by Greg Johnson
Duchesne writes, further:
Western culture, in contrast to the virtues of serene acceptance, calmness, or composure one finds in Eastern religions, has always been charged with tension, always striving to transcend itself, and thus always engaged in a fight against itself—a fight that would culminate in the nihilism, cultural relativism, weariness, and lack of faith in Western civilization that dominates today. (p. 284)
7. HEGEL & THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION
Duchesne discusses the nature of the “struggle for prestige,” and its role in shaping the Western character, in terms of a unique interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. And here I will pause for a moment simply to note that this is one of the features that makes his book so impressive. On top of everything else—his survey of the historical literature of several decades, demolition of revisionist histories, refutation of cultural relativism, survey of Western achievements, and discussions of figures like Weber and Spengler—we are treated to an original interpretation of perhaps the most difficult text in Western philosophy. (And Duchesne will go on to surprise and impress us in other ways as well.)
The Phenomenology of Spirit is traditionally understood to be an account of the process by which humanity comes to consciousness of its own nature as self-knowing and self-determining. (“Spirit,” Geist, is nothing supernatural: it simply refers to the human spirit or human nature.) The Phenomenology can’t accurately be described as an intellectual history of human consciousness, because although Hegel sometimes discusses actual historical movements he does not move in chronological order, and often it is not at all obvious how what is under discussion refers to concrete historical phenomena. It would be closer to the truth to see the Phenomenology as a “natural history” of human consciousness, surveying its various forms, and showing how their telos must be the achievement of a standpoint in which human beings are in full possession of themselves; fully aware of what they are.
Duchesne makes the radical suggestion, however, that what Hegel is really doing is a phenomenology of the Western spirit (p. 302). He notes, correctly, that when Hegel makes explicit references to historical figures, events, and intellectual movements, he refers exclusively to those that appear in Western history. To be sure, Hegel never says that he is describing the Western spirit alone; he frames things in universalist terms, talking of “humanity,” and of such things as “reason,” which are implied to be universal human possessions. Duchesne argues, however, that everything Hegel says about “spirit” (and about “reason”) applies to the West almost exclusively. And he argues, further, that Hegel is one of a long list of Western philosophers who have simply (and often naively) projected features of the Western spirit onto “humanity” as a whole. (This is a fascinating thesis, and one that I shall explore at greater length in a later section.)
Duchesne tells us that in the Phenomenology Hegel portrays spirit “as if it were in a state of dissatisfaction and alienation, ceaselessly pressing ahead, trying to understand, overcome, and sublimate every non-conceptualized unknown it encountered” (p. 302). It seeks to take everything in; to know and to control the whole. And Spirit is, furthermore, characterized by a kind of “negativity” about itself, perpetually questioning itself. Its aim seems to be a radical sort of freedom, in which it has cancelled all difference, everything that might place a limit on its ability to re-form itself according to its own self-grounding principles and designs. Sound familiar?
Duchesne writes, further:
What drew Hegel’s attention was the seemingly restless desire of Western reason to become fully conscious of itself as free activity. It was this desire to be the source of its own assumptions and principles that drove Western reason forward until it brought into existence a culture wherein individuals enjoyed freedom of inquiry, tolerance of diverse views, and meritorious achievement. According to Hegel, [Western] individuals become what they are potentially—rationally self-conscious agents—when they recognize themselves as free in their institutions and laws. (p. 303; first instance of italics added)
In other words, Hegel gives us an account of how the “human” spirit restlessly seeks to free itself of all encumbrances, to achieve total knowledge of itself and the conditions that make it possible, and to become self-legitimating. This process reaches its goal when spirit creates a philosophy (Hegel’s) and a social structure which truly recognize men as free and self-determining. But Duchesne’s thesis is that it is, in effect, Western spirit that Hegel is truly describing, and that he is actually telling the tale of how Western spirit gave rise to a fully adequate self-understanding, reflected in the coming-into-being of classical liberal, democratic states.371
Hegel believed that spirit had come into full possession of itself in his own time, through the increasing democratization of European society violently inaugurated by the French revolution. And he seems to have taken the position that this development marks the “end of history.” This is a controversial interpretation among Hegel scholars. Also, the idea of an “end” to history strikes most people as absurd, because it seems to suggest that things have just stopped happening. But the idea makes sense if one understands history, as Hegel did, as the process by which man achieves consciousness of himself as free. If we have achieved that consciousness, and developed institutions that reflect it, it is indeed difficult to see how anything fundamental remains to be developed, so far as our institutions and our self-understanding are concerned.
My readers are likely to be quite unsympathetic to Hegel’s idea that the goal of history is the development of liberal, democratic states. And they are even less likely to side with him in thinking that our modern institutions reflect an adequate human self-conception. Nevertheless, however one evaluates our modern institutions, it really is quite plausible to see how they are indeed the culmination of certain Western tendencies of thought and action. Even if we wish to reject modern liberalism, it does seem as if it is the result of something in us; something peculiarly Western. (Readers who find themselves immediately resisting this claim should withhold judgment until they’ve read my discussion, in sections nine and ten, of the development of the Western conception of self and of Western political institutions.)
