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Hegel on Herodotus

I reproduce here an imporant article of Will Desmond about the views of the major German Philosopher G. W. F. Hegel on Herodotus, Hegel’s appropriation of Herodotus and the integration of the latter into the Hegelian philosophy of history, but also about the limits of this appropriation and integration.

“Intellectual History Review Volume 32, 2022 - Issue 3: Ancient and Modern Knowledges / Towards a History of the Questionnaire

Herodotus, Hegel, and knowledge

Will Desmond

Pages 453-471 | Published online: 24 Aug 2022

ABSTRACT

This article locates Hegel’s understanding of the nature of knowledge in various contexts (Hegel’s logical system, Kantian idealism, the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopaedia) and applies it specifically to his systematic classification of histories. Here Hegel labels Herodotus an “original” historian, and hence incapable of the broader vision and self-reflexive method of a “philosophical” historian like Hegel himself. This theoretical classification is not quite in accord with Hegel’s actual appropriation of material from Herodotus’s narrative for his own purposes. These appropriations point in complex ways to dimensions of the “Father of History” which are proto-Hegelian, as well as to other dimensions which are not.

1. Introduction

Concerning the topic of knowledge, questions abound. What can be known? What are the limits of knowledge? Can human knowledge be compared with animal knowledge? With divine knowledge? What is worth knowing? Is knowledge a good? The good? Or an awakening to the futility and tragedy of existence? If knowledge has many objects, modes, and divisions, can these be organized into an articulated whole? Or does the plurality covered by the word “knowledge” resist systematization, because there are knowledges that are qualitatively different, and not species of a single genus? Questions like these are old, perhaps perennial. But they become especially prominent in modern European thinking. Descartes is traditionally taken as a symbol of the beginnings of a “modern,” keenly self-conscious, and methodically self-critical quest for certain knowledge. Among the many who laboured in the wake of Descartes is Hegel, in some ways so Cartesian, with his confidence in the power of a priori ideas, and a narrative of Geist that elides the sense of difference between human and divine minds, both illuminated by the natural light of reason. On the other hand, Hegel is one of the most empirical and historically minded of thinkers. This fact gives one an entrée to a rather unusual juxtaposition: Hegel and one of the many whom he takes as a significant predecessor, Herodotus, “Father of History.” With a view to evaluating Hegel’s attempt to make something modern of Herodotus and his Histories, this article will comprise three parts: (1) a snapshot of Hegel’s systematic, post-Kantian approach to the nature and organization of knowledge; (2) a synopsis of both his theoretical understanding and practical use of Herodotus; and (3) an exploration of ways in which Herodotus’s work can be regarded as proto-Hegelian, or not.

2. Hegel’s ideal of a philosophical encyclopaedia of the Wissenschaften“

The true is the whole” (Das Wahre ist das Ganze) is the pithy phrase Hegel often uses to summarize his holistic and systematic approach to knowledge. Though his own work in revising lectures and previous publications was cut off by a premature death, his long ambition was clearly to coordinate all disciplines into a single, consistent, and tolerably complete whole; a system that would organize all human knowledge into a single, presuppositionless whole. His Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817, revised 1827, 1830) is the closest approximation to this ideal whole, but its root understanding of knowledge draws most significantly on Kant’s critical philosophy. Kant’s project of transcendental critique would, of course, find a synthetic a priori element in all experience: physical, moral, aesthetic, even political and historical. Kant’s own language tends to associate knowledge claims with those disciplines central to the First Critique – namely to arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian mechanics – which together articulate the empirical laws of nature and reality, i.e. phenomenal reality.Footnote1 Kant argues that the stuff of sense experience comes shaped by the transcendental forms of time, space, and the categories of the understanding. Namely, phenomena are the synthesis of two elements: the sensual and a posteriori, and the categorical or synthetic a priori, or, in Aristotelian terms, the matter of sensuous intuition comes shaped by the a priori forms of the experiencing subject.Footnote2

Hegel, for his part, stresses more the logical unity of these two analytic elements of intuition and the synthetic a priori. The sensual Anschauung provides the particular filling of experience, while the subjective categories provide the universal framework for empirical intuitions. Particular and universal become abstract aspects of the concrete reality; the phenomenal individual. This triad of universal, particular, and individual becomes for Hegel the key to all reality and knowledge, including knowledge of the past. For example, in all disciplines, a scientifically organized study should begin with a universal concept (Begriff) which broadly delimits the subject matter. From this, it should proceed to relevant particulars (Besondere), relating them to each other, and to the universal concept that unites them. The result is a holistic understanding of phenomena as concrete individuals (Einzelne) in whose particularity the universal concept is uniquely manifested. Again, each entity or phenomenon exhibits the same fundamental “life-cycle”: a universal notion or essence evolves or unfolds its inner determinations, thus particularizing itself into a plurality of parts, each of which manifests the entity’s whole essence, and which together constitute the entity as an individual. Hegel deploys this triad very widely, and it goes to the heart of his idealism, which proclaims that thinking and being share the same inner structure: in Hegel’s language, all that exists exists inasmuch as it is the Idea, and his Berlin lectures in particular attempt to articulate this ontological logic as it works itself out through such disparate phenomena as the will and human communities (family, state), art works (of all periods and genres), religions of the world, philosophies of the past, even the totality of human history itself.Footnote3 Each of these objects of thought is knowable inasmuch as it reflects the inner logical structure of the thinking subject.

