of the dialogues have the negative purpose of confounding men with contradictions within the realm of the particular and sensuous in order to convince them of the existence of a science of universals, showing that virtue is one rather than many and that beauty has a universal form, a dialectic learned from Zeno and from the Sophists who knew so well how to disintegrate the particular. But Plato went further, finding the way to preserve the individual in the universal and to unify the real and ideal worlds by means of objective dialectic. Here Hegel turned to the later dialogues, to the Sophist and Philebus and above all to the Parmenides, which he called the masterpiece of Platonic dialectic, and in which he found revealed the unity of being and non-being in the concept of realization or end — Plato having first comprehended the absolute as the being of Parmenides while conceiving it as the universal which, as species, is also end, and which rules, penetrates, and produces the particular and manifold. The union of the one and the many is effected by recognizing the presence of the one in the other rather than by juxtaposition or transition, non-being being a constituent part of being as the many are implicit in the one. Gray states that as Hegel sums up his conclusions from this dialogue he states what amounts to the substance of his whole logic, and transmits the formulation: that freedom exists only in a return into itself, that the undifferentiated is the lifeless, that the active living concrete universal inwardly differentiates itself while remaining free in doing so, and that this determinateness consists in the one being identical with itself in the other.
The judgment on this reading is among the book’s most consequential and is delivered with the same structure as the judgment on Heraclitus, though more firmly. Gray records Bratuscheck’s nineteenth-century attack, which maintained that Hegel’s translation of certain passages in the dialogue was inaccurate and his interpretation of others more inaccurate still, and which concluded that the dialogue itself was spurious and Hegel’s whole conception of Plato therefore false. Gray calls the attack extreme and declines to investigate the problem, observing that scholars have never agreed as to what Plato implied in this difficult dialogue. What he does affirm is that it can hardly be doubted that Hegel found there, and to a lesser extent in the Sophist and Philebus, the basis of his dialectical logic, while its expansion and development were largely conditioned by non-Platonic factors; and he draws the inference that the appearance of such an interest only in these late works is perhaps indication enough that it was not of the central importance for Plato that Hegel wished to believe. Dialectic was not for the author of the dialogues, nor is it for us, the only truth and the only interest in Plato’s philosophy. And the conclusion is stated without hedging: at this point one cannot avoid the conviction that Hegel’s extreme passion for logic prejudiced his historical judgment.
The transition to Aristotle is made by locating Plato’s shortfall in Hegel’s own terms. Plato had correctly apprehended the essential nature and truth of the intellectual world, and in addition to an inadequate mode of presentation his treatment fell short because he remained too exclusively concentrated on universal determinations and had only imperfectly applied the idea to the individual and particular; in more formal language, he remained in the objective, the sphere of the substantial only. Aristotle first added the notion of subjectivity and concrete particularity in the principle of process: what with Plato was abstractly intellectual, Aristotle made concretely rational; the principle of life by which universals as potentialities become particular actualities was not fully realized in Plato; in distinction from Pythagorean numbers and Platonic ideas, Aristotle made process valid. It should be observed that this diagnosis is verbally identical with the diagnosis delivered against Plato in the ethical chapter, where the defect was the exclusion of subjective particularity from the Republic. The logical and the political criticisms coincide, and their coincidence is one of the strongest pieces of evidence the book offers for its claim that Hegel’s categories operate across domains without change of sense. It also, I would add as an inference, exposes the same vulnerability twice, since the criticism that Plato could not accommodate the individual is brought by a philosopher whose own logic, on the testimony of this very chapter, treats the individual as inessential and lacking reality.
The account of Aristotle then begins from a statement of intimacy that exceeds anything else in the book. When Hegel enters Aristotle’s realm he is more truly at home than in the dialogues; though he complained of having studied Aristotle in the most difficult and unsatisfactory modern edition, a folio without accompanying Latin, it is safe to say that he penetrated more intimately into his thought than into that of any other philosopher; there is certainly no other thinker whom he regarded with such unqualified admiration and respect, and it is impossible to miss his personal feeling of allegiance, which appears again and again throughout his works. Aristotle is called the teacher of the human race, to whom most of the philosophic and natural sciences are indebted for their beginnings; nothing would be more desirable, if one would be serious with philosophy, than to lecture upon him, since of all the ancients he is the most deserving of study; and while Hegel often said that his religious contemporaries’ desire to return to Plato belonged to the weaknesses of the time, of Aristotle’s metaphysics and psychology he said that they have never been surpassed.
Gray’s evidence for the affinity includes a document of a kind he uses nowhere else: an aphorism from Hegel’s notebook, given in the broad Swabian idiom characteristic of his speech, enjoining the reader to be no sleepy-head but to stay awake, since the sleeper is blind and mute while the waking man perceives everything and says of everything what it is, which is reason and the mastery of the world. The evidentiary type is worth marking. A private notebook entry in dialect is adduced as testimony about philosophic temperament, on the same principle by which the repetition of the opening lecture on Greek philosophy was earlier adduced as testimony about preference. Both are symptomatic materials rather than doctrinal statements, and the book’s willingness to weigh them is a consequence of its declared interest in the wisdom lying behind what Hegel said rather than in the said alone.
A further mirroring follows that repays notice. Gray writes that Hegel found in Aristotle the quality which Haym considered preeminently characteristic of Hegel himself, namely the combination of the strongest empiricism and sense for the real with the highest degree of speculative power. Aristotle impressed Hegel as an inquirer who had the patience to examine all particular phenomena and the insight to construe them so as to discover the most profound philosophic implications; Hegel never ceased to wonder at the all-inclusiveness of his interests and the thoroughness with which he handled all sides of knowledge, while remaining always the philosopher — seeking to determine every object while penetrating ever further speculatively into its nature, leaving the object in its concrete determination and seldom leading it back to abstract determinations of thought, so that the study of Aristotle is inexhaustible. A judgment about Hegel from the nineteenth-century critical literature is thus used to characterize what Hegel found in his own favourite, with the result that the affinity is described in terms borrowed from the description of the admirer. The device is elegant and it carries an implication the text does not draw: that Hegel’s Aristotle is in some measure a self-portrait, which would make the chapter’s conclusion — that Hegel assigned to himself the recasting the ancients left undone — a natural terminus rather than a surprise.
