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The End of the Future:
Hegel and the Political Ecology of Deep Time
Stefan Skrimshire
The University of Manchester
[email protected]
May 28, 2010
Abstract
Ecological discourse is often framed as a critique of the paradigm of progress. As
such it implicitly critiques the religious roots of our teleological framing of time. This
is a notion that borrows heavily from the genre of Judaeo-Christian apocalypse: the
‘revelation’ of linear, historic destiny to humanity - including predictions of its end.
However, a more recent trend in ecological discourse can be linked to an interest in
the conceptual reverse of apocalyptic finality: endlessness. The roots of this idea lie to
an extent in ‘heretical’ philosophical and theological traditions of the eternal return
inherited from presocratic philosophy (but also found separately in some nonChristian religious traditions). This quasi-mythological belief in infinite cycles of
death and rebirth of ‘worlds’ persisted historically as resistance to the Augustinian
Christian belief in linear time. It can be seen to culminate in such philosophies as
Nietzsche’s.
But it is also implicated in an antipathy to ‘imminent’ apocalyptic future prediction
that we find, much earlier, in a pivotal moment in western thinking about time:
Hegel’s philosophy of history. The influence of ‘unfolding apocalypse’ on Hegel’s
thinking represents a fundamental paradox in thinking about the future. And this
paradox closely mirrors a contemporary sort of inertia in our own future thinking:
history as pure immanence; the ‘end’ of the future seen as definitive event to come.
This discovery provides an important critique of a contemporary ecological interest in
‘deep time’, or the positioning of the earth’s history within macro-scale cycles of
destruction and regeneration. My argument, in short, is that Hegel’s legacy to us is a
dangerous one. It positions the magnitude of climatic crises within the ‘bigger picture’
of cosmic timescales and the inevitability of death and rebirth: relax - climate change
is all part of a bigger cosmic narrative, which we are powerless to change. Such a
view arguably provides moral, spiritual and scientific bases for doing nothing about
either mitigating or adapting to ecological crises.
Introduction
In short, anything can be said about world history, anything that might occur to the most disordered
imagination. There's only one thing that can't possibly be said about it—that it's rational. You'll choke
on the word.
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground1
In 2007 the designer clothes brand Diesel ran a series of ads that marked the birth of
what can only be described as climate change chic. Portraying the new trendy
lifestyles of a globally warmed world, actors sipped Martinis from the rooftops of a
Manhattan submerged in water; St Mark’s square was overrun with Parrots; and
lovers erotically applied sun cream on a palm beach next to a Mount Rushmore half–
submerged by ocean. All were stamped with the tagline “Global Warming Ready”.
What is revealed in this cultural phenomenon of crisis consumerism? A certain type
of growth, excess, or progress, today can be seen to ironize planetary catastrophe.2
Indeed, in the case of the phenomenon coined “disaster capitalism”, it is its very
lifeblood.3 We hear time and again that despite a greater access than ever before to the
knowledge of planetary crisis (whether economic of ecologic), contemporary social
and political attitudes are marked by an ability to absorb its catastrophic tone. This
has led some to speak of an accommodation with crisis in affluent societies; of
apocalypse as “way of life” or “dwelling place”.4 We note a culture of ironic selfdistancing towards the future through the static spectacle of consumption. But it is the
rhetoric of climate change in particular that raises the most pressing concern with this
discourse of crisis ‘readiness’. In contemporary environmental literature, the
communication of passing ‘points of no return’ in global warming levels often
presents crisis in terms of the acceptance of cycles. Mark Lynas, for example, has
written of a propensity to view climate change today in terms of human powerlessness
as a kind of ‘geological fatalism’: ‘the oft-heard refrain that life will go on, with us or
without us, and that at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter’ (Lynas, 2007: 257–
8).
If this last perspective is true, what is significant is not the attempt to curb an attitude
of human hubris. Rather, it is the relatively sudden popularity of the idea that human
agency – the ability to act – has also become swallowed up in some larger metanarrative in which the end of the story is beyond people’s control. The issue, in other
words, is not whether human action in the world is in reality capable of reversing
trends in global warming already set in place (a point on which many scientists are
already skeptical), but how this self-awareness is narrativised in culture. How, for
instance, might a narrative of inevitable crisis translate ethically into behaviour in the
present? Does viewing global warming as the outworking of a bigger cosmic cycle
diminish the ethical responsibility of industrial nations to reduce carbon emissions
that will continue to threaten the lives of those in the developing world? Does it lead
to the sort of ironic celebratory tone of Diesel’s crisis consumption?
These are some of the concerns that lead us to pursue a philosophical search for the
roots of contemporary crisis thinking. Analysis of the social perception of crisis is a
1
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground trans. and ed. Michal R. Katz (1863; New York:
Norton, 1989), p. 21.
2
This is far from contested, of course, as a new discourse of “green capitalism” and the promise of
global salvation through expected breakthroughs in energy innovation and geo-engineering suggest.
3
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008).
4
The concept is Frederick Buell’s, in From Apocalypse to Way of Life (London: Routledge, 2004).
study which requires an inherently interdisciplinary approach.5 What I propose in the
following is to offer to this debate the fruits of research in philosophies of history
from European Enlightenment thought. And this entails interrogating the very
emergence of a philosophy of progress. Where does the idea of progress come from?
Amongst its pre-modern antecedents stands apokalypsis, or revelation: a literary genre
that introduces the meaning of history as divine destiny unfolding in time. The history
of apocalypse presents a vital insight into the way that future crises of humanity, and
of the earth, are imaginatively constructed and have shaped European thought. This
includes a pivotal moment in the development of a philosophy of progress through
Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, I hope to prove that a critique of a specifically Hegelian
philosophy of history illuminates this paradox about the conceptualisation of future
crisis. The critique reveals crisis to be something that one can, as in the Diesel ads,
internalise and ‘celebrate’.
To do this I shall outline the importance of two developments in modern European
thought that help us appreciate the paradox inherent to Hegel’s thought. The first is a
secularised apocalyptic, linear model of history as directed towards an ‘end’; the
second is the persistence of cyclical models of time that describe change as the
repetition of death and rebirth according to patterns of equilibrium and restoration.
