The Life of the Mind (41 page)

The primacy of the past, however—as Koyré discovered—disappears entirely when Hegel comes to discuss Time, for him, above all, "human time"
⁸⁷
whose flux man first, as it were, unthinkingly experiences as sheer motion, until he happens to reflect on the meaning of outside events. It then turns out that the mind's attention is primarily directed toward the future, namely, toward the time that is in the process of coming toward us (indicated, as I have said, in the German Zukunft, from
zu kommen,
like the French
avenir
from
à venir),
and this anticipated future negates the mind's "enduring present," which it transforms into an anticipated "no-more." In this context, "the dominant dimension of time is the future, which takes priority over the past." "Time finds its truth in the future since it is the future that will finish and accomplish Being. But Being, finished and accomplished, belongs as such to the Past."
⁸⁸
This reversal of the ordinary time sequence—past-present-future—is caused by man's denying his present: he "says
no
to his Now" and thus creates his own future.
⁸⁹
Hegel himself does not mention the Will in this context, nor does Koyré, but it seems obvious that the faculty behind the Mind's negation is not thinking but willing, and that Hegel's description of experienced human time relates to the time sequence appropriate to the willing ego.

It is appropriate because the willing ego when it forms its projects does indeed live for the future. In Hegel's famous words, the reason "the present [the Now] cannot resist the future" is by no means the inexorability with which every today is followed by a tomorrow (for this tomorrow, if not projected and mastered by the Will, could just as well be a mere repetition of what went before—as indeed it frequently is); the today in its very essence is threatened only by the mind's interference, which negates it and, by virtue of the Will, summons up the absent not-yet, mentally canceling the present, or, rather, looking upon the present as that ephemeral time span whose essence is not to be: "The Now is empty ... it fulfills itself in the future. The future is its reality."
⁹⁰
From the perspective of the willing ego, "the future is directly within the present, for it is contained as its negative fact. The Now is just as much the being that disappears as it is also the non-being [that]...is converted into Being."
⁹¹

To the extent that the self identifies itself with the willing ego—and we shall see that this identification is proposed by some of the voluntarists who derive the
principium individuationis
from the willing faculty—it exists "in a continual transformation of [its own] future into a Now, and it ceases to be the day when there is no future left, when there is nothing still outstanding
[le jour où il n'y a plus davenir, où rien n'est plus à venir],
when everything has arrived and when everything is 'accomplished.' "
⁹²
Seen from the perspective of the Will, old age consists in the shrinkage of the future dimension, and man's death signifies less his disappearance from the world of appearances than his final loss of a future. This loss, however, coincides with the ultimate accomplishment of the individual's life, which at its end, having escaped the incessant change of time and the uncertainty of its own future, opens itself to the "tranquillity of the past" and thereby to inspection, reflection, and the backward glance of the thinking ego in its search for meaning. Hence, from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, old age, in Heidegger's words, is the time of meditation or, in the words of Sophocles, it is the time of "peace and freedom"
⁹³
—release from bondage, not only to the passions of the body, but to the all-consuming passion the mind inflicts on the soul, the passion of the will called "ambition."

 

In other words, the past begins with disappearance of the future, and, in that tranquillity, the thinking ego asserts itself. But this happens only when everything has reached its end, when Becoming, in whose process Being unfolds and develops, has been arrested. For "restlessness is the ground of Being";
⁹⁴
it is the price paid for Life, as death, or, rather, the anticipation of death, is the price paid for tranquillity. And the restlessness of the living does not come from contemplating either the cosmos or history; it is not the effect of external motion—the incessant movement of natural things or the incessant ups and downs of human destinies; it is localized in and engendered by the mind of man. What in later existential thought became the notion of the auto-production of man's mind we find in Hegel as the "auto-constitution of Time":
⁹⁵
man is not just temporal; he
is
Time.

Without him there might be movement and motion, but there would not be Time. Nor could there be, if man's mind were equipped only for thinking, for reflecting on the given, on what is as it is and could not be otherwise; in that case man would live mentally in an everlasting present. He would be unable to realize that he himself once was not and that one day he will be no more, that is, he would be unable to understand what it means for him to exist. (It is because of Hegel's view that the human mind produces time that his other, more obvious, identification of logic and history comes about, and this identification is indeed, as Léon Brunschvicg pointed out long ago, "one of the essential pillars of his system."
⁹⁶
)

But in Hegel the mind produces time only by virtue of the will, its organ for the future, and the future in this perspective is also the source of the past, insofar as that is mentally engendered by the mind's anticipation of a second future, when thé immediate I-shall-be will have become an I-shall-have-been. In this schema, the past is produced by the future, and thinking, which contemplates the past, is the result of the Will. For the will, in the last resort, anticipates the ultimate frustration of the will's projects, which is death; they too, one day, will have been. (It may be interesting to note that Heidegger, too, says "
Die Gewesenheit entspringt
in
gewisser Weise der Zukunft"
— the past, the "having-been," has its origin in a certain sense in the future.
⁹⁷
)

 

In Hegel, man is not distinguished from other animal species by being an
animal rationale
but by being the only living creature that knows about his own death. It is at this ultimate point of the willing ego's anticipation that the thinking ego constitutes itself. In the anticipation of death, the will's projects take on the appearance of an anticipated past and as such can become the object of reflection; and it is in this sense that Hegel maintains that only the mind that "does not ignore death" enables man to "dominate death," to "endure it and to maintain itself within it."
⁹⁸
To put it in Koyré's words: at the moment in which the mind confronts its own end "the incessant motion of the temporal dialectics is arrested and time has 'fulfilled' itself; this 'fulfilled' time falls naturally and in its entirety into the past," which means that the "future has lost its power over it" and it has become ready for the enduring present of the thinking ego. Thus it turns out that "the [future's] true Being is to be the Now."
⁹⁹
But in Hegel this
nunc stans
is no longer temporal; it is a "
nunc aeternitatis,
" as eternity for Hegel is also the quintessential nature of Time, the Platonic "image of eternity," seen as the "eternal movement of the mind."
¹⁰⁰
Time itself is eternal in "the union of Present, Future and Past."
¹⁰¹