The three Aristotelian doctrines Hegel is shown to have appropriated are then treated in ascending order, and each is presented with an accompanying assessment. The first is the psychology. The contemporary prejudice Hegel was most anxious to refute was the impression that Aristotle held an empirical theory of knowledge, mind being a passive tablet on which impressions are written from without; had he not said that the understanding in reality is nothing before it thinks, and that reason is like a book on whose pages nothing is at the outset actually written? Analogies of this sort, Gray records, gave rise to the whole modern epistemology of sensational empiricism, and Hegel was certain that Aristotle had been completely misunderstood, his similes pressed too far and made to mean the exact opposite of what he intended. As in the case of Plato, modern historians had seized upon external image and illustration and interpreted them with complete disregard for the context and purpose they were intended to serve. For Aristotle mind possessed a power of initiative; the misinterpreted similes meant simply that mind is all things implicitly while being nothing before activity occurs; mind was a natural organism containing potentialities of reasoning activity, whose realization was conceived as function and activity rather than form, as developing structure rather than disengaged intelligibility. It was in this, on Hegel’s judgment, that Aristotle’s thought was a fulfilment of Plato, and this that made his psychology unsurpassed even in the modern world.
Gray’s assessment is unusually warm and is given in the first person: the important thing about Hegel’s interpretation of this psychology is that he fully grasped its organic basis and did not permit the involved epistemological quarrels of his day to mislead him into seeing a dualism that did not exist in the functional conception. For Aristotle mind was the highest development within nature and the crown of its purposiveness, rather than, as so often in the philosophy of Hegel’s own day, an inexplicable phenomenon outside and separate from nature; mind was nature’s complete realization and entelechy. The endorsement is significant for the book’s argument because it is an instance in which Hegel’s philosophical commitments improve his historical reading rather than distorting it. His hostility to dualism enabled him to see what dualistically trained readers could not. This is the strongest counter-case the chapter supplies against its own catalogue of defects, and it complicates the picture in a way Gray permits to stand: the passion for logic that prejudiced the reading of Plato and Heraclitus is the same disposition that corrected the reading of Aristotle’s psychology. Which is to say that the separability of insight from system is asymmetric — the system distorts in some regions and discloses in others — and no rule is offered for telling in advance which will occur.
The second doctrine is the natural philosophy, and here Gray notes a change in the polemical target: the argument is directed against the fact that eighteenth-century physical theory had disregarded Aristotle altogether rather than against false interpretations. The physicists of the generation before Hegel thought of him as belonging to an age before the dawn of science; Hegel, like other post-Kantians, was sharply critical of modern physics, and his analysis shows how completely he rejected much of the accepted scientific theory of his time and how stubbornly he held that on the larger issues Aristotle had been right and the Newtonians wrong. The basic issue is the conception of nature as a life, a totality of organic processes determined by immanent teleology, against an atomistic universe controlled by external mechanical relations; the problems mechanical physics left unanswered were for Hegel largely resolved by the determinations central for Aristotle, necessity and end, efficient and final causation. Aristotle had interpreted nature as a self-productive life whose end is within itself rather than as a collocation of independent atoms related by external forces, and had comprehended the notion of life as an organism that independently propels itself, changes, and develops while remaining identical with itself, its inner unity and power existing because it contains the idea of self-realization, of movement from potentiality to fulfilment — a principle undiscoverable by breaking the organism down into chemical properties. In this natural philosophy Hegel found what was to be a fundamental tenet of his own: that the truth is the whole. Life in nature is a consequence of the whole structure, and the elements are to be explained by reference to that whole rather than the reverse. Gray gives Hartmann’s formulation of the resulting doctrine — that the whole in terms of function is present in every member while every member is in its way the whole, each in a different way, so that it is impossible to conceive a single categorial essence without conceiving the whole, whose structure is enclosed in the entire system rather than in its own independent being — and remarks that this is the dominant insistence of Hegel, whose origin in Aristotle’s natural philosophy requires no special insight to recognize.
A back-note attached to this passage supplies a relevant text from the phenomenology and is worth registering as an instance of the apparatus performing a substantive function: that the real subject-matter is exhausted neither in its purpose nor in the mere result attained, but in the working out, since the result together with the process of arriving at it constitutes the concrete whole, the purpose by itself being a lifeless universal and the naked result the corpse of the system that has left its guiding tendency behind. The note thus grounds the Aristotelian derivation of Hegel’s holism in a passage from the work that inaugurated his mature system, which strengthens the chapter’s genealogical claim at a point where the main text merely asserts it.