Apocalypse: Arrow of History
The ‘secularisation of apocalypse’ thesis attempts to paint the European
Enlightenment’s linear, teleological view of history as the secularisation of an
originally theological concept. As Karl Löwith puts it, a philosophy of history is
essentially the belief in an “ultimate meaning” to successive events. It was therefore
“entirely dependent on theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of
history as a history of fulfilment and salvation.”6 Examples might include the
eschatological enthusiasm of Francis Bacon’s scientific revolution; or the faith in
Reason’s irrepressible unfolding in Kant, Lessing, Fichte and Hegel. Fundamental to
all of these philosophies was the principle of the narrative meaning of history.
The theory has not been without its critics. The most famous objection to Löwith
came from Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg suggested that what really defined the
transformation of thinking about divine providence into its secular historical paradigm
was not the direct transfer of theological ‘goods’ to a secular context. It was, rather,
its embellishment and naturalisation through the discoveries of natural science, and of
astronomy in particular.7 Astronomy played a crucial role in the secularisation of
apocalyptic belief since it generated perspectives of a cosmic sort of progress. The
perception of progress on vast, planetary timescales that had been denied a medieval
scientific consciousness.8
See Sarah Amsler, ‘Bringing Hope ‘To Crisis’: Crisis Thinking, Ethical Action and Social Change’ in
Stefan Skrimshire (ed) Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (London:
Continuum, 2010).
6
Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (London: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p.1.
7
Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London: Verso, 1999),
p.118.
8
Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, pp.117-118
5
Regardless of who in the Löwith-Blumenberg debate is correct, the latter perspective
opens up a useful dimension to my inquiry. Namely, the idea that the scientific pursuit
of a philosophy of progress in essence functions as the revelation of the hidden
secrets of the universe. And this is, of course, also a belief that borrows heavily from
its roots in apocalyptic thought. As the biblical scholar John J. Collins has pointed
out, the ‘traditional’ biblical and non-canonical apocalypses were not accounts of
world history that cohered around specific eschatological formulae (details of the end
of the world). But what is implicit to the genre of apocalypse is this: an ethically
loaded injunction that the truth of the world is not all that is visible or conceivable by
human means9. Understanding apocalypse is vital to a critique of a western
philosophy of history, then because apocalypse represents the belief in an ability to
access that hidden truth through revelation and the decoding of its signs. There is no
coincidence, then, that a connection between a Protestant theology of Providence and
the new science of astronomy had its parallel in biblical, apocalyptic interpretations of
the movements of the heavens, at a similar period.10
A paradox arises immediately from this association between apocalypse and modern
philosophy. For revelation in religious traditions is at once mysterious and encrypted
(reliant on the art of de-coding); and yet also universally accessible to rational beings
- itself a key premise of eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy. At its root,
then, apocalyptic thought describes a relationship between religious truth and
unlocking the narrative meaning of a political context. It describes the movement of
the divine within time. And it does so in such a way that ordinary perceptions of
temporal reality are disrupted, and human authority and prediction challenged.
Prophecy is reworked through a heightening of the corruption of the present up to the
point that it must be completely destroyed and overturned. This leads to a more or less
dualistic schema, a “radical dichotomy between the present age and the age to
come”.11 In the canonical Jewish apocalypse one thinks of the encrypted messages
given in the book of Daniel, in which the fall of successive empires is foretold. In the
Christian apocalypse that of John of Patmos, in which is predicted not only the
interruption of material power and the crumbling of earthly dominions, but also the
concept that time itself will “be no more”.
In its emergence as literary form, apocalypse therefore fulfilled an unprecedented role
in the narrative of political history and progress more generally. It described for the
first time the identification of historic events as purposive. Mircea Eliade, one of the
foremost theorists of religion in the mid-twentieth century, identified the historic
importance of this emergence for western thought. Ancient religions from the NearEast were united, he thought, by the myth of eternal recurrence. Through practices of
archetypes and of repetition, primitive religions had expressed a belief in the “eternal
return” of creation to a mythical or archetypal existence. Thus, life cycles were
9
See, for example, John J Collins, Seers, Sybils and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (Leiden:
Brill, 1997) p.92.
10
Whilst an entirely distinct subject matter in many ways, the correlation of Lutheran theology, the
scientific revolution, and Astrology is also of extreme pertinence in this area of apocalyptic and the
philosophy of history. See Paola Zambelli (ed), ‘Astrologi Hallucinati’: Stars and the End of the World
in Luther’s Time (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986).
11
Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity
(London: SPCK, 1982), p.25.
observed through the passing of time (seasons, days, lunar cycles, and solar cycles)
and the continual rebirth of the life-giving or cosmogonic act.12
What does the history of apocalypse narrative tell us about the development in
western thought of a consciousness of crisis more generally? Ritualising periodic
death and rebirth in the ‘pre-history’ traditions is to be interpreted, according to
Eliade, as a way of dealing with the vicissitudes of existence. With the birth of the
apocalypse narrative in Zoroastrian faith was introduced the concept of the
intervention of the creator God. this God promised to “level” creation in the last days
and inaugurate the final phase of history. Taken to its historic conclusion in the
Hebrew narrative, two essential concepts emerge. First, historic events, including
calamitous events, are explicable (have meaning) and revelatory (are accessible).
Second, history reveals a singular divine will: the “epiphany of God”, as Eliade puts
it. In the context of this divine will, violence in history appears no longer as arbitrary
and no longer as endlessly repeated.13 Provoked by attacks by warriors from abroad;
assimilation into foreign culture; oppression by colonial overlords; or the vicissitudes
of climatic change, apocalyptic texts bring direct relation between external crisis and
moral progress. With apocalyptic religion a faith in total, not partial victory over
disorder and chaos is inaugurated. From the ‘cradle of civilisation’ in the Near East
emerged a faith in history in which human destiny had finally become decoupled from
its primitive dependence on infinite, repetitive natural cycles. The relationship
between human destiny and a theological optimism have consequently been the
hallmarks of a philosophy of progress. Despite the best efforts of Augustine to
spiritualise the narrative of apocalyptic prediction, the future of the world was
continually ritualised into a story of epic eschatology, because of which degeneration
would not prevail forever.14 The City of God described a world whose preparation for
the next could not be equated with the earthly victories it experienced over the City of
the Pagans. But it could assume its ultimate destination to be better than the present.
How do we find the persistence of this linear apocalyptic approach to history in a
figure like Hegel? History, for Hegel, is the self-embodiment of God in time. Its
development takes the form of Reason’s ultimate temporal manifestation: the State.
