We just said that for Hegel, Spirit comes into being through practices, through action. Feuerbach’s contribution to this genealogy of Marx’s idea of reality that we are tracing comes in here, when in The Essence of Christianity he begins to ask about what types of practices or actions indeed constitute meaningful or Spiritual action for Hegel in very frank and basic ways: Are these “practices” ideas? That is, does having a conception suddenly change the development of Spirit? Or are conceptions only “potential” actions that have no actuality present in them? But wouldn’t this mean that ideas are not really existent? What if they alone seem to effect a historical change—like the idea of “equality” in the French Revolution? Similarly, are actions in the world of beings material actions? And, if so, since the whole world of beings is material, do all actions then mean? In short, if I kill a man, is this a “practice”—is it meaningful—in that it was done with a knife and my two hands, or is it meaningful in that it was intended, conceived in my mind, and done with the purely affective, cognized emotion of hate?
Similar questions were and are directed towards Foucault and his idea of discourse (e.g. “is a discursive practice material or not?”). But, like Foucault, Hegel was not eager to specify any clearer answers using the terms the questions were put to him in—rather, he wished to preserve the problematizing power that his formulations withheld in the articulations in which he constructed them (one sees Hegel even resistant in the lecture hall: indeed, from various notes of pupils we find him in fact most resistant to elaborate using more colloquial philosophic language in this traditionally looser discursive atmosphere). This left his followers frustrated. But, as far as Hegel was concerned, these questions were already settled by the consistency of his own developed system. Thus Hegel answered them as follows: both an idea and a material event in the world could constitute an action, so long as they made up and altered the essence of Spirit—that is, what is meaningful and what, as what is meaningful, determines what is able to be meaningful. So long as the history of meaning was taken up and reasserted as meaningful (or unmeaning) in some way, it was a Spiritual action or practice (or not). Spirit was therefore not identical with any particular being—no single person could be elevated to the position of Spirit because she or he could not possibly, in their determinate human being or consciousness, exist as the totality of history. Spirit could only be a part, a consequence, an unintended effect of a personal (conscious) action; indeed, this is why Hegel in his famous Introduction to his lectures on The Philosophy of History says that Spirit effectuates itself via “the cunning of reason:” reason, which is Spiritual and not personal, makes an act informed by what we normally call “reason” (thinking) that issues forth from a person suddenly have the unintended effect of actually being rational (the form it would supposedly take if it were consciously thought), insofar as it brings about a meaningful Spiritual consequence or instantiates Spirit in some unforeseen piece of the act. It is clear, then, that Spirit could thereby be interpersonal, residing somewhere between two or more beings, like in a significant fight between a worker (in Hegel’s terms in the Phenomenology, a “slave”) and a master that leads to a revolution of the workers: the Spiritual act is not the worker nor the master, but the fight—the startling disrespect for hierarchy the worker unconsciously, in merely fighting, (along with the weakness the master, in merely unconsciously engaging the worker, in merely fighting) imbued it with. But if this was the case—i.e. that Spirit can be, as well as an effect of a being, an effect of more than one being that stands residing between them, as it were—if this was the case neither was Spirit completely identical with any particular feature of interpersonal or intersubjective society: Spirit was not the custom of language, or the idea of free will, or practice of revolution, or any particular cause or instrument that allowed a group of beings to form themselves and their society around meaning, i.e. Spirit itself. We begin to sense the frustration of the Hegelians when confronted with such an elusive reality.
But the perfect concrete example of what Spirit is and how remarkably present in the world it can be, as well as what it is not manifests itself in the oft quoted saying of Hegel about Napoleon: “Napoleon was Spirit on horseback.” The way to understand this phrase is not to construe it as “Napoleon was Spirit itself, there, just happening to be seated on horseback.” This would make the totality of Spirit itself a thing. The totality of Spirit itself is only Spirit—this is why Hegel has to take over the word Geist from its popular use and make it signify something particular and idiosyncratic that is only found within his system. Rather, this phrase should be understood by construing it as “Napoleon was Spirit-on-horseback, Spirit embodying itself in the act that was Napoleon-sitting-on-horseback.” This does not detract from the sublime conjunction of the high and the low that occurs with Spirit—namely the fact that Spirit is there and actual in the body of Napoleon on horseback (i.e. though it is not itself that thing, Spirit is in a thing). But it shows that, as we said before, the totality of Spirit itself is only Spirit, is not able to be reduced to or confined as itself within one particular piece of the world of beings, though it is within it. Spirit is only is the basis and the result of this piece, this individual act. Again like Foucault, this view led to charges of idealism, especially as the later works of Hegel took only the Spiritual view of society, psychology, nature and other subjects: many were outraged that Hegel viewed things as real only in the aspects that supposedly possessed this interpersonal, unconscious (yet conscious, rational), elusive, frustrating stuff he called Spirit. But above all these criticisms, the question for those like Feuerbach remains the following: what type of action is Napoleon here? What, more specifically than meaning, can allow us to distinguish another type of Spiritual act in the future if we see one? Hegel refuses to give one on these terms, and remains within his own discourse.
