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8. The Greco-Germanic World: The Home of Self-Conscious Reason
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297 8 The Greco-Germanic World The Home of Self-Conscious Reason The only distinction between the Africans and the Asiatics on the one hand, and the Greeks, Romans, and moderns on the other, is that the latter know and it is explicit for them, that they are free, but the others are so without knowing that they are, and thus without existing as being free. This constitutes the enormous difference in their condition. —G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy We saw in the previous chapters the structure of knowledge that undergirds Hegel’s Eurocentrism as regards the Third World. This chapter addresses the Greco-Germanic Geist and the claim of its essential difference from and absolute superiority over the Third World. It is this claim that is at the core of Hegel’s Eurocentrism.In a speech delivered September 29, 1809, at the Nuremberg Gymnasium, the thirty-nine-year-old rector comments regarding Western antiquity: “The works of the ancients contain the most noble food in the most noble form: golden apples in silver bowls. They are incomparably richer than all the works of any other nation and of any other time.” The ancients are splendid in the “greatness of their sentiments, their statuesque virtue free from moral ambiguity, their patriotism, the grand manner of their deeds and characters , the multiplicity of their destinies, of their morals and constitutions.” To recall these achievements “is enough to vindicate the assertion that in the compass of no other civilization was there ever united so much that was splendid, admirable, original, many-sided, and instructive.” Rector Hegel points out the need for studying Greek and Latin in order to gain access to the classical civilizations . The “riches [of the classical civilization], however, are intimately connected with the language, and only through and in it do we obtain them in all 298 Philosophy of History their special significance.”1 It is necessary to “appropriate the world of antiquity not only to possess it, but even more to digest and transform it” (1996, 326–27). For Hegel, the ancients represent the distant cultural foundations of Western modernity. Around this idea, liberals, conservatives, and Marxists join hands to celebrate the “uniqueness of the West.”2 In Aesthetics, Hegel makes one of the many statements stipulating his Eurocentrism. He sees the military and cultural victory of the West over the East (examples: Greeks against Persians, European Christians against Muslims , Portuguese against Indians) as being in accord with reason. “And so in almost all the great epics we see peoples different in morals, religion, speech, in short in mind and surroundings, arrayed against one another; and we are made completely at peace by the world-historically justified victory of a higher principle over the lower which succumbs to a bravery that leaves nothing over for the defeated.” In this vein, “the epics of the past describe the triumph of the West over the East, of European moderation, and the individual beauty of a reason that sets limits to itself, over Asiatic brilliance and over the magnificence of a patriarchal unity still devoid of perfect articulation or bound together so abstractly that it collapses into parts separate from one another” (1998–99, 2:1062, emphasis added). According to Hegel, the West represents “reason that sets limits to itself,” thus establishing “European moderation.” Asia, in contrast, epitomizes the domain of unreason without bounds, the land of limitless irrationality . Hegel’s paradigm of world history is a consistent and systemic articulation of the absolute superiority of the West over the rest of the world. The place Hegel assigns to the Greco-Germanic Geist in world history should be examined within the framework of this claim, wherein he sees the Greek world as the foundation of Western civilization. 1. Hegel makes similar remarks regarding language in the preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic. For example, he praises the richness of the German language for its abundance of logical expressions, which he claims are lacking in Chinese (1991, 32). 2. For the classic Marxist rendition of this Hegelian idea, see P. Anderson 1979. For a critique of Anderson’s view, see Tibebu 1990. [54.173.221.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:56 GMT) The Greco-Germanic World 299 Greece The ancient Greeks lay the historical foundation for the making of the West. They were the forerunners of the Greco-Germanic Geist. It is with the Greeks that Hegel draws the line of...