But other interpretations point out that this supposedly ‘secularised’ theory of
progress in fact carries a through-going apocalyptic sensibility, via its mystical and
“heterodox” associations.15 The most popular amongst these is the alleged traces of
influence of Joachite apocalyptic prophecy in his thought. Joachim of Fiore was a
12
Examples include the Egyptian invention of the solar year and the Babylonian creation myth. In the
latter, the hero Marduk (identified later with kings in the role of re-enacting the moment of creation)
slays his Great-great Grandmother Tiamat, and out of her carcass creates the cosmos.
13
Mercia Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1954), p.104.
14
A millennial view of the degradation of the earth was, however, preeminent in the theologies of some
church fathers before Augustine’s time. In the third century CE the bishop of Carthage, St Cyprian,
wrote of an apocalyptic awareness of environmental degeneration. Perhaps influenced by Roman and
late Jewish apocalypses (such as the Sybilline Oracles), Cyprian preached that the last days were not
only to be expected on biblical grounds; it was also evident in the changing climatic and geological
conditions. This observation is couched not in terms of a premature and unexpected death of the world,
but by analogy with an ageing human: “even were we silent, and if we alleged no proofs from the
sacred Scriptures and from the divine declarations, the world itself is now announcing, and bearing
witness to its decline by the testimony of its failing estate” - Treatise V, An Address to Demetrianus,
Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. V, Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson (eds), (Michigan: Eerdmans
Publishing, 1971), p.458.
15
Cyril O’Regan The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
Calabrian abbot who broke away from the Cistercians in the late twelfth century to
found his own esoteric order. He is best known for developing a prophetic system that
divided world history into three status or ages according to a Trinitarian model. The
age of the Father corresponded to that of the Old Testament. The age of the Son
represented the age since the birth of Christ to 1260 (when Joachim believed would
begin an end to the age of the church). The age of the Spirit, for Joachim in the mid
thirteenth century, had only just begun. This latter stage was marked by the surge in
pietistic monastic life. It was a movement that had massive influence on the adoption
of Joachite and apocalyptic spirituality in subsequent movements of the “spiritual
Franciscans” and other mendicant movements.16
Joachim therefore represents the first millennial progressivist reading of history. In it,
the coming millennium was seen both as the “Sabbath” – the seventh period of the
church in accordance with the seventh seal - and the third in a Trinitarian
periodisation of divine history. Joachim also represents a decisive break from the amillennial tradition of apocalyptic initiated by Augustine. This is because Joachim
constructed a careful hermeneutics of historical events according to revealed
scripture.17 In philosophical terms, and given the long-reaching influence that
Joachim had in subsequent centuries up to the present day,18 the shift is monumental.
Furthermore, its influence reached as far as the development of Hegel’s Lutheran
philosophy. History’s culmination was once again a realm of knowledge no longer out
of bounds to mortal men. Instead, a system was created for interpreting the successive
progressions of humanity as leading towards a visible improvement of the Christian
church. Moreover, in this vision the present “age of the spirit” can be seen actively as
the culmination of all the trials that had gone before. As Eric Voegelin wrote of the
transition, through Joachim, “the Augustinian pessimistic waiting for the end of a
structureless saeculum has disappeared”.19
The influence of Joachim’s Three Ages on German idealism is well argued. Lessing’s
The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780 and itself highly influential on
Hegel, perhaps defined best the new confluence of Enlightenment faith in the progress
of human society with religiously revealed faith in the divine providence. Lessing
allowed that perhaps the theories of certain “enthusiasts of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries…were not so empty speculation after all”. 20 The correction
offered by Lessing of these “premature” predictions of the progress of the human race
was that they required the enlightened entrance of reason such as only Germania had
come close to.
See for instance David Burr, ‘Mendicant Readings of the Apocalypse’ in Richard K. Emmerson and
Bernard McGinn (eds) The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (New York: Cornell University Press,
1993) pp.89-105.
17
Delno C. West and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Joachim of Fiore: A Study in Spiritual Perception and
History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) p.103.
18
See, in particular, Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore & the prophetic future : a study in medieval
millennialism New, rev. ed . (Stroud : Sutton, 1999).
19
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Volume 20: History of Political Ideas Vo. II, Middle Ages to
Aquinas, ed. Peter Von Sivers (University of Missouri Press, 1997), p.130.
20
G. E. Lessing The Education of the Human Race (1774-1778) [http://lessing.classicauthors.net/
EducationOfTheHumanRaceThe/EducationOfTheHumanRaceThe2.html] [accessed 10/06/09].
16
So it is in Hegel’s philosophy that a lineage from the Joachite status to the
Enlightenment can be most fruitfully be traced.21 Lessing’s appeal to patience of those
“enthusiasts” who might not yet recognise the workings of divine providence (“Go
thine inscrutable way, Eternal providence! Only let me not despair in Thee, because
of this inscrutableness”) can also be seen in that inherent ambiguity of Hegel’s
historicism with regard to whether the time he presently occupied could be said to be
the culmination of history’s Absolute towards which his whole philosophy is directed.
Like Joachim, for Hegel the realm of the spirit is also one of freedom and equality of
the community which could only be achieved after the successive stages preceding. In
the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel
uses the Trinitarian model to describe the successive stages not only of divine
revelation but of the realisation of spirit in history itself.
Deep Time: the Paradox of Progress
If a secularised apocalypse, culminating in German idealism, provided fertile ground
for viewing history in terms of narrative with a beginning and an ‘imminent’ end, the
early history of geology provides the little appreciated underside to this story. For the
model of ‘time’s arrow’ was not without a competitor in the scientific and
philosophical Enlightenment. Stephen J. Gould makes this point in outlining the
historic significance of the discovery, by James Hutton in the late nineteenth century,
of deep time. Hutton, in some ways the father of modern geology, is best known as a
champion of ‘uniformitarianism’. This is the belief that the world is constituted by
slow-moving forces internal to the earth itself that continue just the same today as it
has throughout its life. Observations of the upward intrusion of rock from (for
example) plate tectonics, to form horizontal against vertical sedimented layers
(‘unconformities’) appeared to confirm this revolutionary proposal of continuous
creation. That is, they painted a picture of the earth in continuous regeneration by
successive cycles of erosion and ‘uplift’ of geological forces, as opposed to the notion
of continual erosion of an earth that had been formed by some singular event in the
(not too distant) past.