The third doctrine is the theology of self-thinking thought, and it is here that the chapter reaches its summit and then, immediately, its most consequential reversal. The conception of the active intellect and, still more, the doctrine of the unmoved mover formed for Hegel the highest point in Aristotle’s understanding of the intellectual world; his deep desire to find a harmony between the individual and the objective world, his intellectual passion to comprehend all things as the material and substance of the human spirit rather than as foreign to it, perceived in these speculations a final wisdom. Gray adds a careful qualification of Hegel’s reading: he did not interpret these disputed passages in terms of transcendence, since for him they embodied the most inclusive context within which the union of subject and object could be operative. Man’s union with his world, his sense of being at home there, could come about in the last analysis only by thought and the power of reason, since there the thinking self could entirely appropriate its object and the object of thought could be one with the thinker; the very nature of thought raised to its highest level in philosophy is reflection on self, and this became in Hegel’s vision the goal of intellectual history. In the Aristotelian idea of mind — separate, unmixed, self-contained, whose essence is pure activity and whose activity is self-reflection — Hegel found the highest idealism ever advocated, and at the very end of the encyclopaedic summation of his whole system he quoted the passage from the twelfth book, in which thinking deals with what is best, thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought so that the two are the same, possession rather than receptivity is the divine element, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. Gray calls this Hegel’s answer to the dualisms of God and world, transcendence and immanence, thought and being, and the place where Plato and Aristotle came together and anticipated the truth of the Christian faith, Aristotle’s searching spirit having comprehended the empirical in its synthesis and reached the highest speculative standpoint.
The reversal follows in the next sentence and is the most philosophically loaded passage of the chapter. If this can in one sense be called the ideal union of spirit with its world, Gray writes, it is also for Hegel, as for Aristotle, an advance beyond it, since here the main emphasis on organic totality and the interrelatedness of all parts is forsaken and thought becomes complete in itself, a separate and self-enclosed activity. This signifies, on Hegel’s part, passing beyond the social and natural world, dispensing with the material, eternalizing the process of reason. It is a union of the thought of Plato and Aristotle which, if carried too far, could destroy the sounder bases of the philosophy of both. Moreover — and this is the decisive clause — the conception of the self-completeness of reason is foreign to the main bent of the German thinker’s whole evolutionary philosophy. Gray records that the influence has undeniably important consequences upon which he has no occasion to enter, though in any elaboration of Hegel’s logic or of his analysis of Christian doctrine the importance of this speculation would become obvious.
The declared limit should not obscure what has just been established, since it is the culmination of the itinerary I have been tracking through the book. At-homeness was introduced as the definition of freedom, developed as the Greek relation to nature, embodied in the Athenian citizen’s relation to his city, and now fulfilled in the union of thought with its object. At every earlier station the concept required a world: institutions, customs, temples, altars, the stone the sculptor forms. At the final station the world is dispensed with, and the fulfilment of the concept consists in thought’s self-enclosure. The consummation of at-homeness in the world is thus a state in which the world has become superfluous, and Gray marks this by observing that it is foreign to the main bent of Hegel’s evolutionary philosophy. The tension is exact, and it recapitulates at the highest level the tension the fourth chapter located in Hegel’s ethics, where the individual’s fulfilment in the objective whole issued in a state that could recognize no ethical value outside itself. In both cases a doctrine of union terminates in the effacement of one of its terms. That the same structure appears in the ethics and in the theology is, I would suggest as an inference the text amply supports, further evidence for the diagnosis Gray deposited in his note on the concrete — that the attempted fusion of the Platonic priority of the universal with the Aristotelian immanence of form in content generates a doubleness that reappears wherever the fusion is attempted.
The chapter then confronts the fact that Aristotle’s philosophy resists the treatment Hegel wishes to give it, and the confrontation is presented as a problem for Hegel rather than as a criticism of him. Aristotle’s philosophy was not built up logically around the single book of the metaphysics, and this constituted a problem: though Hegel tried to insist that the works formed a totality of purely speculative philosophy, he was too honest a critic to overlook their unsystematic and ununified character, and Gray transmits his admission that a system of philosophy is what we cannot find in Aristotle. Hegel appears to be always trying to conceive Aristotle as a whole while finding it impossible; and he concludes that with Aristotle the object was to retain each determination and pursue it further rather than to bring everything to a unity or reduce determinations to a unity of opposites. Gray states the consequence: herein lies the great difference between the two thinkers, and what most definitely separates Hegel from Aristotle is his desire for unity, synthesis, and system, set against Aristotle’s equally strong desire for distinctions, analytic investigation, and subject-matter in its discreteness; the aporetic method could hardly be further in intention from the dialectical logic.
The finding deserves to be stated in its full force, because it is the chapter’s most important single result and Gray does not underline it. The philosopher with whom Hegel felt the deepest affinity, whom he called the teacher of the human race and whose metaphysics and psychology he declared unsurpassed, is on Hegel’s own report methodologically his opposite. The affinity is substantive and the opposition is formal, and the formal opposition concerns precisely the feature of Hegel’s thought that the book has identified as the source of his historical distortions. Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions. The separability thesis gains its best evidence here, since a thinker capable of recognizing and reporting a method antithetical to his own, and of admitting that his favourite yields no system, is demonstrably capable of historical judgment that his own commitments do not dictate. And the separability thesis is simultaneously placed under strain, since Hegel’s response to the discovery is to declare that Aristotle’s philosophy requires recasting so that all its determinations should be brought into a necessary systematic whole — one living organic whole in which each part is held to be a part and the whole alone is true. The honest report and the corrective demand stand side by side, and the corrective demand is the system reasserting its claim over the very material whose resistance has just been acknowledged.
The treatment of the Organon exhibits the same structure at the level of exposition. Aristotle’s logic is described as the very antithesis of the philosophic method Hegel approved, since there dialectic serves as the prototype of the Enlightenment reasoning Hegel was attempting to escape rather than as an instrument for discovering truth. Gray records the compositional consequence with precision: in his history of philosophy Hegel treated the Organon in an unusual way, giving up his threefold division into logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit, placing the metaphysics first, and bringing the Organon in at the very end in a fourth division, as a pendant to the rest. He adds that Hegel did not intend to deny the value of Aristotle’s logic, maintaining that this natural history of finite thought testified to the breadth of understanding of its originator, while denying that Aristotle had thought in terms of his own syllogisms, since the truths found in the physics, the psychology, and the metaphysics, on the strength of which Hegel believed him the highest speculative thinker, could not have been contained in the deductive logic of the analytics or categories; the Organon was accordingly valuable as a general method for the natural sciences, jurisprudence, and mathematics, while being unfitted as an instrument for arriving at philosophic truth.