Hegel’s logical triad of universal–particular–individual appears in somewhat disguised form in the division of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. This is an encyclopaedia of human knowledge, though in the older, pre-Diderot style: not arranged alphabetically and thus quasi-democratically, but hierarchically, from controlling ideas down to subordinate details. The three main sections are Logic, Nature, and Spirit; a division that, for Hegel, is both rationally necessary and historically mediated, and which he might agree is both “ancient” and “modern,” as well as neither.Footnote4 Less paradoxically, Hegel envisions his three parts as a holistic trinity of equals: each part implies and is implied by all the others, such that there is no single foundational principle. As Inwood writes: “The universe [For Hegel] involves the logical idea (U), nature (P) and spirit (I): in his system, Hegel presents them in the order U-P-I, but any order would be equally appropriate, since each term mediates the other two.”Footnote5

These remarks provide some background for Hegel’s thinking about history and historical knowledge. Firstly, the triad Logic–Nature–Spirit is an articulated whole: each part is different from, yet related to, every other. Each shows internal development or evolution by which it “unfolds” from its universal, but only spirit has temporal development. Namely, Spirit is historical, indeed the realm of history is Spirit, for Spirit is essentially marked by the dynamic dialectic of the logical Concept as it expresses itself in time, and each moment of Spirit – from the subjective Spirit of psychology and individual experience, to the objective Spirit of the state, to the absolute Spirit of historical arts, religions, and philosophies – is bound to time, and sees development from the inchoate to the complex. Perhaps the most celebrated, and obvious, aspect of Hegel’s attempt at an encyclopaedic world history posits the same basic intelligibility percolating through each of the four world historical civilizations. The Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic worlds are governed by their own unique and irreducible “spirit” or cultural paradigm: a universal principle which particularizes itself into its many individual customs, institutions, beliefs, and cultural artefacts; thus each national spirit develops, blossoms, or actualizes itself, and then declines and bequeaths the ghost, as it were, to the next world historical people.

In contrast to all this is Hegelian Nature, which has no history; a proposition that simply reflects scientific orthodoxy before Darwin. But unlike a later orthodoxy that would separate the natural sciences and humanities, Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, Hegel’s systematic also posits an inner continuity between Nature and Spirit: Nature is known also according to the U–P–I triad, and can be related to Spirit as its “ground”: at once the backdrop for, material of, and a moment in Spirit, which actively sublates Nature into its own all-embracing actuality. This becomes more concrete in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, which begin, rather conventionally, with a chapter on “The Geographical Basis of History.” Such prefaces are often written in a quasi-materialistic vein: “geography is destiny” is a modern proverb and guiding assumption here, to which one might offer, as an ancient parallel, the evocative conclusion of Herodutus’s Histories, “from soft lands, soft peoples.”Footnote6 For Hegel, by contrast, geography is the basis or “ground” of history, not because it determines it, but because it expresses in a merely inchoate way what would become explicit and self-conscious in the higher productions of culture and Geist. Namely, “ideas” implicit in a geographical region are made explicit in national character and development; geography is thus subordinated to the higher discipline of historiography. The point is illustrated by Hegel’s remarks on Ionia: the Ionian climate, Hegel notes, is not the cause of Homer’s epics, though in his Neoclassical/Romantic vision, the beauty of Ionia and the Aegean, with their free interplay of mountains and sea – in countless islands and bays, that are both separate from each other, yet bound together by the “middle sea” (Mittelmeer) – is only the backdrop and material that would be expressed more perfectly in the manifold beauties of Greek culture.Footnote7

Hegel’s theory of the nature of knowledge is complex. It might, however, be characterized as a kind of logical historicism, at once attuned to the timeless, universal patterns behind change and the uniquely particular events of history: the logician in him attends to the recurrent pattern, the historicist to irreducible particulars. Hegel himself acknowledges (inconsistently, in my view) that the logical Begriff cannot utterly inform temporal particulars: “the impotence of nature” renders it resistant to fully reasoned knowledge, while history is marred by contingencies in its fine grain, if not in the broad outlines.

3. Hegel on Herodotus: theoretical classification and practical appropriation

Where does Herodotus fit in this logico-historical system? Hegel accepts Herodotus’s familiar title as “Father of History,” and more specifically he names him as the first example of what he classifies as “original history.”Footnote8 The first in Hegel’s three-fold categorization of types of histories, original history is that in which writers were imbued with the “spirit” of the events they record: subjective knower and known object, historian and historical events (res gestae) are not radically distinguished, but both informed by the same cultural Geist in which they move and have their being. This first and most basic form of history is followed logically and chronologically by two higher types: reflective and philosophical history. Reflective historians are, in all their subspecies, more removed from their objects, either because they are universal historians tackling a huge range of time, pragmatic historians abstracting from or imposing useful lessons on their material, or critical historians who bring their own stringent criteria of plausibility and relevance to their period. The third and final, philosophical type of history also brings a priori elements to bear to sift, judge, and understand the stuff of the past, with the difference that these are synthetic a priori, the necessary rational structure of all minds and all thinking.