What is the relevance of bringing in the key arguments of modern geology here? It
helps us to understand the different conceptions of time that lie at the heart of modern
European thought about future crises. Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, published in
1785, was alleged to do two key things. First, it was thought to banish the
‘unempirical’ principle of catastrophism. Catastrophism was the notion that the shape
Cyril O’Regan has suggested that this transference of apocalypse theory is neither uncontroversial
nor straightforward, and others have argued that such attributions are tenuous at best. Bull, Seeing
Things Hidden, p.134 Evidence for Hegel’s carrying of Joachite theology is itself mediated by other
sources, from Lutheran hermeneutics, to the mystic Jakob Boehme, and Valentinian Gnosticism. Glenn
Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p.240.
See also Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future. Nevertheless, what is significant for my
purposes is that in Hegel a science of progress is predicated on a combination of revealed religion and
the concept of a realised eschatology. In his system, this takes place through the realisation of Spirit at
the apex of consciousness, or “absolute knowing”., moving towards the eschatological community of
the Kingdom of the Spirit. As for Joachim, it was a realm defined by reconciliation of contradiction
and the achievement of God’s self-reflection through the spiritual community. In Hegel the moment of
the Spirit is also that of the “self-consciousness of the Community”. G.W.F.Hegel, Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III: The Consummate Religion ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R.F.Brown,
P.C.Hodgson and J.M.Stewart (London: University of California Press) p. 371
21
of the earth is the product of past events of large-scale geological catastrophe, and is
now gradually eroding away. Uniformitarianism was thus thought to have verified for
the first time the absolute vastness of time against the accepted literalist biblical
interpretation that the earth was no more than a few thousand years in age. Second,
Hutton had introduced to geology the principle of cyclicity, as opposed to viewing
‘time’s arrow’ in linear fashion. This inaugurated a paradigm shift that allowed the
conceptualisation of endlessness. The famous words of Hutton’s treatise sum this up
well: “If the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to
look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of our present
enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end”.22
The distinction between cyclical and linear portrayals of geological time is of great
significance to the parallel shift in thinking I am trying to describe within a
philosophy of history. Uniformitarianism opened the way not only to viewing the
history of the earth as one of cosmic vastness (cyclical patterns in geology were also
linked to a Newtonian picture of the revolutions of the planets). It also called into
question the very meaning or possibility of history at all, seen as a narrative with a
beginning and an end. Nietzsche later arrived at a similar conclusion from a quasimetaphysical and existential point of view: the possibility that the present moment
was the product of revolutions of eternally returning sequences through infinity. What
Hutton’s early expressions of geological change did was to consciously avoid all
reference to ‘history’ proper as a concept at all. He avoided, that is, notions of
directionality, sequence, narrative, and, crucially, progress. Hutton’s earth was one
not defined by apocalyptic sensibility to the quickening of human progress or the
limited lifespan of the earth. It was, instead, marked by constant flux, movement, and
equilibrium when seen within the vast timescales that geology revealed.
How, then, does the success of a cyclical view of global crisis sit with the
‘secularisation’ thesis of apocalypse theory - the narrative of history as having a
beginning and imminent end? The answer lies in the rhetorical success that time’s
arrow model had over its cyclical counterpart. This success was guided to a large
extent by the emergence of a powerful theory in the form of species evolution. As
Gould details, purely cyclical, non-progressivist accounts of the formation of the earth
did not sit well with the emergence of paleontological accounts of the apparent arrival
of the human species at a certain point in time only. In the end, the progressivist
implications of Darwin’s arguments won the day. A cyclical view of time employed
by early geology to explain the ability of the earth to maintain equilibrium throughout
millennia of apparent change and disruption was a successful idea. But it would be
accompanied henceforth by a view that these changes demonstrated a far bigger,
narrative direction in which the human was playing a decisive part: the world was
evolving and progressing.
This ‘cyclical’ development is important, nevertheless because, at least in the form
that Gould presents the argument, it proves that the two models of time employed to
make sense of the world - time’s arrow and time’s cycle - have both been
indispensable metaphors for describing planetary crises. What this brief allusion to
the history of geology reveals, therefore, is the intellectual roots of thinking about
environmental crisis in terms of an overarching and potentially never-ending narrative
22
quoted in Stephen J. Gould, TIme’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle , p.65
of catastrophe that lies literally underneath our feet. Hutton’s conviction that the earth
might never have had a beginning, nor need it necessarily have an end, might seem
like the scientific antithesis to a linear apocalyptic view of history as outlined at the
beginning of this essay with reference to Lowith’s secularisation thesis. But in the
almost contemporaneous developments of Hegel’s philosophy of history occurring in
Prussian Germania, they find the perfect compromise. That is, in Hegel we witness a
view of crisis as stitched into the notion of history: crisis is involved in the revelation
of truth itself.
Hegel’s Apocalypse
Hegel’s concept of progress shares many aspects of this balancing act between the
directional, apocalyptic thrust of history on the one hand and cyclical theories of crisis
on the other, as outlined above. And the way he balances them can be crudely
described as an attempt to distinguish carefully between the rational idea of human
providence and the ‘irrational’ or extra-rational behaviour of external nature, the
“regular behaviour of the stars, or the innocence of the plants.” 23 Hegel’s Philosophy
of Nature bore little relation to a close empirical study of geological or ecological
change. It was founded upon a definition of nature as the very essence of externality:
“the idea in the form of otherness”.24 How, then, does Hegel conceive of progress
within its ecological home? And how, more importantly, does this view relate to a
consciousness of crisis? Whilst he was keen to show that nature progresses as a
“system of stages”25, Hegel actively opposed the then fledgling theory of evolution.
He taught that because nature is the realm of necessity, not freedom, it was not
involved in any factors of chance, as the theory of natural selection implied.26 Like
Kant, Hegel viewed nature as merely the background occasion against which the
process of human history may occur, governed by the laws of Reason. As Löwith put
it, Hegel believed that “nature has no independent positive significance… nature was
for him merely the natural ‘arena’ of the spiritual events of the world.” 27 We observe
in his theory, therefore, a triumphant decoupling of human destiny from its primitive
dependence on infinite, repetitive natural cycles. The overwhelming legacy of
Hegelianism (through its influence on Marxism, for instance) in this respect is the
realisation that through human labour the necessity of nature is brought into
relationship with the freedom of the subject and something is produced towards an
end.28
To speak about the anticipation of crises in natural systems within this scheme,
therefore, would appear only to refer to a wider understanding of historic events
tending towards rational ends, despite ‘appearances’ to the contrary. The appearance
of ecological crisis, we might surmise, would thus operate in the same way that
perhaps Hegel accepted political calamities in his time: as means to an end. The
23
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings ed. Ernst
Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990) p.141.