To oversimplify: That there exists such a thing as the
Life
of the mind is due to the mind's organ for the future and its resulting "restlessness"; that there exists such a thing as the life of the
Mind
is due to death, which, foreseen as an absolute end, halts the will and transforms the future into an anticipated past, the will's projects into objects of thought, and the soul's expectation into an anticipated remembrance. Thus summarized and oversimplified, the doctrine of Hegel sounds so modern, the primacy of the future in its time speculations so well attuned to his century's dogmatic faith in Progress, and its shift from thinking to willing and back again to thinking so ingenious a solution of the modem philosopher's problem of how to come to terms with the tradition in a mode acceptable to the modem age, that one is inclined to dismiss the Hegelian construct as an authentic contribution to the problems of the willing ego. Yet in his time speculations Hegel has a strange predecessor to whom nothing could have been more alien than the notion of Progress nor anything of less interest than discovering a law that ruled over historical events.

 

That is Plotinus. He, too, holds that the human mind, man's "soul"
(psyché),
is the originator of time. Time is generated by the soul's "over-active" nature
(polypragmōn,
a term suggesting busybodiness); longing for its own future immortality, it "seeks for more than its present stage" and thus always "moves on to a 'next' and an 'after' and to what is not the same but is something else and then else again. So moving, we made a long stretch of our journey [toward our future eternity] and constructed time, the image of eternity." Thus, "time is the life of the soul"; since "the spreading out of life involves time," the soul "produces the succession [of time] along with its activity" in the form of "discursive thought" whose discursiveness corresponds to the "soul's movement of passing from one way of being to another"; hence time is "not an accompaniment of Soul ... but something which ... is in it and with it."
¹⁰²
In other words, for Plotinus as for Hegel, time is generated by the mind's innate restlessness, its stretching out to the future, its projects, and its negation of "the present state." And in both cases the true fulfillment of time is eternity, or, in secular terms, existentially speaking, the mind's switch from willing to thinking.

 

However that may be, there are many passages in Hegel that indicate that his philosophy is less inspired by the works of his predecessors, less a reaction to their opinions, less an attempt to "solve" problems of metaphysics, less bookish, in brief, than the systems of almost all post-ancient philosophers, not only those who came before him but those who came after, too. In recent times this peculiarity has been often recognized.
¹⁰³
It was Hegel who, by constructing a sequential history of philosophy that corresponded to factual, political history—something quite unknown before him—actually broke with the tradition, because he was the first great thinker to take history seriously, that is, as yielding truth.

The realm of human affairs, in which everything that is has been brought into being by man or men, had never been so looked on by a philosopher. And the change was due to an event—the French Revolution. "The revolution," Hegel admits, "may have got its first impulse from philosophy," but its "world-historical significance" consists in that, for the first time, man dared to turn himself upside down, "to stand on his head and on thought, and to build reality according to it." "Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, that is, in thought.... This was a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch ... a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the Divine and the Secular was now first accomplished."
¹⁰⁴
What the event had shown amounted to a new dignity of man; "making public the ideas of how something ought to be [will cause] the lethargy of smugly sedate people [
die gesetzten Leute],
who always accept everything as it is, to disappear."
¹⁰⁵

Hegel never forgot that early experience. As late as 1829/30, he told his students: "In such times of political turnabout philosophy finds its place; this is when thought precedes and shapes reality. For when one form of the Spirit no longer gives satisfaction, philosophy sharply takes note of it in order to understand the dissatisfaction."
¹⁰⁶
In short, he almost explicitly contradicted his famous statement about the owl of Minerva in the Preface to the
Philosophy of Right.
The "glorious mental dawn" of his youth inspired and informed all of his writing up to the end. In the French Revolution, principles and thoughts had been
realized;
a
reconciliation
had occurred between the "Divine," with which man spends his time while thinking, and the "secular," the affairs of men.

This reconciliation is at the center of the whole Hegelian system. If it was possible to understand
World History
—and not just the histories of particular epochs and nations—as a single succession of events whose eventual outcome would be the moment when the "Spiritual Kingdom ... manifests itself in outward existence," becomes "embodied" in "secular life,"
¹⁰⁷
then the course of history would no longer be haphazard and the realm of human affairs no longer devoid of meaning. The French Revolution had proved that "Truth in its living form [could be] exhibited in the affairs of the world."
¹⁰⁸
Now one could indeed consider every moment in the world's historical sequence as an "it was to be" and assign to philosophy the task of "comprehending this plan" from its beginning, its "concealed fount" or "nascent principle ... in the womb of time," up to its "phenomenal, present existence."
¹⁰⁹
Hegel identifies this "Spiritual Kingdom" with the "Kingdom of the Will"
¹¹⁰
because the wills of men are necessary to bring the spiritual realm about, and for this reason he asserts that "the Freedom of the Will
per se
[that is, the freedom the Will necessarily wills]...is itself absolute ... it is ... that by which Man becomes Man, and is therefore the fundamental principle of the Mind."
¹¹¹
As a matter of fact, the only guarantee—if such it is—that the ultimate goal of the unfolding of the World Spirit in the world's affairs must be Freedom is inmplicit in the freedom that is implicit in the Will.