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C H A P T E R 2 Clausewitz and Hegel THE DUEL AND ALTERNATION OF OPPOSITES Benoît Chantre: When you said that for Clausewitz Napoleon incarnated something other than the manifestation of Spirit in history, you suggested that Clausewitz was in opposition to Hegel, his exact contemporary. The worldwide rise of undifferentiation supports your thesis. It is a powerful intuition , so I would like us to go back to the triangle that links Napoleon as an ambivalent model to his two greatest interpreters, both of whom were at Jena in 1806 and died in Berlin in 1831. René Girard: You are asking me to take to its logical conclusion an intuition that came to me while we were speaking. That would require philosophical knowledge that I lack. I am probably opposing Hegelianism, much more than Hegel himself. However, it is essential to compare these two figures, even though Clausewitz was not a philosopher—this has to be kept in mind. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind introduced an impressive philosophical illusion that we are finally managing to discard. It came out in 1807, the year after the Prussians were defeated by Napoleon. Hegel, who admired the ideals of the French Revolution and had followed the events in Paris when he was at the Tübingen Seminary with Schelling and Hölderlin, saw that Napoleon’s actions were the paradoxical manifestation of those ideals in space and time. Napoleon both invaded and liberated the Germans, in a way (perhaps the worst way). Thus we have the famous quotation according to which, when he 27 28 Clausewitz and Hegel was working in Jena, Hegel saw the World-Soul pass on horseback under his window.1 The legend misleads us, for Hegel is also the thinker who distrusted the Enlightenment, the Aufklärung, in which he was raised. We therefore have to try to avoid the commonplaces about his thought that always come to mind. BC: Indeed, note that in 1820, when Hegel writes in the Preface to The Philosophy of Right, that “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational ,”2 the reality in question was not the reality that we can perceive but the unity of essence and existence. The phrase thus has nothing to do with the “meaning of history” that Hegel supposedly claimed to understand and to have seen Napoleon as incarnating. Hegelianism has masked the tragic sense inhabiting Hegelian philosophy, both with respect to self-sacrifice, in which an individual risks his or her biological life to manifest the Spirit, and with respect to the absolute Spirit itself. We should not forget that Hegel spoke of a “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.”3 RG: Indeed, for him there was only one Incarnation: that of God in history . According to him, only that “divine mediation” has made the emergence of true rationality possible. All of Hegel’s dialectic is therefore based on the Revelation. Here too we have to leave behind the sempiternal schema of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Hegelian dialectic has little to do with that. It went from the Spirit to alienation, and then out of alienation through a transcendence or elevation (Aufhebung) that is the reconciliation of the two opposing terms. Dialectic presents a position, then the “negation” of that position, and finally a “negation of the negation.” To open up to the other, to get outside of oneself through alienation, is to prepare a return to oneself that provides true access to the real, access to real rationality free of any subjectivity. As we can see, this is a philosophical echo of Christ’s death and resurrection. All the power, but also all the ambivalence, of Hegel’s philosophy lies in this parallel. From the Christian revelation, Hegel took the need for a double reconciliation , a double Aufhebung: that of humans among one another, and that of humanity with God. Peace and salvation would thus be two conjoined movements. Hegel thought that churches had failed to regulate the interplay of human will, so he assigned the task to the State, the “concrete universal” that has nothing to do with specific states. The rational universality of the State is supposed to become a worldwide organization, but in the meantime individual states will continue to wage war. The series of wars is an essential contingency of history. However, if for Hegel war was only a contingency that could not be reduced to reason, it cannot be denied that he thought of it in...

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