The observation about the abandoned tripartition is the most concrete evidence in the book concerning the relation between Hegel’s system and his historical practice, and it can be read in either direction, which is why it is so valuable. Read one way, it shows the system yielding: confronted with a body of work that will not fit the standard architecture, Hegel rearranges the architecture rather than the work, which is what the separability thesis predicts a historian of independent judgment would do. Read the other way, it shows the system imposing: the relegation of the logic to a pendant is a judgment about what in Aristotle is philosophically central, and that judgment is made on Hegelian grounds, since the criterion by which the Organon is demoted is its failure to be a dialectic. Gray records the fact and leaves both readings available. Given the chapter’s overall economy I take this to be deliberate restraint rather than oversight, since the same passage that reports the rearrangement also reports the demand for a recasting, and the juxtaposition makes the ambiguity legible to any attentive reader.
The paradox is then named, and its naming is the moment toward which the whole book has been moving since the first chapter set the historicity of cultural principles beside the permanence of spirit. What, Gray asks, had Aristotle left for the succeeding centuries to accomplish? The question is difficult because of what he calls an inevitable paradox in Hegel’s thought, already met in other connections: the problem of how to conceive the sphere of absolute spirit — the ideal activity of art, religion, and philosophy — in relation to the social world. How could true thought have a history, how could the absolute be relative? On the one hand Hegel repeatedly affirmed that in the modern world one could be neither a Platonist nor an Aristotelian, since history had advanced and philosophy, like all other activities, is a product of the age and spirit of a people. On the other hand he emphasized again and again that the Greek thinkers, and Aristotle in particular, had not been surpassed, so that from the standpoint of philosophic discovery this twilight philosopher of Greece represented ultimate and lasting truth, which could in different epochs have an outer history and development while remaining always the same in core and substance. And Gray’s verdict: in a real sense this paradox remained an unresolved problem of Hegel’s thought.
Two partial answers are then recorded, and their partiality is emphasized. The first appeals to the reforming and remoulding effect of the present upon tradition: though the content and substance of past truth might persist, every new society needed to fit it into new forms and find it revealed in new contexts. The second appeals to organization: a deficiency remained in the Aristotelian philosophy from the standpoint of organization, and Aristotle’s whole philosophy, in Hegel’s words, requires recasting so that all his determinations should be brought into a necessary systematic whole — one which is not merely divided correctly into parts with nothing forgotten and all set forth in proper order, but one in which there is a single living organic whole, each part held to be a part and the whole alone taken as true. The important lack in both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy lay in the fact that the parts were not fused into a unity and that one idea was not implicit throughout: Aristotle had discovered the absolute idea in the metaphysics while placing it side by side with the rest, and the truth of Plato’s Parmenides had not been applied in the remainder of the dialogues. Both had discovered the idea, that is, had come to the realization of the unity of self-consciousness and essence, recognizing thought as the being of the world and the unity of subject and object in reflection; and their philosophies had not been penetrated by that speculative idea. This, Gray transmits, is what a succeeding time had to accomplish.
The answer offered is thus that the absolute is relative in respect of organization while remaining absolute in respect of content. The distinction is elegant and it does real work, since it explains how the same truths can be at once permanently valid and historically incomplete: they were possessed as isolated discoveries and must be repossessed as members of a whole. It is also, I would note as an inference, an answer that transposes the paradox rather than dissolving it, since the doctrine that the whole alone is true entails that a truth not yet integrated into the whole is not yet fully true, and therefore that the ancient discoveries were not the same in core and substance before and after the recasting. The book does not press this, and its restraint is consistent with the declared verdict that the problem remained unresolved.
The final movement of the chapter traces the partial performance of the recasting through the Hellenistic schools and Neoplatonism, and it does so in a way that brings the book’s master concept back into view in its negative form. The Hellenistic characterization is one of the most suggestive aspects of Hegel’s interpretation of history, on Gray’s judgment, and it repeats the analysis the youthful manuscripts had given of the same period: in his earliest writings Hegel had been convinced that just here occurred one of the most significant changes in human thought, a transformation causing men to break loose from traditional moorings and seek an absolute and foreign religion, and after a lifetime of study he was no less convinced of the importance of this time in changing the character of the world. Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism reflected a sharp break between man and nature and represented a direct antithesis to Plato and Aristotle rather than a development from them. The old feeling of being at home in the world was gone. The Hellenistic philosophers forsook the social to save their own souls and withdrew into the seeming security of the self; the temporal world became unreal and untrue; only by complete indifference toward everything external could the wise man hope to possess his soul in peace; and the final development of a powerful scepticism destroyed even this last citadel, leaving man without self-certainty, scepticism being the surrender of everything objective and the absolute poverty of all secure content, and thereby evidence of the decay of philosophy and civilization together.
The continuity with the second chapter is complete and Gray marks it. The mechanism by which the loss of a public world produces a religion of need, first stated in the youthful account of Christianity’s victory, reappears here as the mechanism by which the loss of a public world produces a philosophy of withdrawal; and the resolution is the same in both accounts, namely the Christian doctrine that the absolute is nothing alien to self-consciousness. Gray transmits it in these terms: Hegel believed that Christianity, understood in its philosophical substance, offered a reconciliation to this world of spirit in self-estrangement which overcame the dualism that had so long separated man and nature; the subjective attitude of Stoics and Sceptics no longer satisfied mankind, and men found they could not live in a private, isolated, atomistic sphere; and the new idea arising with Christianity, intimated before in ancient philosophy, was that absolute existence is nothing alien to self-consciousness, since nothing really exists for it in which self-consciousness is not itself immediately present.