Hegel’s classification of histories rests on his sense of the differing relations between knower and known: in original history, the knowing historian is immediately at home with his object and times; in all three subspecies of reflective history (universal, pragmatic, and critical), the historian’s knowledge is mediated through sources (e.g. others’ original histories) somewhat alien to his sensibilities; while philosophical history synthesizes these “opposites,” mediating given data with the true a priori categories that are transcendentally adequate to and illuminative of their objects. Overall, this classification can be understood as a veiled history of histories: historiography progresses, approximately speaking, from Oriental annals and king lists through to the critical and philosophical histories that appear in the wake of Kant’s “critical” philosophy and are one product of the modern “Germanic” spirit, with its defining self-awareness and drive to systematic comprehensiveness. Again, while, for Hegel, the Persians were the “first historical people,” historiography proper begins with Herodotus, and its subsequent types parallel the trajectory of Hegelian world history: in his classification, original history is most exemplified by Greek writers, universal history by Romans, while pragmatic history is explicitly associated with the French, critical and philosophical history with contemporary Germany.Footnote9 Just as, for Hegel, world history culminates in the “Germanic world” of medieval and modern northern Europe, and most of all in contemporary modern Germany, so, as a kind of corollary to this, the practice of history reaches its historical and “logical” fulfilment in the philosophical history of the Hegelian present.

Hegel clearly privileges Germanic modernity over the Oriental, Greek, and Roman pasts. Yet this does not at all devalue past forms of historical knowledge. Rather, his typical concern for the precise dialectic of sameness and otherness is evident also in his categorization of types of history. Namely, his is an ordered and progressive typology. Each form of history is obviously different: Herodotus’s original history is not the same as Hegel’s philosophical one. Yet at a deeper level, the later, more mediated forms incorporate the earlier and less complex: universal histories collate many separate original histories into large or comprehensive wholes; pragmatic and reflective histories take the others as materials for their higher moralizing, or “higher criticism”; philosophical history aims to synthesize the essentials of all the others, creating a comprehensive world history, and even subjecting the reasoning of the so-called “higher criticism” to a yet-higher philosophical critique.Footnote10 To the contemplation of the past, Hegel writes, the philosopher brings nothing but the “simple conception of reason”Footnote11: this true logical canon would enable the Hegelian historian to elicit the inner rational form of materials provided by the “lower” types of history. The result (Hegel claims) is not only the most comprehensive and true history, which reworks the materials given by original and reflective histories into the broadest, most intellectually secure framework. Even more, philosophical history would demonstrate the deepest, trans-temporal rationality of human development. History becomes veiled theodicy, and, “to him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect.”Footnote12 In another way, the modern philosophical historian subsumes all past histories into a comprehensive vision that recognizes the timeless core of all human development. For this vision, there is really no “ancient” or “modern,” because all temporal events become necessary moments in the self-unfolding of the eternal Idea.Footnote13

So much for a summary of Hegel’s typology of histories as part of his larger epistemology of the Absolute Idea. From this height, let us descend to more humble details: the main passage in which Hegel introduces his ideas on Herodotus and “original history.”

To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides, and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had before their eyes, and whose spirit they shared. They simply transferred what was passing in the world around them, to the realm of representative intellect. An external phenomenon is thus translated into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the material supplied him by his emotions; projecting it into an image for the conceptive faculty. These original historians did, it is true, find statements and narratives of other men ready to hand. One person cannot be an eye or ear witness of everything. But they make use of such aids only as the poet does of that heritage of an already-formed language, to which he owes so much; merely as an ingredient. Historiographers bind together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for immortality in the Temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, Ballad-stories, Traditions, must be excluded from such original history. These are but dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary, we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what they were about … Such original historians, then, change the events, the deeds, and the states of society with which they are conversant, into an object for the conceptive faculty. The narratives they leave us cannot, therefore, be very comprehensive in their range. Herodotus, Thucydides, Guicciardini, may be taken as fair samples of the class in this respect. What is present and living in their environment is their proper material. The influences that have formed the writer are identical with those which have moulded the events that constitute the matter of his story. The author's spirit, and that of the actions he narrates, is one and the same. He describes scenes in which he himself has been an actor, or at any rate an interested spectator … Reflections are none of his business, for he lives in the spirit of his subject; he has not attained an elevation above it.Footnote14

Though the passage is somewhat jumbled, one can extract several salient points. First and foremost, Hegel is concerned, here at the start of his quasi-logical history of histories, with locating the transition from immediate experience to the mediated artefacts of written memory: namely, the transition from lived experience, with its “fleeting” memories, to the first continuous, prose histories. Here the sources of historical knowledge are necessarily limited to what is immediately to hand. Personal experience and autopsy of “what was passing in the world around them” is obviously one such source, but, because “one person cannot be an eye or ear witness of everything,” seemingly more important are the “statements and narratives of other men,” which expand the horizon of the historian’s experience, vicariously; though even then that horizon cannot be “very comprehensive” in its range. Strangely enough, these narratives seem not to include “legends, ballad-stories, [and mythic?] traditions”: Hegel’s statement may well reflect his low opinion of Niebuhr and his allegedly “critical” sifting of early Roman legends, but it certainly glosses over the folkloristic element in Herodotus, and his frequent use of poets like Homer and Archilochus. More insightful is Hegel’s implication that an original historian such as Herodotus is necessarily limited to oral materials, because, at the very beginning of historiography, written records do not exist. It is original history itself that helps to affect the transition to a written culture, and, though Hegel does not pursue the issue in any detail, his analysis could profitably be extended to Herodotus: Herodotus’s historiē is indeed ostensibly oriented almost exclusively to his travels, to what he saw (opsis) and heard (akoē), to his observations and interviews with logioi andres, and not on the few inscriptions or texts he mentions, let alone on Rankean archives.