If, for the moment, we tentatively accept the idea that Western history does have the pattern and the telos that Hegel imputes to it, let’s now turn our attention to how the whole process began. For it is Hegel’s account of our remotest, primal origins that is really what is most important for Duchesne.
For Hegel, human history (or, perhaps, Western history) begins with a struggle between two individuals, who represent basic human types. This is the famous “master-slave dialectic” of the Phenomenology. “Master” is Herr and “Slave” is Knecht, and, predictably, Hegel scholars have endlessly debated the proper translations of these terms. It is entirely correct, for example, to point out that Herr might be better translated as “lord” and Knecht as “servant.” But I will stick with the most familiar translations, as Duchesne does, and refer to “master” and “slave.” It is the struggle between these two that constitutes Hegel’s “state of nature”—an answer, in effect, to the highly implausible states of nature dreamed of by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. That this is Hegel’s state of nature is seldom recognized by Hegel scholars, who take the discussion to be mainly about modern epistemological concerns. But Hegel signals that he wants to be interpreted this way when he writes elsewhere “the fight for recognition [between master and slave] . . . can only occur in the natural state, where men exist only as single, separate individuals” (quoted in Duchesne, p. 326; italics added).
In brief: two men engage in a life or death struggle with each other. What has occasioned the struggle is unimportant. Suffice it to say that there is some dispute between them (perhaps a dispute over ownership). Each wants to compel the recognition of the other; to demand the other’s respect and admission of his right in the matter. It is, in short, an affair of honor. One yields to the other, thereby bec
oming his servant or slave. What characterizes him? He values his physical survival more than his honor; his fear and his love of life are greater than his ideals, his self-respect. The “master” is the reverse: he is willing to die for an ideal, for his honor. Following Alexandre Kojève’s controversial interpretation, Duchesne takes Hegel to be claiming that in this primal struggle human spirit (and human self-consciousness) first emerge. Human nature is born when man negates the animal in himself—his desire for self-preservation—for the sake of something that doesn’t physically exist (an ideal).
In this act, man first turns toward the idea, which only exists for man, and toward himself. For he must self-consciously choose to deny his fear and his love of life, for the sake of his ideal conception of himself, his honor. The struggle for recognition is thus the birth of human self-consciousness. For Hegel, the “political” result of the struggle is the coming into being of hierarchy: some are subordinated to others. But in a real sense one man is “master” not because he masters another, but because he masters his own animal drives. And, fundamentally, the other man loses the struggle because he is a slave to those same drives.
When Hegel develops the dialectic beyond this initial stage, however, he argues that the slave eventually turns the tables on his master. The master desires recognition, but he cannot value the recognition of an inferior. So, he abandons himself to sensual pleasure and becomes the sort of effete aristocrat with whom Hegel was familiar. Meanwhile the slave, put to work by the master, creates culture, seeking different means of obtaining true freedom (and recognition) for himself—a process that culminates in the coming into being of the modern, liberal-democratic state.
However, it is when the dialectic twists and turns beyond the initial struggle for recognition that Duchesne parts company with Hegel (or, rather, with Kojève’s quasi-Marxist reading of Hegel). To name just one problem—to which we shall return later—it is absurd to claim that Western culture is the product of either real or figurative “servants,” given the overrepresentation of men of aristocratic birth in the history of Western philosophy, science, and art. (This is a point that really demands a book in itself.)
But the more serious problem here is with Hegel’s claim that the master is unable to achieve his desire for recognition, since he has made a slave of the only person who could give it to him. This is simply a non-sequitur, for as Duchesne asks (echoing the Hegel scholar Allen W. Wood) why can’t the master receive recognition from his peers, i.e. from other masterly men? This obvious problem points to what seems to be a serious misunderstanding, on Hegel’s part, of the psychology of the aristocratic master type.
Francis Fukuyama commits the same fallacy in his The End of History and the Last Man (1992), an otherwise very valuable book which is heavily indebted to Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Fukuyama suggests that the historical contributions of aristocratic masters were quite brief and unfruitful, since they went on to lead parasitic lives. And when Fukuyama discusses the master type he uses as examples men like Stalin and Mao, who were megalomaniacs moved by a narcissistic desire to subjugate everyone around them, and were quite content to receive the adulation of inferiors.