Neoplatonism is then presented as the school that reflected this return of spirit to its home in the objective world and the breaking down of the abstractions of self-contained existence. Its fundamental idea, in Hegel’s formulation, is thought which is its own object and therefore identical with what is thought, so that we have the one and the other and the unity of both. The Neoplatonists returned to the truth of the objective by means of pure thought, building up the external spiritual world from within; they conceived God as the absolutely objective, as being fully manifested and revealed to the human intellect while wholly self-contained and independent; this absolute objectivity was in its very nature spirit, implying eternal self-identical existence which had nevertheless differentiated itself and created the world; and man in so far as he was mind represented the return to this primal unity, the absolute standing outside them as eternal universal truth while remaining related to man, the world as God’s other being not himself and yet, as his activity, a phase or moment of himself.
Hegel’s specific judgments are then recorded with their evaluative weights intact. He did not consider the writings of Plotinus and Proclus an advance upon Plato and Aristotle, treating them as a special development from the logical and metaphysical truths of the Parmenides and the twelfth book of the metaphysics. He defended Plotinus from the charge of mysticism often brought against his conception of God as pure being in which potentiality and actuality coincide, holding that such pure intellectualism is inconsistent with mysticism, while objecting to the arbitrariness of idea and inadequate imagery in the Enneads which sometimes seemed to take the place of conceptual thought. Proclus appeared more significant because of his closer attention to Plato’s logic, having uncovered in the Parmenides what Hegel called the true theology and the real revelation of the mysteries of the divine essence — a theology whose content is the concept of the Trinity, which had become the central truth of Christianity, and which reveals the nature of the world as the unity of the one and the many, of universal and particular, in the organic concept of becoming. Gray notes that Hegel elaborated in wearisome detail the triads of Proclus and the trinity of trinities, and declines to follow, adding only that the essential principle was conceived to be God as spirit, spirit concrete and determined by the idea of the dialectical nature of truth.
The claim that the philosophical content of the Trinity is the truth implicit in Plato’s dialectic completes an arc that has been building since the third chapter, and it should be named because the conclusion will name it. Christianity, on this account, receives its central dogma as the articulation of a Greek logical discovery. The doctrinal difference between Athens and Jerusalem is thereby reduced to a difference in the mode of possession — figured in the one case, conceived in the other — and the Christianity that surpasses Greek religion in its valuation of the individual is itself, in its speculative substance, of Greek derivation. The title concept accordingly acquires a determination it has not previously had: the Hellenic ideal is the medium through which the surpassing religion is received.
The catalogue of Neoplatonism’s failures then specifies exactly what remained undone, and each item corresponds to something the book has established elsewhere. They had not grasped the Christian truth of the value of the individual, having failed to pass from man as a concrete type to man as a particular person — which is the same deficiency identified in Plato’s Republic and in Greek ethical life generally, now recurring at the end of antiquity. Their rationalism prevented them from developing the natural side, the sphere of objective mind, the life of society — which is the deficiency the first chapter identified as fatal to any purely inward conception of freedom. And most insistently, the unity they found was not grounded in the true dialectic, in the recognition of the absolute chasm separating thesis and antithesis; theirs was in the last analysis an abstract identity of subject and object rather than a maintenance of the separate phases in organic totality, and their philosophy lacked the inner necessity of dialectical determination.
The conclusion drawn is the boldest structural claim in the book: it can be safely concluded that for Hegel the Neoplatonists did not actually succeed in recasting the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies into a system fully in accord with the revelations contained in their speculative reaches; such re-forming had to await a later time; and it was eventually undertaken by Hegel himself, who attempted to carry through substantially this process in his science of logic. A back-note refers to Hartmann.
The consequence for the book’s governing wager is severe and should be stated plainly. If the entire history of Greek philosophy is organized as a task whose completion is Hegel’s own logic — if the pre-Socratics furnish materials, if Plato and Aristotle discover the idea without penetrating their philosophies with it, if the Neoplatonists point toward an end they cannot reach, and if the recasting is undertaken by the historian himself — then the history is written from the standpoint of its outcome, and the outcome is the system. The separability of insight from system is at its weakest here, since what is at issue is not the distortion of particular readings by logical prejudice but the organization of the whole narrative by a terminus that is the logic itself. The chapter has, in effect, produced the strongest available case against the thesis it was written to test.
And then its final sentence reverses direction. So Hegel summed up the history of Greek philosophy from Thales to Proclus; and in spite of his dialectical scheme it did not for him take the form of a necessary progress from thinker to thinker, becoming rather the record of an expanding and deepening knowledge, a wisdom in which each trend and each school made its contribution to the whole. The reversal is abrupt and it is placed at the exact point of maximum strain. Two readings are available and the text supports both. On one, the sentence distinguishes two claims that ought to be distinguished: the claim that the sequence exhibits logical necessity, which Hegel asserted and which Gray has rejected as an idiosyncrasy, and the claim that the sequence exhibits cumulative deepening, which the chapter’s own reconstruction has borne out and which does not require the logic. On the other, the sentence protects a thesis whose evidential situation has just deteriorated, by asserting a conclusion the preceding pages have not established. Gray gives no signal as to which he intends, and the ambiguity is itself a datum about the book: at the moment when its central wager is most exposed, the exposition closes the chapter with an assertion rather than an argument, and turns to the conclusion.