Intriguing also for Herodotean studies is the analogy that Hegel draws between original historians and poets, both of whom translate raw experience into an object of contemplation. Elsewhere, Hegel describes his understanding of the process by which the mythopoetic imagination transformed the immediacies of sensed nature into the personalized deities of the pantheon: the pond becomes the form of a Naiad, the babbling stream becomes the Muses’ Hippocrene, the sea storm Poseidon’s wrath. Hegel’s discussions of this spiritualizing activity of “phantasy,” of “prophecy” (manteia), or poetry occur within larger discussions of Greek religion and history: poetry in this sense is for him clearly an activity distinctive of Greek culture.Footnote15 If so, a Greek (and Herodotean) invention of history would be its prose counterpart. But while the poet transforms natural immediacies into divine archetypes of the spiritual imagination, hovering ambiguously between sensation and rational understanding, the original historian, by contrast, changes current experience “into an object for the conceptive faculty.” Namely, an original prose history can be thought and reasoned about in general terms (i.e. concepts), and so furthers the emergence of a more philosophical or theoretical culture. But, if Hegel does not fully explain the inner workings of the mythopoetic imagination, neither does he here shed much light on the transformative process of historical composition. His original historians seem to do their work semi-automatically. Personal experience and borrowed statements are there as “ingredients”; “fleeting elements” for the historian simply to “bind together” into an “object” for conceptual thinking. This binding and shaping of materials seems to be almost instinctive with Hegel’s original historian, with little room for selection and judgment. Indeed, “reflections are none of his business,” for it is only with “reflective” history that the historian culls his material in light of some abstract end or criterion. A casual remark on Herodotus’s “naïve account” of the “Constitutional Debate” seems to fill out Hegel’s image of him as a rather unthinking recorder of what he saw and heard.Footnote16

While this follows on from Hegel’s differentiation of “original” and “reflective” histories, one might query whether it is fully consonant with his own post-Kantian epistemology, by which known phenomena are pervaded with, even constituted by, the mind’s a priori categories. So, more specifically, of historiography, Hegel writes that “a simply receptive attitude” is impossible, for every historian “brings his categories with him, and sees the phenomena … exclusively through these media.”Footnote17 Again, Hegel does not develop the thought in relation to Herodotus, but his statement does prefigure the scholarship that has exploded perceptions of Herodotus as a naïve, simple, and uncomplicated raconteur, who (in Hegel’s terms) simply bound together whatever materials he saw and heard, re-telling the “statements and narratives” that others told him, without much critical reflection: on the contrary, reflection was very much his “business,” and gnōmē is the critical element in Herodotus’s “methodology.” So, where Hegel speaks in general terms of the “categories” that must colour ever historian’s vision, specialized studies by Hartog, Thomas, Boedeker, Raaflaub, and others have pointed to the “thought patterns” which Herodotus imposes on or discovers in his material:Footnote18 for instance, the analogies that he (and some Presocratics) makes between the seen and unseen; the polarities of hot and cold, wet and dry, that fascinate him as much as they do contemporary geographers, doctors, and cosmologists; the mechanism of “mixing” and “separation” that he seems to apply metaphorically to the Aegean region, where east and west, north and south meet and create new cultural compounds. In addition to such contemporary scientific “thought patterns” or “categories,” this Herodotus draws on the discourses of heroic epic, contemporary tragedy, Sophistic rhetoric and epideixis, even philosophical forays into epistemology. In all these ways, Herodotus’s mind is deeply formed by his intellectual milieu.

Hegel would grant the point, though in quite different terms. In Hegel’s own terms, the spirit of “original” historians reflects and is the spirit of their times, and its categories of explanation are their own: Herodotus was a man of his times, times when the world Spirit had alighted on the Greek world and infused it with its own energy. Of course, Hegel’s sense of this contemporary “spirit” is very different from that of a Thomas or Raaflaub. In the wake of Winckelmann’s philhellenism, Hegel construes the Greek world to have been naïvely at home with itself: living around the beautiful Aegean, with its lovely mountains and seas, Hegel’s Greeks are not alienated from nature, either because of work (done by slaves) or by a Judaeo-Christian sense of fallenness; the Olympian gods are the mirror image of human beings, perfected in beauty and happiness; and in pre-Sophistic days, these Greeks did not experience the social alienation that comes with critical thinking, and that emerged first with the Sophists and Socrates. Chronologically, and as an “original” historian, Hegel’s Herodotus would seem to belong to this prelapsarian, pre-Socratic Greece. But since (for Hegel) nobody, not even superlative minds like Plato and Aristotle, can “overleap” their times,Footnote19 and since the Greek Spirit does not feature the critical distance necessary for reflective and philosophical history, Hegel would agree that Herodotus was, in his own style, a “modern” man of the mid-fifth century B.C., but still a Greek, and therefore not at all a spiritual contemporary of a Gibbon or Ranke.

Such an inference would have to include Hegel’s Thucydides also. In the passage quoted, one might be surprised to find Herodotus and Thucydides juxtaposed as “historians of the same order.” Hegel does not contrast them as naïve story-teller and rigorous scientist; as historical jongleur who tells “myths” for hearers’ momentary pleasure, and serious political analyst suggesting pragmatic lessons about human nature for future readers; as an Archaic traditionalist, keenly aware of divine agency in history, and a more Sophistic progressive who ignores it. The passage also does not contrast Herodotus qua traveller and “interested spectator” with Thucydides, the exiled naval officer and one time “actor” in the war he records; it does not use such a contrast to make Thucydides a cooler, more objective historian than Herodotus. It does not even contrast their vastly different spatial and chronological ranges: world-wide in Herodotus’s case, narrowly focussed in Thucydides’s. Thus, Hegel glosses over the salient differences between the two that have much preoccupied modern scholars, including Hegel’s Heidelberg colleague, Creuzer.Footnote20 These differences can sometimes be reduced to a ranking of the two in order of their value and/or greater “modernity.” One tendency here is to rank Thucydides above Herodotus because he seems more fully empirical, sceptical, and non-religions, therefore more “scientific” and hence more “modern.”Footnote21 In Hegel’s world historical scheme, by contrast, “modernity” is Lutheran and scientific, sceptical and idealist, with an internal complexity beyond anything in the ancient Greek world. Hence, for Hegel, the differences between Herodotus and Thucydides melt away before their shared Greekness, and he simply classifies them as original historians, as if they were both simply transcribing contemporary events into written memory.