24
Hegel, Encyclopedia, p.140.
25
Hegel, Encyclopedia, p.141.
26
Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)
p. 173.
27
Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought trans. David
E. Green (London: Constable, 1964), p.214.
28
David Lamb, ‘Teleology: Kant and Hegel’ in ed. Stephen Priest, Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987), p.174.
expression of this gradualist justification of historic eras in the Lectures on the
Philosophy of History is well known. Successive civilisations’ articulations of the
goal of human freedom culminate in the expression of Christian philosophy. It is the
latter stage of human thought that represents Reason’s crowning achievement, the
realised telos of universal freedom. Hegel is clear about the relationship of Providence
or the “workings…of God’s hand” to his own philosophy. He states that in a “ ‘retail
version’ of the view of Providence” 29 (in which an individual is merely aware of
God’s “unexpected” grace in his or her life) discernment might be allowed in isolated
cases. But his own philosophy of world history is of a totalizing, far grander kind. It
therefore leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of Reason’s governance of the world.
What does this inheritance of a historicised eschatology tell us about the development
of crisis thought in Hegel’s philosophy? The clue lies in the principle of dialectic.
Ultimately, Hegel’s thought carries over the idea that history’s consummation, its
eschaton, was conceivable and experienced in some sense as already achieved. That
is, history is immanentized for his own age in the triumph of reason over the
vicissitudes of nature and repetition. There was already a strong precedent for this.
Behind Hegel stood such luminaries of this faith in the fulfilment of science as
Francis Bacon, also richly influenced by Joachim. It is also significant to trace
Hegel’s Trinitarian dialectic as the radical departure from Kant’s idea of human moral
progress. Hegel rejected fundamentally Kant’s careful antinomic division between the
infinite and the finite. Instead, for Hegel, infinity was capable of being reconciled in
time. A theory of progress was logically connected to the immanence of God, or the
Absolute, in time, and not merely in ‘some point in the future’. For Hegel, “[The
Christian religion is] the religion of reconciliation”30.
The consequences for analysing the development of a perspective on future crisis are
great. For Hegel’s scheme implies the rejection of the possibility that future events
may fail the human project. This stood as a direct challenge to the influence of Kant’s
rationalist view of history. The achievement of perfection was, for Kant, a desire
inscribed onto the heart of reason but never achievable, creating an infinite series of
nearing the goal, but never reaching it. But this gave no real, historical motivation for
aligning one’s will with the out-workings of reason itself. It could only produce the
contradiction that there was “no motivation for any progress or any history”. 31 In
Hegel’s scheme, however, this sense of failure is to be avoided at all costs. Dialectic
means that the eschaton is, with the culmination of history in the age of the spirit,
already being achieved.
What should interest us most about this development is the transformations of
temporal language in respect of the progress “of” the future. O’Regan has termed
Hegel’s philosophy a “revisionist” concept of eternity. This is because it reflects a
quality of history not reduced to timelessness but to a concept of transformed time
itself.32 Hegel is notoriously ambivalent about the ability to describe the social and
political form of the eschatological community. Yet it is possible and important to
note the quality of a transformed relationship with the external, natural world, and
29
G.W.F Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History trans. Leo Rauch (London: Hackett, 1988),
p.16.
30
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, p.65.
31
Bull, Seeing Things Hidden, p.115.
32
O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, p.303.
what this implies for a theory of future, planetary crisis. For Hegel, the consummation
(“end”) of history means that all is subsumed into the being of Spirit. In this case
nature becomes the “eternal externalisation”;33 the “Spirit emptied out into Time”34.
This does not conform to a millennialist reading of history, in which the eschaton is
feverishly expected. Rather, it describes a stage which was to be believed to be
occurring now, or at least in its final stages.
What is implied by this position for a vision of the future as crisis? There is a
temptation to view a theory of progress as necessarily tending towards a continued
optimism about the ability to overcome the “terror of history” through human
ingenuity. Within linear apocalyptic, in other words, there is an assumption that
history must appear as a permanently futuristic, utopian, and forward thrust. And this
is as true of a faith in rapid, revolutionary change of a Lenin, or the gradualist, and
eventually cosmic timescale changes of a Kant. Either interpretation differ radically
from Hegel’s incarnational dialectic. This dialectic redefined the future as the
totalising transformation of the present: the glorious future made immanent to
history’s now. A sense of historical optimism in the “end of history” is often falsely
attributed to Hegel as the prediction that history will be brought to a close through
“technology and social engineering.”35 But this sort of utopian manifesto is clearly
very far from his religious vision of the final eschatological community. The latter is
inherently practiced as the State, in which all individuals achieve true freedom and
mutual recognition. Hegel was conscious of the temptation to be impatient with this
concept and to wish an eruptive revolution as the culmination of history. In his way,
therefore, Hegel warned against a pre-emptive millennialism, just as Augustine had.
Instead, Hegel insists that the realisation of Spirit is a slow process and is occurring
all around us, unfolding all of the time: “a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a
gallery of images”.36 It remains for us to see exactly what the nature of this new,
consummate experience of the crisis of the present, implies for a philosophy of the
future.
The End of the Future
Bringing this analysis back to my original problem, we need to ask how the
development of a philosophy of progress came to shape a consciousness of an
‘indwelling’ of crisis. How can a consciousness of planetary crisis, or the inevitable
end of human life, possibly relate to Hegel’s analysis of “endzeit” – understood as the
“consummation” of temporal, finite history? 37 In Hegel the end of history is expressly
not a discourse on the possibility of human extinction,38 or even the collapse of
human civilisation. What, then, has his legacy been to political thought on historic
crises? Despite the varieties of its interpretation through Heideggerian, Marxist,
Kojevian, or Fukuyamian lenses, Hegelian philosophy looms largest as a method of
interpreting historic accomplishment. The notion of accomplishment stands at the
heart of speculative logic itself. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel is explicit in his
33
G.W.F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A.V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
p.492.
34
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.492.
35
Jon Bartley Stewart, The Hegel Myths and Legends (North-western University Press, 1996) p.209.
36
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.492.
37
McCarney, Hegel on History, p.173.