The concluding chapter opens by returning to the image with which the book began, and the return is exact enough to be read as a compositional frame. The pathos of history, the sorrow and sense of futility that descend upon the reflective man when he sees the past as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness, wisdom, and virtue of individuals and states have been victimized — such, Gray writes, were the terms in which Hegel characterized the sharp decline that followed the brief glory of Hellas. The specification is worth noting: the image that the first chapter deployed as a general characterization of world history is here attached specifically to the fall of Greece, so that the pathos with which the book opened is retroactively identified as Hellenic pathos. This is the last of the book’s retroactive determinations and it is delivered without comment. From this partial view, the sentence continues, Hegel’s philosophic mind penetrated the more inclusive whole in which tragedy and defeat are but a phase; from his need to understand the complexity of the human record he evolved a system of metaphysics that attempted to account for the totality of experience.
The mythology thesis is then restated in its final and most explicit form. This metaphysics can be best appreciated as a comprehensive mythology derived from a sustained vision of history. Hegel himself, one of the wisest and most subtle minds of modern times, did not intend his dialectical system to be understood in any literal sense, a pitfall that has beset the path of many of his followers; for him it was a universal medium, a method of interpreting the meaning of events in time; like Christian dogma it is true to man’s deeper and recurring experiences rather than to literal fact or isolated outward occurrence. Gray adds the epistemic humility that the thesis presupposes: in common with the sanest and most penetrating thinkers before him, Hegel recognized that man’s art and philosophy and religion are inadequate expressions of truths too far-reaching to be comprehended by any single mind; it is the fate of human thought to be partial and one-sided; and Hegel knew this while also being aware that collective human experience enables men to see ever more inclusive unities and so to move from the partial toward the more complete.
Then comes the argument that serves as the book’s keystone, and it deserves extended attention because it retroactively justifies the entire method. Hegel’s studies of Greek religion, ethics, and philosophy show him, Gray writes, to have been a relatively unbiased critic of past ideas in spite of his dialectical scheme and his absolutist metaphysics; on the whole his speculative theories did not pervert the truth of his subject matter; he used them as a kind of framework whose function was to set the larger context in perspective both for himself and for his readers. And then the test: if he had been fettered by the logic of his own system, he would have been compelled to see an advance in the modern world over the Greek. Actually, however, he could concede only a partial and limited progress.
The form of the argument is inference from underdetermination. A system is shown to be non-controlling by exhibiting a case in which it failed to produce the result it required; and since some faculty must have produced the result actually reached, that faculty is identified as historical judgment operating independently of the system. The argument is genuinely evidential, and it is the only argument in the book that could establish the separability thesis rather than merely asserting or illustrating it. It is also the argument that converts the book’s chief methodological vulnerability — the impossibility of testing an interpretation once the mythology thesis has removed the criterion of factual fidelity — into an evidential result, since it supplies a test that mythology-status does not disable: the internal test of whether the vision delivered what its own principles demanded.
Its vulnerability lies in the premise, and the premise is contestable on the book’s own evidence. The claim that Hegel’s logic would have compelled an unqualified verdict of modern superiority presupposes that the dialectical scheme requires each later stage to be superior in every respect. Yet the first chapter reported the doctrine that nothing in the past is lost, that spirit retains in the depths of its present the grades it seems to have left behind, and that each cultural synthesis is absolute in its own time; the third chapter reported that Greek art achieved a perfection beyond which there can be nothing more beautiful, and that this perfection is itself a systematic result, since art belongs to the stage at which form and content coincide; and the fourth reported that in a determinate respect — the relation of subject and universal — the Greeks alone in all history had grasped what is essential. Each of these is a doctrine of the system, and each licenses precisely the kind of qualified verdict that the concluding argument treats as evidence against the system’s control. If the retention of superseded excellences is itself dialectically required, then Hegel’s refusal to grant unqualified modern superiority may be the system operating rather than the system failing. I mark this as an inference and as a criticism; its warrant is the book’s own reports of the doctrines in question, all of which are supplied in earlier chapters and none of which is invoked when the concluding argument is made. The observation does not overturn Gray’s conclusion, since the specific judgments that Hegel reached — the priority of Greek ethical insight, the deficiency of modern individualism, the supremacy of Aristotle — remain more determinate than any doctrine of retention could generate on its own. It does show that the keystone argument is stated in a stronger form than the evidence supports, and that the book’s final vindication of its method rests on a premise it has itself complicated.
The substantive verdict then follows and is stated with unusual balance. As a mature philosopher Hegel was certain that Christianity had passed beyond the insights of Greek humanism in its evaluation of the individual; it was his lasting conviction that modern Christian civilization had gone to an extreme in placing supreme value on the individual person and his subjective claims, to the serious detriment of culture as a whole and of higher truth; and he believed that in all history the Greeks alone had grasped the essential relation of subject and universal. What they lacked was a thoroughly humanized religion — one supporting the sacredness and importance of individuality and also giving assurance of a wholly intelligible deity, a religion that must abolish forever the unintelligibility of blind fate and the sway of mere nature. And then the formulation that completes the title concept: Christianity, in Hegel’s Hellenized interpretation of it, supplied this imperative need.
That phrase should be dwelt on, since it is the last and most important redetermination of the term the book is named for. Across the five chapters, the Hellenic ideal has been in turn the object of an early and idolatrous reverence; the measure by which a modern civilization can read its own gains and losses; a resource for an ethical problem that admits no other approach; the mould into which a modern content was poured; and now the interpretive medium through which the religion that surpasses Greece was itself received. The fifth determination subsumes the others, because it entails that the very standard by which Greek insufficiency was established — the Christian valuation of the individual and the intelligibility of God — reached Hegel in a form already shaped by his Hellenism. The judgment against Greece is delivered in a Hellenized idiom. This is the deepest sense in which the book’s title names a structure rather than a topic, and it is also the point at which the book comes closest to formulating the reflexive difficulty that has accompanied it throughout: an ideal that furnishes the categories of its own critique cannot be assessed by that critique without circularity. Gray does not raise the difficulty. He states the fact that generates it, in a single subordinate clause, on the book’s penultimate pages.