Unlike Foucault, however, despite this ambivalence to specification, we already see that this conception of Spirit irreducible to a conventionally defined type of action indeed allowed Hegel remarkable specificity in what was considered meaningful Spiritual action: as we saw, an action was not Spiritual when it did not take up meaning and the accumulation of meaning in its unfolding. Elaborating on the consequences of this, we can see two main spheres of occurrences (that, we should note, also subsume the various occurrences we have just described) excluded from the realm of Spirituality. First, a mere happening, like the chemical processes within a leaf on a tree, is not Spiritual. It does not take up meaning but leaves meaning alone, and confines itself to a mere operation that would ensure its own growth. This is why we have to continually use the phrase “world of beings” when referring to the world that participates in Hegel’s Spirit: using just “world” would invite the assumption that the natural world, which for the most part leaves meaning alone, was meaningful. The Spiritual world is a world of beings, of things that exist in meaning. Indeed, Hegel called this sphere of what in itself leaves the issue of meaning alone and keeps to itself “nature.” Along with these “natural” types of happenings, there is also a second sphere of happenings that leaves meaning as it is, does not change meaning: it would be something like the death of the poor in the streets of Berlin. This is a mere fact: it occurs, but it does not alter anything within the Spiritual world of beings; it is a result of the changes in meaning that constitutes the meaningful—such as the general opinion within Berlin of the poor, which was that they (the poor) do not work hard enough (or at least as hard as the bourgeoisie) and thus deserve their poverty. If this were to change, and change because of a poor person dying in the streets, then the death would be meaningful, would be Spiritual. But as it is it just issues from the general formation of Spirit at that time. For Hegel, the question was not whether these types of actions should matter or not, but whether they genuinely contributed to the development of the world of beings in history. What was absolutely clear was that if they did not, then they were excluded from this history—the history of meaning.
Now, the best Hegelians, like Feuerbach and Marx, did not quibble with the question of whether Hegel was being idealist or not merely by invoking something intersubjective, unconscious, elusive, etc. as reality, which was and still is the most prevalent and most banal criticism of Hegel. Rather they saw precisely these exclusions and what caused them as the foremost problem: in the end, it was not Hegel’s ambivalence towards specifying a particular type of action that would constitute Spirit and reality, but the specificity this ambivalence produced that tyrannized any attempt to analyze phenomena within the world of beings, any attempt to get at reality. How could one tell whether something was genuinely part of the world of meaningful beings or not? And were Hegel’s judgments as to what was meaningful anywhere near correct? Here the stakes are higher than any inane question about idealism, for if something was not deemed Spiritual, it simply did not need to count as meaningful. More: it did not really exist from the perspective of reality. With one move, Hegel excluded the two spheres we delineated from existence. Essentially, he made all the findings of natural science into things that were interesting, but did not count—because they related to a world of “nature” and not of Spirit (and he did this without specifying whether the ideas of science or its material, empirical findings were meaningless). Was this correct? Did the findings of science fail to constitute any truth, anything eternally meaningful in itself for beings, other than the truth that resulted from their altering the ability of beings to mean? Were there not natural truths, like gravity? Similarly, were there not truths about society and the operation of society? Is the poor worker dying in the street to be regarded forever only as a mere effect of the development of meaning? Hegel apparently could tell that these things did not matter, for he could divine what was meaningful. But for others who followed him, how could they legitimately see something that fell within these two spheres and tell whether it was meaningful or not? In the late 1830’s and early 1840’s, clear historical figures like Napoleon were gone, and the task at hand was precisely to divine, within the poor cities and with the aid of the flourishing sciences, what was meaningful!
This is where Hegel’s followers—most were former students of Hegel at the University of Berlin, still in their youth—split. The Right Hegelians decided to remain in a perspective that could see only “Napoleonic” forces, and simply looked around them and affirmed that these two spheres were as unimportant as Hegel said they were. This amounted to saying that the current state of their society was meaningful and did not need to change unless some larger, recognizably meaningful force came on the scene. These were mostly students of Hegel who had risen to positions within the German universities and taught the coherence of Hegel’s perspective to the next generation of philosophy students. As Hegel was celebrated within certain spheres of the academics, most notably in Berlin among Hegel’s old colleagues, and as these academics now controlled the ability to appoint younger faculty, these young Hegelians seeking steady positions within the educational system could espouse this view of Hegel in their papers and in their classes (that is, the view Hegel’s old contemporaries held—this is why Marx calls this young group the “Old Hegelians” in The German Ideology) and ensure themselves a post as well as success. It was not merely a matter of allegiances to a “doctrinal” view of Hegel that got these Right Hegelians the posts, either, for a few years after Hegel’s death Hegelianism in general went under attack throughout the academy, and yet those who were more conservative Hegelians still got posts. Evidently, affirming the current state of society had no problem of poverty except as an effect of the infinitely more profound creation of meaning in the world was a political move—thus most of these Right Hegelians tended to be “Right” or conservative in their political views. The Left Hegelians, which included Feuerbach and, for a time, Marx, took the opposite approach, attempting to revise Hegel to be able to see into the two spheres excluded by Hegel’s conception of Spirit. In doing so, each had to somehow address the first, which as we saw dealt with the position of “nature” in Hegel, in order to address the second, more interesting (to them) sphere concerning the state of society and its inadequacies—again we see this as a political move, a “Leftist” or liberal move. The essence of their movement was to use and apply Hegel to analyze society through what they called “criticism:” it was very similar to how the Frankfurt School later used and applied Marx...
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