Hegel’s simple labelling of Herodotus as “original” cuts across other, more obvious dimensions to Herodotus’s work. Most salient is the fact that Herodotus is not quite a contemporary historian: the Greek events he narrates are 50, 75 years in the past; his Lydian, Persian, and Egyptian logoi deal with even older material; the historiē that he pursues takes him ostensibly from Sicily to Babylon, from Egyptian Elephantine to the Scythian Black Sea and beyond; the cultures and chronological vistas of those exotic peoples slip through whatever explanatory “categories” or Greek “thought-patterns” that Herodotus bears upon them. It seems only very partially true, then, that Herodotus’s spirit is “one and the same” with that of the matter he narrates: true enough of the later books’ events that are set more firmly in Greece, with Greek protagonists, but hardly true of their Persian opponents, let alone of the Egyptian or Indian wonders that crowd the earlier logoi.

Given his vast range and his mental distance from much of his material, Herodotus may in some ways more resemble Hegel’s universal historian.Footnote22 Indeed, Hegel himself treats him practically as such, when he turns from theoretical labels to actually reading Herodotus and incorporating him into his own philosophical history. Such a careful reading of original historians he recommends emphatically: a comprehensive modern education involves learning the Greek world from the inside, and Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon are here indispensable.Footnote23 And yet, when he cities Herodotus, it is not just as a source of knowledge for the Greek world but also for aspects of the Oriental world and even Africa. In his approximate 48 citations of Herodotus in the Philosophy of History, Hegel draws information about Egyptian architecture, art, and religion, the Egyptian caste systems, Phoenician merchants, Babylon and the cities of Assyria, the Persian empire and Zoroastrianism, and the politics of Oriental despotism.Footnote24 Some of Herodotus’s statements become quite important for Hegel. The Herodotean claim that the Greeks initially received many of their gods from Egypt bolsters Hegel’s argument that Egypt was the point of transition between the Oriental and Greek Worlds.Footnote25 Or again, Herodotus’s account of the Constitutional Debate, and more diffusely of Egyptian pharaohs and monarchs like Croesus, Cyrus, and Xerxes must inform Hegel’s generalization that the constitution natural to the Oriental world was tyranny. Likewise, one could surmise that Herodotus’s narrative of the freedom-loving but fractious poleis that barely allied against Xerxes informed Hegel’s generalization that democracy was the fundamental constitution of the Greek world. If so, then there is significant Herodotean background to the celebrated passage in which Hegel sums up his vision of world history as the progressive triumph of freedom:

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third Monarchy.Footnote26

Such generalizations are very much informed also by the way that Hegel incorporates Herodotus’s “original” history into his own vast philosophical world history. In one passage, Hegel interprets the Iliad and later epics in terms of an almost perennial struggle between Asia and Europe:

[I]n the Iliad … the Greeks take the field against the Asiatics and thereby fight the first epic battles in the tremendous opposition that led to the wars which constitute in Greek history a turning-point in world-history. In a similar way, the Cid fights against the Moors; in Tasso and Ariosto the Christians fight against the Saracens, in Camoens the Portuguese against the Indians … We are made completely at peace by the world-historically justified victory of the higher principle over the lower which succumbs to a bravery that leaves nothing over for the defeated. In this sense, 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.Footnote27

The passage does not name Herodotus and Xerxes’s brilliant entourage. But, elsewhere, Herodotus’s Proem lies definitely in Hegel’s mind as he reflects on Homeric culture and the Trojan War:

While this state of things prevailed, and social relations were such as have been described, that striking and great event took place—the union of the whole of Greece in a national undertaking, viz., the Trojan War; with which began that more extensive connection with Asia which had very important results for the Greeks. (The expedition of Jason to Colchis—also mentioned by the poets—and which bears an earlier date, was, as compared with the war of Troy, a very limited and isolated undertaking.Footnote28

It is not “the poets,” of course, who suggest understanding Jason’s Argo, the Argive fleet, and Xerxes’s armada as products of the same geo-political dynamic. It is Herodotus who tantalizingly places mythic raids and historical wars on the same historical continuum. This suggestion of the Proem Hegel takes up and generalizes even further: the “national expedition” led by Achilles becomes the founding act of the Greek world, to be matched by its closing act, Alexander, as a second Achilles, again uniting Greece in a war of conquest against the Oriental World. Even more generally: Greece’s wars against the Orient define the Greek character just as much as the Crusades defined high medieval Christendom.Footnote29 In such passages, one sees the key dynamic of Hegel’s world-history – the mantle of Spirit passing from one civilization to another, and here specifically from the Orient to Greece – drawing on Herodotus as source and authority.