38
McCarney, Hegel on History, p.173.
intention to write a philosophy whose very appearance marks the act of completion of
knowledge. It is this aspect that makes his philosophy a ‘science’: “to the goal where
it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be ‘actual knowing’”.39
Why is this significant? Through the historic emergence of thought in speculative
form, Hegel confirms the telos of progress as the culmination of the history of thought
up to this point – where the Absolute is grasped by human consciousness and hence
philosophical thought comes to an end. But he also does much more. For speculation
essentially indicates the stage in human consciousness that is a reflection of itself, as a
realisation of its own completion. This means that speculation as an “activity”, if it
can be called such, is fundamentally a passive activity. This is expressed nowhere
more clearly than the famous conclusion to the Phenomenology. There, the
culmination of history, Spirit’s self-consciousness or self-recognition, is understood
as an internalising, self-examination. It is “recollection, the inwardizing, of that
experience”40. Glenn Alexander Magee makes much of the ancient Greek roots of this
notion of knowledge as recollection, and its connection to the act of speculation:
the term speculation comes from speculum meaning ‘mirror’. What does the
speculative philosopher ‘mirror’? Speculation holds up a mirror to the Idea itself: It
allows Idea to comprehend itself…The Philosopher is a vehicle of the muses: an
oracle through which the Spirit expresses itself, an automatic writer who passively
watches the play of the dialectic as it develops on his page.41
Magee goes on to argue for the mytho-poetic and aesthetic elements of Hegelian
speculative thought. But what stands out for my purposes is this emphasis on the
static, inwardizing, mirror-like activity by which any talk of the unfolding of a future
history must now be framed. Indeed, we arrive here at the most crucial and
problematic paradox of Hegelian thought. It concerns whether or not it is possible to
conceive a future at all. It is the contention of many noted commentaries on Hegel42
that what his thought announced with the self-realisation of Spirit in history, was a
declaration of the end of future-thinking. To await a future is to deny that the totality
of being is unfolding. In Hegelian philosophy, goes the argument, stands the
insistence that history is now unfolded as much as unfolding. It is a sentiment that we
find in Hegel’s views on historic events, such as the famous anti-utopianism of his
preface to The Philosophy of Right:
since philosophy is exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the
comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a world beyond
which God knows where – or rather, of which we can very well say that we know
where it exists, namely in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination. 43
Celebrating Endlessness
39
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.3.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.492.
41
Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, pp.88-89
42
Most notably Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic trans.
Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005).
43
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right ed. Allen Wood, trans. H.B.Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.20.
40
The anticipation of the future for Hegel should be thought of as the very antithesis of
utopian hubris, or messianic hope in the face of crisis. There is no ‘better’ yet to come
outside of what already is immanent to history. It is therefore the connection of the
two central concepts, progress and contradiction, seen through an apocalyptic lens,
which ultimately connects Hegel’s thinking about history on the discourse of future
crisis. The anticipation of global disaster needs to be read in terms of a faith, of sorts,
in contradiction (the overcoming of crisis through its subsumption) in the process of
historical progress. As Paul Miklowitz has written, it is this aspect of Hegel’s
eschatological scheme that raises the business of philosophical speculation to the
audacious level of the end of thinking, striving, and waiting itself. The eschaton is
achieved in time, as the overcoming of contradiction: “Reconciling finite and infinite,
immanent and transcendent, in the Gnosis of rational speculation, the here-and-now
becomes Absolute: a consummation once devoutly to be wished is blasphemously
achieved.”44
The point of this analysis is to reinforce the revelatory aspect of the Hegelian dialectic
of history and its impact upon thinking about crisis as both linear progress and the
‘overcoming’ of natural cyclical processes. For we must see, stitched into Hegel’s
apocalyptic “commitment”, the idea, to which I have already referred, of the
completion of nature itself into the life of Spirit. Hegel’s belief in the end of history
through a triumph of dialectical reason (though, in reality, contextually specific to the
triumph of Lutheran, philosophical Christianity and Prussian nationalism), is therefore
the celebration of stasis, or a distancing of human ‘ends’ from the necessity of natural
cycles of death and rebirth. The eschaton is that which erodes the need for striving or
the overcoming of crisis. Successive philosophers have pointed out the consequences
of this totalising and nullifying dialectic, and the eschatological expression of Hegel’s
‘end of time’. Catherine Malabou asks, for example, “can there be any temporality
which corresponds to this ‘end of time’ except time’s stasis in the congealed for of a
perpetual present?”45 Paul Miklowitz, too, argues that speculative thought is in
essence the celebration of a repetition of the same, a theme subsequently taken up by
Nietzsche’s eternal return. It is a step which in Hegel involves “not the abrogation of
history but rather its celebration, and its celebratory repetition.”46 Hannah Arendt also
famously made a similar point when she argued that Hegel, “establishes a time-space
in which the very notion of an end is virtually inconceivable”.47
For my own purposes, the references of these commentaries to a celebration of
endlessness are important because a) they recall an interesting parallel to the
discoveries of deep time and Hutton’s geological suggestion of ‘no vestiges of an end’
in the life of the planet, and b) they suggest quietist political connotations. Hegel must
have reflected at times that the “slaughter bench of history” can appear to be no more
than a cycle violence. Indeed, it comes as a strange consolation to learn that even after
professing his optimism at the triumphs of Napoleon’s campaigns as the birth of a
genuinely new age, by the time he reached fifty, living in Berlin and writing the
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel recognises “ever-unrestful times of hope
44
Paul S. Miklowitz, Metaphysics to Metafictions: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the End of Philosophy (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1998) p.92.
45
Malabou, The Future of Hegel, p.4.
46
Miklowitz, Metaphysics to Metafictions, p.102.
47
Hannah Arendt, Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought (London: Penguin,
1993), p.75.
and fear. I had hoped for once we might be done with it. Now I must confess that
things continue as ever. Indeed, in one’s darker hours it seems they are getting
worse.”48 This may go some way to temper the accusations that Hegel was
myopically positive about his own contemporary historic events. But the most
important point is that, for Hegel, the faith one must profess in history’s progress is,
with all its religious apocalyptic connotations, a clarity of vision and one that
incorporates a long, and potentially endless, view of the future.