What Hegel-Kojève-Fukuyama fail to understand is that the aristocratic master desires recognition of his worth by similar men possessing equal worth. “Masters” in the mold of Stalin and Mao are actually slavishly dependent on the approval of others—any and all others. (They are “second-handers,” as Ayn Rand would have said.) A true aristocrat may (and should) give a damn about the plebes, but he doesn’t give a damn about what they think of him. Why? Because their judgment is incorrigibly plebian; not concerned uppermost with ideals like honor, but with the mundane, the trivial, and the material. As Hegel himself astutely observed, “No man is a hero to his valet—not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.”372
Further, Fukuyama falsely asserts that aristocratic societies were to be found “the world over.” In fact, Duchesne argues that what we find in the West is a unique form of aristocracy in which the lords were free men, not mere vassals to a king, and the king was “first among equals.” Taking his inspiration from a suitably modified Hegel, Duchesne envisions the Western state of nature as one in which free and equal Indo-European aristocratic warriors competed with one another for prestige—each trying to outdo the others, to achieve personal glory and personal immortality through the words of the poets who recorded their deeds.
It is from this primordial Indo-European struggle for recognition that Western history flows, along with all its achievements. All that is unique about us is founded ultimately on our deep, thumotic desire to have our worth and dignity recognized. And all our Western greatness is founded on the fact that some men have felt the desire not just to be recognized as “equal,” but as better—but, again, only by those whose recognition is worth a damn. The first such men to feel these stirrings were the original Indo-European aristocratic warriors.
Duchesne writes:
I will argue . . . that the beginnings of self-consciousness presuppose the historical existence of self-assertive characters living in a heroic culture. The unceasing aristocratic desire for personal distinction was, in fact, the basis for the awakening of human self-consciousness and the eventual formation of an integrated personality capable of understanding the opposition between the “natural” and the “mental” world, leading to the dialectic of Western reason and freedom, which Hegel captured in his Phenomenology of the [Western] Spirit. (p. 332; bracketed insertion is Duchesne’s)
Now, Duchesne is obviously not claiming that only Westerners have thumos. One thinks, for example, of the Japanese Samurai, who seem to have been about as thumotic a bunch as one could imagine—fighting duels and even taking their own lives over honor. Yet the samurai were unlike Indo-European warrior aristocrats in at least one crucial respect: they swore complete and total vassalage to their lord. Their bondage (no other word will do) was so complete they were expected to commit suicide if their lord fell in battle. And living as an exemplary samurai was not a means to personal glory or distinction: it was conceived rather as a Zen path to the effacing of one’s individuality. As Hagakure states, “The Way of the Samurai is found in death. . . . [The Samurai] has already given up his life and has become one with his lord.”
Western thumos seems to be different both in degree and in kind from the thumos we find elsewhere. Westerners are simply far more prone to rebel against authority and to demand recognition of their personal honor and dignity (no Western nobleman would ever have stood for the kind of treatment meted out by Japanese lords to their aristocratic, samurai vassals). And, to get down to brass tacks, we are also just much more prone to pick fights. Further, our thumotic nature has a peculiarly individualistic twist to it. Our aristocratic warrior ancestors did not simply demand that others treat them with the honor appropriate to their social station—they wanted to be honored as distinctive and unique individuals. Duchesne argues essentially that the uniqueness of Western culture flows from the uniqueness of our thumos: both its matchless ferocity and its peculiar character.
8. THE INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS
Duchesne writes that “it is only in reference to Indo-European aristocratic berserkers that we can speak in Hegelian terms of a fight to the death for the sake of pure prestige” (p. 387). And he gets a little help from Nietzsche (to whom we will return later): “The noble caste was in the beginning the barbarian caste: their superiority lay not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical—they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means as much as ‘more complete beasts’)” (quoted in Duchesne, p. 341).
Of course, any discussion of the Indo-Europeans in academic circles is automatically fraught with controversy. In case you are unaware, the reason for this is that the Indo-Europeans are the same people scholars used to refer to as the Aryans: the ancient ancestors of today’s Europeans, whose homeland was probably the Pontic-Caspian steppe. That the
Indo-Europeans existed as a genetically-distinct ethnic group is undeniable. But to admit this, of course, is tantamount to admitting that there is (or was) an “Aryan race.”
Thus, while there are still quite a few scholars devoting themselves, in one way or another, to “Indo-European studies,” they are at great pains to make sure that they say nothing that might cause other academics to suspect them of far-Right sympathies. This is taken to such extremes that many scholars tend to avoid any talk of an Indo-European people or culture at all, and instead treat “Indo-European” merely as a linguistic marker. For the uninitiated, the Indo-European language family comprises most of the languages of Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Iranian plateau. In one way or another, these languages are all derived from an original Indo-European language (dubbed “Proto-Indo-European” by linguists).
But how did the dispersal of the original Indo-European language take place? This is perhaps the touchiest question of all in Indo-European studies. Clearly, it had to have happened due to the dispersion of the Indo-Europeans themselves, but it is the nature of this dispersion that is so controversial. Duchesne asks “how do we explain the incredible superimposition of Indo-European languages on a majority of substrate speakers by a minority of pastoral peoples who had expanded over territories many times greater than their original homelands?” (p. 346).