In this regard, perhaps the most revealing pages are those on “The Wars with the Persians,” where Hegel simply recommends reading the “brilliant description” of them by Herodotus.Footnote30 Content to give the briefest synopsis of events, Hegel moves on to what he regards as the larger (one might say “philosophical”) implications of the Greeks’ “world-historical victories”:

In the case before us, the interest of the World’s History hung trembling in the balance. Oriental despotism—a world united under one lord and sovereign—on the one side, and separate states—insignificant in extent and resources, but animated by free individuality—on the other side, stood front to front in array of battle. Never in History has the superiority of spiritual power over material bulk—and that of no contemptible amount—been made so gloriously manifest. This war, and the subsequent development of the states which took the lead in it, is the most brilliant period of Greece. Everything which the Greek principle involved, then reached its perfect bloom and came into the light of day.Footnote31

Thus, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea not only perfectly exemplify the Greek Spirit. Not only do they signify the victory of Greek freedom over Oriental tyranny. Even deeper is the metaphysical lesson that Herodotus’s account harbours. The Greek victories over such overwhelming odds manifest the truth of absolute idealism itself, for there one can clearly witness the “superiority of spiritual power over material bulk.” More abstractly, the necessary reality of the universal Concept ultimately prevails, through particular historical events (like Herodotus’s wars), over the inertia of the material and irrational.

One need not chase down all the more minor citations to draw the main conclusion: not only does Hegel take from Herodotus a far broader range of historical information than he should from an “original” historian, key Herodotean passages also help him to bolster his larger philosophico-historical generalizations about Greece, the Orient, freedom, reason, and the nature of reality itself. In practically treating Herodotus as a universal historian, Hegel tacitly follows Kant’s lead. Kant sought a universal history guided by the “Idea” of freedom; the early stages of this history would have to be mediated through Greek historiography, which offered the only real knowledge about “older or contemporary” peoples.Footnote32 With more historical acumen (though not full internal consistency), Hegel turns to Herodotus as a major, de facto source for knowledge about Egypt, Persia, and so forth. Passages like those quoted above see Herodotus being incorporated into Hegel’s philosophical history, and thus upgraded to a part of a quintessentially “modern” composition. Indeed, Herodotus becomes an essential moment in that most comprehensive of Enlightenment projects: a universal and reflectively self-critical history of the progressive self-liberation of the human race.

4. Herodotus the proto-Hegelian?

Could Hegel press on to interpret Herodotus not merely as an important source but also as a philosophical historian in his own right? Hegel was not, of course, the first to use the term “philosophical” history. The epithet was used of Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, and other Enlightenment historians.Footnote33 Gibbon, in turn, admired Tacitus as the “philosophic historian” who could discern the essential fact or motive beneath a chaotic mass of happenings.Footnote34 Such uses of the term are not unrelated to Hegel’s. Though keenly aware of the changing connotations of the word,Footnote35 he firmly associates “philosophy” itself with systematic, organized, “encyclopaedic” Wissenschaft. But fully systematic knowledge like this he does not associate with the Greek world at all: for Hegel, not even Aristotle is properly systematic, but rather only a “perfect empiricist” who could “recognize the truth in the particular, or only a succession of particular truths.”Footnote36 Here is another perspective on why Hegel does not classify Herodotus as “philosophical” (and hence fully modern) historian.

Nevertheless, as he systematically construes world history as a single, integrated, and evolving whole, Hegel understands the past as prologue to the present. Every past art genre, religion, philosophy, and, indeed, civilization or “world” develops to such a stage that it gives way, necessarily, to its “logical” successor. Conversely, each later cultural form contains all the essential content of its predecessors. Indeed, if history did not feature this cumulative progress, then the notion of a universal philosophical encyclopaedia and world history would be an empty, impossible ideal. Once more, and more abstractly, Hegel’s conception of knowledge posits an inner “identity” between past and present: qua evolutionary monist, the early and less-developed contains in potentiality everything that will become actual and distinct in the later and more complete. Such an epistemology embraces, as part of itself, Hegel’s own sense of the inner and special affinity between Classical Greece and modern Germany. This feeling, so pronounced among German philhellenes, becomes for Hegel not simply an accident of the personalities of a Winckelmann or Goethe, but, rather, it is grounded in the dynamic of the World Spirit itself: the harmonious wholes that Greek culture achieved in all areas – the polis, sculpture, or even the “sculptural” perfection of works like Herodotus’s Histories – is revived in a more self-conscious, theoretical, and methodical way among modern Germans.Footnote37 Hence the modern German can feel intuitively “at home” among the ancient Greeks, or, as Hegel phrases the matter, the World Spirit finds itself first “immediately at home” in Greece.Footnote38 Hegel speaks of the “deep and genuine enjoyment” to be had from reading a great original historian like Herodotus, and recommends dwelling long with him for one’s own spiritual education: the Father of History is a necessary beginning for and presence in modern Bildung.Footnote39 In light of such considerations, it is undeniable that Hegel himself would have regarded Herodotus specifically as an intellectual or “spiritual” predecessor. Herodotus – early, unreflective, original historian as he was – nevertheless, in theory at least, contains the seeds that are brought to fruition in Hegel’s final, self-reflective, philosophical history. As we have seen, Herodotus is important for Hegel’s understanding and classification of forms of histories, and for his own philosophical history. Can one extend Hegel’s appropriation of Herodotus in ways that he does not explicitly take up? Are there other aspects of Herodotus that are better understood through a Hegelian lens?