The remaining paragraphs restate the master concept and then withdraw its realization. The idea most basic to Hegel’s philosophy of history, an idea Gray says is derived directly from classical culture, is the concept of freedom or self-realization attained through progress from the subjective and inward to the objective and substantial: mind as subjectivity is merely nature that is not unfolded, abstract and implicit and isolated, while as actual it is concrete, explicit, objective; freedom is achieved to the degree that man becomes at home in his society, in his cultural inheritance, and in the spiritual universe as a whole; for individual and race alike, freedom is a movement from the isolated to the implicated. Religion, art, and philosophy are forms of explicit expression that further this universal purpose, and particular religions, arts, and philosophies serve as measures of the degree of freedom a national culture has attained, being different embodiments of one general content which is the all-embracing intelligibility of the real world. The realization of freedom means that an individual has become aware of the spiritual whole and of his relation to it, and for Hegel that whole and that relation found fullest incarnation in public institutions, which he considered both the gauge and the consequence of a people’s life.
The attribution of this idea to classical culture is the book’s final act of retroactive determination and it should be registered as such. The concept that organized the first chapter’s account of Hegel’s philosophy of history is here declared to be a Greek inheritance, so that the framework within which the Hellenic ideal was assessed is revealed to have been supplied by the object of the assessment. The reader who returns to the first chapter after finishing the last finds that its central definition has changed status: what appeared as Hegel’s own doctrine of freedom, expounded in advance of the Greek material, is now presented as the most direct of his classical derivations. This is precisely the operation the book has described Hegel performing on the pre-Socratics, where the first attempts take on real significance only in the light of later developments, and it is the third and final instance of the monograph reproducing in its own procedure the historiographical principle it attributes to its subject.
The prescriptive claim follows: Hegel was convinced that the modern world could not escape its inner contradictions and overcome its error of individualism without reference to this Greek insight into the nature of freedom; only by taking account of that recognition of the organic relations of man and his world could a higher advance be made; only by combining the new truth brought by Christianity with the older humanism revealed in Greek culture could a better synthesis be achieved. And Gray adds, in the first person and with an expression of hope rather than of certainty, that Hegel himself sought to bring about this synthesis in his ethics and metaphysics, and that he hopes this has become clear in the foregoing pages. The modesty of the formulation is characteristic and should not be read as mere convention; it is continuous with the preface’s description of the work as a short study offering a step in a direction, and with the notes’ repeated declarations that the limits of the study permit indication rather than development.
The last statement of Hegel’s faith is then given in his own images. He wished to believe that nothing of worth in history is irrevocably lost, that truths the past revealed were renewed in wider horizons of consciousness; though the external bloom of Greece was long gone, the fruits her people had ripened were preserved and purveyed to the present by the venerable housekeeper, Tradition; from the vantage point of national life the essential values were woven into the institutions and practices of modern society, and from the vantage point of the individual thinker all of the past was the property of the present, the present being as rich and full as the seeker, earnest and unafraid, could make it. His was a faith, secure and impregnable, that did not shrink from pain and tragedy, a belief that out of pain and tragedy could arise the most sublime of human values; history became for him, much as it was for Herder, a holy chain uniting past with present; history was moving neither away from a paradise nor toward one, and mankind was always and yet never at its end and goal.
Two details in this passage carry more weight than their placement suggests. The first is the return of the housekeeper, the image the fifth chapter had reported Hegel rejecting in favour of the river that grows as it flows from its source. Its reappearance in the author’s own voice, at the moment of summing up what became of Greek achievement, restores a figure of conservation where the chapter had installed a figure of transformative accumulation. The second is the formula that mankind is always and yet never at its end and goal, which is the most compressed statement in the book of the antinomy it has tracked from the first chapter through the fifth — the same structure that appeared as the relativity and permanence of cultural principles, as the historicity and finality of philosophical truth, and as the simultaneous supersession and unsurpassability of the Greeks. That the formula is offered without commentary, as a characterization of Hegel’s faith rather than as a philosophical problem, indicates the disposition with which the book closes: the antinomy is stated in its most balanced form and left as a description.
And then the deflation, which occupies the final page and determines the shape of the whole. To envision the unity of the past within the present and to set it forth in a great philosophical synthesis did not accomplish this unity in fact, and the subsequent history of Hegel’s ideas bears eloquent testimony to this; though he believed he had brought into harmonious relationship the positive insights of the classical and Christian ages, the years since have hardly borne out his faith. Gray then enumerates what remains open, and the enumeration corresponds precisely to the three domains his five chapters have traversed: the problem of evaluating the individual in the light of the social whole, which is the fourth chapter; the problem of conceiving religion as a unification and transmutation of human ideals, which is the second and third; and the problem of understanding the natural and intellectual world as an interlocking totality and process, which is the fifth. These are still vexed and troubled issues, and because of the effect of the industrial and technological revolutions in breaking the continuity of tradition they have grown more rather than less perplexing. Then the two sentences that state the terminal condition: we have not yet learned to be at home in our world, which was Hegel’s fondest dream, and we have not yet fused the contradictory elements of our Greek and Christian inheritance. Hegel’s thought has profoundly influenced modern life and has aided in bringing about the recognition of Greek naturalistic ideals; whether those ideals can be incorporated more closely into our individualistic ethic and our religious tradition has still to be decided. And the final valuation: Hegel’s unquestioned value seems to lie, most clearly, in his having brought these problems to light.