Clearly Hegel is not bound to the pessimism of recurrent cycles of destruction. It is a
religious vision, above all, since to regard the resolution of contradictions in history is
to live the very self-knowledge of God. Reason’s incarnation in history is the
becoming of absolute self-knowledge, the infinite becoming incarnate in, and with,
the finite. To our critique, then, we need to add the other essential ingredient of
Hegel’s apocalyptic. This is the notion of rupture, since the concept of reconciliation
of contradictions entails the confronting, welcoming and subsuming of the negative.
As Richard J. Bernstein argues, this is parallel to the philosopher’s task of suspending
the common sense desire to dissolve contradictions of finite and infinite.49 But in a
well known passage from Phenomenology of Spirit it sounds rather more like a war
cry, or at least the call to brace oneself for the tremors of disaster:
the Life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself
untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains
itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds
itself… Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and
tarrying with it.50
The “negative” is a complex concept in Hegel but essential for our understanding
here, and an essential component of dialectic itself. One of Hegel’s central premises is
that reality is revealed simultaneously as that which is, and that which is not, on its
way to becoming full potentiality.51 For Hegel, nature itself is to be viewed, at least in
its “abstract idea”, in terms of the negative.52 Nature is, in a sense, not selfsufficiently positive, independent of Logic, of the divine Idea. The above passage
therefore confirms the expression of dialectic, with this powerful, apocalyptic, visual
metaphor, as the staring of negativity in the eye and recognising the necessity of its
cycles and blind obedience of eternal laws. The imperative that follows, however, is
equally important: that we must continue “tarrying with it”. For we recall the very
emergence of apocalyptic thought as the overcoming of repetition, its subsuming into
a metanarrative of history. Hegel combines this revelation of reality with its
necessarily “negative” incarnation.
With this insight we begin finally to recognise a peculiar form of regard to the future
and to future crisis consonant with the problem I described at the start, and by which I
outlined two models of time that have shaped European thought since the modern era:
time’s arrow and the cyclical implications of deep time. Crisis, in other words, may be
seen as both the transcendence of repetition and an acceptance of its necessity. It is
48
Hegel, The Letters quoted in McCarney, Hegel on History, pp.179-180.
Bernstein, The New Constellation.
50
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.19
51
See Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p.123.
52
Hegel, Encyclopedia, p.140.
49
the dialectical aufhebung whose resting place is a final, spiritual state of selfrecognition. It is a regard, or vision, that prefers the internal acceptance of mature
wisdom over the rash desire to spark change that he feared of the utopians. Hegel
believed that utopians were people who were too wrapped up in the idea of new
creation, a trend that had stunted philosophical as well as political progress: “we are
tempted to suppose that we must now begin and keep on beginning afresh forever.”53
The alternative for Hegel was to view precedent moments in history as all incarnate in
the immanence of reason in the present moment.
Hegel’s Legacy for Political Ecology
I have argued that Hegel’s apocalyptic philosophy of history was also a celebration of
permanent unfolding. And this occurs against a backdrop in which both geological,
theological and philosophical discourse has combined both cyclical and linear models
of time to explain this unfolding. I wish to suggest now that this can be shown to
persist in a contemporary discourse. That discourse is a resurgence of interest in the
cosmic cycles of death and rebirth that shape a certain form of political ecology.
The first thing to do is to distinguish carefully between an attraction to temporal
stasis, and that of eternally repeated cycles. For Hegel was very clear that for him it is
not cyclical patterns that constitute progress, but the very opposite: their sublation
(aufhebung), and hence our unchaining of historic progress from the vicissitudes of
nature. And this antipathy towards cyclical thinking is related to Hegel’s racist
caricaturing of the “Oriental world” precisely for the latter’s commitment to circular
temporal models. In his commentary on Chinese and Indian Buddhism in particular,
Hegel is intrigued by the elevation of Nature to the place of Absolute Spirit (whereas
for Hegel Nature represents “alienated Spirit”) and that because “all proceeded from
and returns to Nothingness” there can be no “element of freedom”.54
These comments should only reinforce the extent to which Hegel, alongside Kant in
this case, have stamped the Christian, apocalyptic history upon the European
consciousness. It is this heritage, moreover, that now confronts a crisis in thinking
through its own “ends”. The suspicion with which I began this study has been that
through a thoroughly postmodern commitment to historic progress in an era of global
crisis, it is crisis itself that is celebrated. And in the light of my analysis of the
persistence of a deep time perspectives within this broader apocalyptic sensibility, we
can now appreciate a greater tendency towards accepting the ‘revelation’ of history in
its cycles of death and regeneration. A recent article in Orion magazine on the
“consolations of extinction” typified this switch:
53
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p.12.
G.W.F Hegel, The Philosophy of History trans. J. Sibree (London: Dover Publications, 1956) p.168.
It is worth noting that Kant was similarly opposed to aspects of oriental thought, but in his case due to
its alleged attempt to square the problem of imagining an infinite series: what he caricatured as the
“monstrous system of Lao-kiun” (probably Lao-Tsu), which actively promoted the feeling of
“nothingness” that “brooding” upon the proposal of an infinite series produced.59 Kant had proposed
that it was also the result of a human weakness to prefer the reward of “eternal tranquillity” over the
duty to strive forever towards a goal in the infinite future. Hegel, on the other hand, opposed the notion
of cyclical recurrence of death and rebirth and an infinite future, in favour of a thoroughly historicised
achievement of Spirit, a realm of freedom that spiritualities of circular ‘eternity’ and repetition could
never achieve.
54
The consolations of extinction are an acceptance of death, of all deaths, always,
in all places…Families die. Genera die. Whole ecosystems die. The solar system’s
planets—nine, no, eight, or, okay, maybe twelve, count ‘em how you will—they’re
goners too. Stars, including all 400 billion in the Milky Way: doomed. Galaxies, all
of them, all 100-plus billion of them: doomed. Even protons will decay someday, the
ages of the atom finally closed. This universe—one, perhaps, in an infinite
multiverse—will die in a darkness and cold beyond our imaginings. 55
Whilst an isolated example, the approach described above also draws upon other,
post-Enlightenment discourses such as eco-feminism and deep ecology. These both
attempt to reorient the moral status of humanity in the context of a wider intrinsic
value of the biosphere, and beyond, from which our life is generated. Some of those
voices have argued that taking a deep time perspective can be constructed with a view
to deepening an ethical commitment to the present. The process theologian John Cobb
once wrote, for instance, that “viewing our species from the point of view of the total
natural process does not mean adopting an attitude of calm detachment”.56
Nevertheless, in the light of my exploration of a Hegelian “stasis” towards future
imagination, the assumption that such a deep time perspective represents a reaction
against progress might be misplaced. In fact, this perspective of a ‘bigger picture’
bears similarities with the interpretation of the inwardness of Hegelian dialectic that I
have described above. But it also confirms some of the conceptual roots of its
apocalyptic heritage, which may have been influenced to a large extent by
breakthroughs in cosmology and astronomy. These were the original cosmic
perspectives that allowed the appreciation of patterns operating by vast timescales.