As we have seen, the prime categories structuring Hegel’s organization of knowledge are the encyclopaedic triad of Logic–Nature–Spirit. For Hegel, again, the triad is both timelessly eternal and subject to progressive historical manifestation. This manifestation begins in Greek antiquity, where Hegel detects the triad, variously developed, in all the Greek philosophers going back to Plato, and possibly even Anaxagoras, whose statement that Mind governs the cosmos Hegel quotes with approval as an axiom to be applied to history also, for the true history is theodicy.Footnote40 Applying this axiom (and the triad) to Herodotus, one would be hard pressed (I think) to isolate a “logic” of fundamental categories thoroughly pervading the Histories, though the “thought patterns” of Raaflaub and others move definitely in this direction. On the other hand, Hegel’s pairing of Nature and Spirit is (I suggest) foreshadowed by the physis-nomos dichotomy so important to Herodotus and contemporary Sophistic literature. For Herodotus, it is not a dichotomy so much as an intimate pairing: his Histories masterfully unite geography with ethnography and history; the rivers, plains, climate, and wildlife of a place form the backdrop to human customs – the languages, clothing, laws, religious beliefs, and rituals – as well as the events that rise up from them. The old hypothesis of Analysts like Jacobi may have a general truth, in that Herodotus’s investigations may have initially been more geographic and ethnographic in scope, while a later, more historical turn is reflected in the more historical Books V–IX. Nevertheless, as more recent work tends to emphasize, the geographic and historical are present throughout the work, side by side, holistically and inseparably mingled ,even to the final anecdote. If so, then one could read (as a thought experiment) Herodotus through this Hegelian perspective: namely, for Herodotus, physis and natural (geographical and ethnographic) phenomena become a moment in the cultural histories of nations. Not at all an “environmental determinist,” Herodotus treats physis in proto-Hegelian fashion as the “ground” of nomos. For him too, geography and ethnography are subordinated to the cultures and histories of the peoples who inhabit a natural place.

Moreover, a Hegelian perspective helps one to appreciate the Histories as an early and “original” attempt to synthesize all types of knowledge into a single whole. Here can be found information about regions and places, the people inhabiting them, their customs and character, and consequent histories, all loosely tied to the rise of Persia as it came to embrace almost the then-known world, and tied, even more loosely, to the (allegedly) perennial and natural conflict between Greece and Asia. In the Histories, the genre of the traveller’s periodos gēs (“Circumnavigation of the world”) has been deepened by further naturalistic and humanistic enquiry (historiē) and so transformed from within into a kind of rudimentary or “original” encyclopaedia. Though its logical structure is undeveloped, it does nevertheless bear (in its synthesis of Nature and Spirit, physis and nomos) the fore-traces of Hegel’s world-historical philosophy: here too, the cultural spirits of various nations have been sought out, summed up, and transcended, by the higher spirit of the Greek; both on the battlefield, and in Herodotus’s own synthetic genius.

In conclusion, let me explore such a Hegelian reading with regard to one incident in the Histories: the logos of Xerxes crossing the Hellespont. This incident draws together many Herodotean narrative patterns and categories of organization and explanation. At Abydos, the great navy, army, and bridge are a wonder worthy of historical memory. The crossing of the stream of the Hellespont recalls other rivers significant in Herodotus’s account of Persia’s rise: the Halys, Araxes, Nile, Euphrates, Ister, the many rivers that Xerxes’s forces drank dry, and the customary Persian reverence for rivers. All these find an Aufhebung as Xerxes’s armies cross the “river” dividing Europe and Asia. Such transgressions of objective limits positively invite divine nemesis, and the whole episode is hedged by ominous dreams and portents. In the event, the Persians’ customary imperialism receives a significant check at the hands of the free Greek cities. So the logos at Abydos brings together geographical facts and explanatory patterns: the Hellespont is not just background to the narrative, and thoughts of divine nemesis are not superimposed on the “facts”; rather, in Hegelian-wise, natural and spiritual elements are synthesized into a single, holistic narrative.

More obviously proto-Hegelian is the sense of opposition between Oriental despotism and Greek freedom. For neither Herodotus nor Hegel is this opposition a simplistic or one-dimensional thing. At Abydos, Herodotus’s Xerxes has conversations with Demaratus, the Spartan king, who amazes him by stating that the Spartans at least will not submit because they fear and obey the Law far more than any tyrant. Demaratus is proved right, but one should notice that he is just one figure who moves between the Greek west and Persian east; others are Themistocles, Hippias, Aristagoras, and Histiaeus, as well as Demodocus and even Croesus. As a native of Halicarnassus, Herodotus was well aware of the continual interaction between Greek and Asian (or “Oriental,” to use Hegel’s term), from mythic raids to historical wars. Like Hegel, Herodotus does not assert difference as the sole or even primary reality. Rather, cultural difference subsists within a broader unity of geographical space and temporal development. Lloyd articulates this well when he generalizes from the Egyptian logos to claim that, in Herodotus,

the centrifugal tendency of the Greek/non-Greek dualism [i.e. the reality of difference] is counterbalanced and mitigated by a centripetal imperative to create a unity out of this duality and thereby fuse the binary human world into a coherent, intelligible, and tractable whole.Footnote41

For his part, Hegel was even more concerned with overcoming dualisms: the post-Kantian problematic that preoccupied him and his contemporaries. The prominent dualism of determined Nature and free Spirit has a partial exemplification in the historiographical opposition of the Oriental and Greek worlds. Hegel’s philosophical history dialectically juxtaposes the Oriental and Greek worlds. To the former belong despotism, nature religions, patriarchal societies, and political despotism; to the latter, religious anthropomorphism, democratic republics, and a spirit of freedom. But, as for Herodotus, the differences are not absolute. For Hegel, a “centripetal imperative” drives the course of history on towards “a coherent, intelligible, and tractable whole.” Politically, the Persian dominion over the Orient is extended by the conquests of Alexander and, in a different way, by Rome. More important is the spiritual dimension: Hegel’s Greeks inherit the cultural capital of the Orient, and rework it into new and more inclusive forms. Herodotus’s scene of Xerxes at Abydos hints at this kind of historical and intellectual unification: the scene marks the limits of Persian expansion, and hence the culmination of Oriental history so far, while also pointing to the imminent Greek victories and the passing of divine favour (if not quite Hegel’s World Spirit) from east to west.