With this the book’s internal organization completes itself, and it is possible to state what form of unity it attains. The unity is not one of reconciliation. Every major tension the work has generated is left standing at the end, and several are explicitly declared unresolved. The relation of the absolute to the relative was named in the fifth chapter as a problem Hegel did not solve. The relation of the individual to the social whole is named on the last page as an issue still vexed, having been shown in the fourth chapter to defeat Hegel’s own ethics, which could recognize no value outside the state and would produce a polity as unsuited for happiness as Plato’s. The relation of vision to fact, which the mythology thesis was introduced to manage, is managed rather than settled, and the management is shown in the fifth chapter to be inapplicable at precisely the point where the vision concerns the nature of thought itself. The relation of insight to system, which the whole book was constructed to demonstrate, receives its strongest evidence and its strongest counter-evidence in the same chapter, and its final vindication rests on an argument whose premise the earlier chapters complicate.
Nor is the unity one of stabilization by hierarchy, in which a governing principle subordinates the tensions to itself. The book has no such principle. What it has instead is a set of devices that hold tensions in a determinate relation without dissolving them, and the sum of those devices constitutes its form of unity, which is best described as layered stratification under methodological restraint.
The first device is the layered valuation by which every position is recorded twice, at its own level of determination and again as revised. Young Hegel’s verdicts on Judaism, on Christianity, on Eleusis, and on the modern world are reported at full polemical strength and then marked as superseded, the supersession changing their meaning without erasing their force. The mature Hegel’s verdicts are treated the same way: the encomium on Antigone stands beside the systematic demotion of what she represents; the supremacy of Greek art stands beside the doctrine that art has ceased to meet the highest requirements of spirit; the unqualified admiration for Aristotle stands beside the demonstration that Aristotle’s method is Hegel’s opposite. This device produces a text in which contradictory valuations coexist by being assigned to different strata, and it is the direct expository counterpart of the doctrine Gray attributes to Hegel, according to which the grades spirit seems to have left behind are still possessed in the depths of its present.
The second device is the distribution of destabilizing material into the apparatus. The contrast between the organic and dialectical conceptions, contested by the scholarship and defended nowhere else; the diagnosis of Hegel’s doubleness as the consequence of an impossible fusion of Plato and Aristotle; the dismissal of Hegel’s triadic ordering of Greek philosophy as half-hearted and irrelevant; the disclosure that the chronology of the youthful manuscripts is unsettled and the chapter’s order therefore thematic; the observation that Hegel’s Platonic ethics rests almost wholly on one dialogue and neglects the one that would most complicate it; the adjudications against Glockner and Stace — each of these is a load-bearing judgment placed outside the running argument. The effect is a two-stratum text whose upper level presents a continuous reconstruction and whose lower level continually qualifies it. Read together, the two strata constitute a more skeptical book than either alone, and the reader’s sense of the work’s claims depends heavily on whether the notes are consulted.
The third device is the declaration of limits. The formula that the study’s limits permit indication rather than development recurs at exactly the points where a difficulty would require extended treatment: the organic-and-dialectical contrast, the consequences of the Aristotelian speculation for the logic and for the analysis of Christian doctrine, the triads of Proclus, the Bratuscheck controversy, the relation of Plato’s political thought to Hegel’s. These declarations are not evasions in any simple sense, since the genre is announced in the preface and reinforced by the publisher’s note, and a monograph offered as a step in a direction is entitled to leave steps for others. They do, however, mean that the work’s unity is achieved partly by exclusion, and that several of the tensions it identifies are stabilized by being placed outside its scope rather than by being resolved within it.
The fourth device is the mirroring of method and object, which gives the book a coherence that its explicit arguments do not supply. Gray treats Hegel exactly as he shows Hegel treating the Greeks. The object is admired and declared unrepeatable; its recovery is refused as impossible and undesirable; its value is relocated from model to measure and from measure to diagnostic resource; its errors are catalogued without diminishing its indispensability; and its final worth is said to consist in having brought problems to light rather than in having solved them. The preface’s opening request — that readers turn to Hegel to learn what he has to teach rather than to become partisan as Hegelians or anti-Hegelians — is the same request that Hegel, on this book’s account, made concerning Greece: understand and appropriate rather than imitate or revive. The monograph is therefore a Hellenic study of Hegel in a sense stronger than its title requires, and this structural mimesis is the most complete unity it achieves.
What holds these devices together is a single sustained restraint. The book declines to complete Hegel’s synthesis on his behalf; it declines to reject him for having failed to complete it; and it declines to convert either its admiration or its criticism into a verdict on the system as a whole. When its argument reaches a point where a decision would be required — whether the mythology thesis can apply to a doctrine about thought, whether the demotion of the Organon exhibits the system yielding or imposing, whether the organization of the history of philosophy by its Hegelian terminus is compatible with the separability of insight from system — the text records the materials on both sides and moves on. This restraint is the price of the unity attained and also its substance. A work that had resolved these questions would have had to argue for a general thesis about the relation of philosophical systems to historical understanding, and no such thesis is offered. What is offered is a demonstration, conducted across five domains, that in this particular case the historical understanding can be followed and assessed with the system held at arm’s length — together with an honest record of the places where the arm proves too short.
The final valuation the book pronounces on Hegel is therefore also, and with some precision, the valuation it invites for itself. Its value lies most clearly in having brought certain problems to light: the problem of what a superseded ideal can be for a thinker who denies its recoverability; the problem of how a philosophy that is constitutively late can also instruct; the problem of whether a category framework that excludes individuation can ground a normative claim about the worth of individuals; the problem of assessing an interpretation whose standard of assessment has itself been supplied by what it interprets. None of these receives a solution. All are exhibited with sufficient clarity that they can be worked on. And the concluding image of a mankind always and yet never at its end and goal, offered as a characterization of Hegel’s faith, serves equally well as a description of the state in which this study leaves the questions it has raised — which is the condition of controlled antinomy, held open by a restraint that declines to force a closure the evidence will not bear.
Simon Gros 
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