And in doing so the philosophers allowed, in a way, a perspective that essentially
removed the faith in progress from its immediate, experiential base (Hegel’s “retail
version” Providence) and placed it within the safer confines of “deep time”.
Does our contemporary society explore ecological crisis as at once a narrative within
a general progressivist scheme, and at the same time the outworking of nature’s
cyclical movement? Though it has fallen out of favour, a rhetoric of natural cycles is
normally the first port of call for climate skepticism (a good example was the Channel
4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle). Climate skeptics usually assert
that the anthropogenic elements of current warming patterns is greatly overplayed:
what we are experiencing now is the outplaying of natural cycles we have no control
over. In a sort of parody of that exchange that took place in the late eighteenth century
between uniformitarianism and catastrophism, climate skeptics again evoke the
‘rational’ claims of an ever changing and evolving cosmos against the belief in
definitive and final catastrophic events. With a twist of irony, therefore, it may well
be the return to archetypes, or the natural rhythms of ecological balance, which is
desired in the condemnation of the anthropogenic disruption of that balance.
A return to cyclical thinking in relation to geological timescales (i.e. a far-flung
future) can also be recognised in our cultural fascination with the continuation of
planetary life after the ‘inevitable’ demise of the human. This is manifest in the recent
Christopher Cokinos, (2007), “The Consolations of Extinction” Orion Magazine May/June 2007
[http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/268/], September 2008.
56
John B. Cobb, Jr. Cobb, Process Theology as Political Theology, (London: Westminster Press,
1972)
<http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=3035&C=2542>, 16 September 2008.
55
explosion of thought experiments on the survival of life on earth after humans have
(by entirely arbitrary causes) disappeared: thought experiments such as Alan
Weisman’s The World Without Us (2008); Jan Zalasiewicz’ The Earth After Us
(2008); the National Geographic’s Aftermath: Population Zero (2008) and the History
Channel’s Life After People (2008). In all of these examples what is striking is not the
ability to represent cataclysmic ‘ends’ in the life of our species, but rather the desire
to see the the next ‘stage’ of life on earth as an essentially painless transition: in
none of the above examples is a period of suffering, war or disease suggested
by which not ‘the human’ but ‘human civilisation’ is reduced and threatened.
Conclusion
Examining the apocalyptic roots of a Hegelian perspective has therefore opened up a
conceptual frame for better understanding the political paradox with which we started.
It has revealed a perspective caught between the revelation of future crisis and the
crisis of action: what does it mean to ‘act’ at all within this environment? One cannot
help but read Hegel with an implicit feeling that a sense of “withdrawal” remains at
the heart of the end of history. A positive relationship with historic events remains
ambivalent at best, and actively negative at worst. A quietist, introspective colouring
of the ultimate achievement of the understanding - or of Spirit - might therefore be
thought of as an appropriate conclusion to this analysis of a Hegelian concept of
progress. In its relation to the subordinate world of finite, natural cycles the telos of
world progress is not to be threatened by the apparent ‘unnaturalness’ of lived life.
Hegel’s apocalyptic commitment is able to maintain both the continuation of natural
cycles and the eschatological ability for humanity to rise above it, to allow its
progress to be untainted by it. Indeed, in the Logic Hegel speaks of the “maturity” of
religious thought that is able to realise the Absolute as the transcendence of the
cyclical conflict. It stands in stark distinction to the young, immature perspective that
dwells only on naturalistic finitude:
All unsatisfied endeavour ceases, when we recognise that the final purpose of the
world is accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself. Generally speaking,
this is the man’s way of looking; while the young imagine that the world is utterly
sunk in wickedness, and that the first thing needful is a thorough transformation. The
religious mind, on the contrary, views the world as ruled by Divine Providence, and
therefore correspondent with what it ought to be. But this harmony between the ‘is’
and the ‘ought to be’ is not torpid and rigidly stationary. Good, the final end of the
world, has being, only while it constantly produces itself. And the world of spirit and
the world of nature continue to have this distinction, that the latter moves only in a
recurring cycle, while the former certainly also makes progress.57
Hegel’s final rejection of the “recurring cycle” of nature has become the very
foundation for our own difficulties in articulating future crisis. For our inheritance of
a Hegelian world progress can be seen in the apocalyptic faith that somewhere beyond
these immediate, destructive and finite patterns of nature, all is reconciled in the
world of Spirit. How might we understand this in our daily lives? For us, perhaps,
world crisis exists but is simply swallowed up in the inward reconciliations of
57
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic
[http://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/hegel/works/sl/slidea.htm#SL234] [accessed 12/06/09].
progress, lived through hyperreality TV; 24 hour news cycles; saturation of
information and representation, and the spiritualised consolations of extinction. If
Hegel teaches us anything for today’s crisis consciousness therefore, it is a caution, or
at very least a question mark, over the propensity to take the ‘bigger picture’ of
planetary evolution. A political ecology that has woken up to the macro-scale changes
of deep, geological time is certainly a key element to many laudable ethical
movements, from eco-feminism to deep ecology. But the combination of this view
with the blind, apocalyptic faith in human progress towards a future it is barely
conscious of, can lead to a state that is worse than blindness: seeing the crisis without
the ability to respond meaningfully; an ironic celebration of crisis; its becoming
‘immanent’ to the human narrative beyond all petty human, ethical endeavours.
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Biography
Stefan Skrimshire is a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy of religion at the
University of Manchester, UK. His teaching and research focus on the persistence, in
contemporary political life, of three concepts: apocalypse, eschatology and utopia. He
is author of Politics of Fear, Practice of Hope (Continuum: 2008); editor of Future
Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (Continuum: 2010) and the
director of a documentary film, Beyond the Tipping Point? Conversations on Climate,
Action and the Future (2010). He has led a 3 year research project at Manchester
called Future Ethics that explored the relationship between climate tipping points,
apocalyptic rhetoric, and political action.