But let me not give Hegel this last word, as if he understood Herodotus better than Herodotus did himself, as if there is nothing in Herodotus that cannot be found better digested in Hegel. At Abydos, Xerxes reviews the armies and navies, of effectively all the world’s peoples, now unified by the rise of Persian power. The wonder of the sight puts Xerxes in mind of how blessed he is. And then, the next moment, Herodotus says, he weeps, conscious that in one hundred years none of those there would be alive. “It is an extraordinary moment,” writes Burrow, “at which, thanks to Xerxes, or Herodotus, the political distinctions between peoples and even, for us, the gulf between ancient and modern melt away in the contemplation of a common human lot.”Footnote42 Hegel too knows of history’s tragic dimension, as he images history as the Schlachtbank on which the virtue of individuals and nations is sacrificed. Yet, for Hegel, the negativity of tragic history is necessary for the positive salvation of the race; wars are necessary for the spiritual unity of civilizations, and before such struggles as the Persian–Greek wars, the philosophical historian is (again) “made completely at peace by the world-historically justified victory of the higher principle over the lower … of the West over the East.”Footnote43 Obsolete peoples melt away, the particular perishes, but thereby the universal lives on in better forms. Thus, in Hegel’s philosophical history, temporal markers such as “ancient” and “modern” melt away before the universalizing light of Reason: ancient knowledge is deposited safely in the Temple of Memory, that modern hold-all, where every past happening is contemplated and sanctified sub specie aeternitatis. Herodotus, by contrast, is more attentive to the particular qua particular, and may therefore be more sensitive to a real sense of loss. He does not ignore the need for sacrifice; he celebrates patriotism, and finds satisfaction in the Greek victories over Persian hybris, victories that accorded with the will of the gods. And yet, the insight of Xerxes at Abydos seems to resist a final reconciliation or a consoling theodicy. At that liminal moment of time and space, Xerxes touches on the intuition that pervades Herodotus’s conception of historiē and knowledge, but which Hegel may gloss over in his rush to universal encyclopaedias: the glory and the tears are not unified in a synthesis, but juxtaposed, conjoined yet different. Irreducible, elemental, both are right, and both are necessary if history is to be written – a celebration of past deeds that are “wondrous” and worthy of being known – but which, alas!, are past and will never come again.

Will Desmond

Will Desmond holds a joint PhD in classics and philosophy from Yale University and is currently associate professor in the Department of Ancient Classics in Maynooth University, Ireland. His interests focus on Classical Greek literature and culture, the history of philosophy, and modern receptions of the classics. Among his publications are The Greek Praise of Poverty (Notre Dame, 2006), Cynics (Acumen, 2008), Philosopher-Kings of Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Hegel's Antiquity (Oxford, 2020).

Notes

1 The three central questions posed at the end of Critique of Pure Reason – “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” (A 805 / B 833) – implicitly dissociate “knowledge” from moral insight, though, in fact, Kant’s vocabulary is not so precise, and he does effectively allow for moral knowledge. This constitutes the core of any religious knowledge, which must remain within the “bounds of reason alone,” and hence can bring no revelation of the supernatural, supersensual, or of the whole. So, too, aesthetic statements masquerade as judgments about the objective world (e.g. “this rose is beautiful”) but are in fact not characterized by the universality and/or necessity of knowledge claims. The fourth question that appears in the Logic – “What is man?” – looks forward to Kant’s ventures into anthropology and philosophy of history (see Beck, Kant: Selections, 7–23), and, in a way, to a more synthetic, unified vision of a knowing, acting, hoping humanity. Yet, as with morality, religion, and aesthetics, such endeavours do not qualify as scientific knowledge proper, given that they deal with “ideas” (like “universal history”) which transcend the limits of actual (sensible) experience.

2 Given his self-conscious adoption of the Platonic term “Idea” (1994: 113), Kant is no doubt aware of the ancient provenance of the concepts “matter” and “form” also, though he is not interested in pursuing their intellectual history. On the matter/form distinction ultimately underlying “all knowledge” and “all reflection,” see especially Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 92 (A50/B74) and 280 (A266/B322), respectively; cf. Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 203-5; Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, 107-10.

3 “Everything is a syllogistic inference” (Alles ist ein Schluss): Hegel, Science of Logic, §181; cf. Encyclopaedia Logic, §198. World history as a judgment: Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §341.

4 Hegel is keenly aware of the triad’s ancient precedents and history. It first came to prominence with Plato (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1.387 (citing Diogenes Laertius 3.56), 2.48–49), was articulated explicitly by the Stoics, who influentially divided knowledge into logic, physics, and ethics (2.243; cf. Sellars, Stoicism, 42-43 et passim), and eventually was made central to philosophical “science” by Wolf, Kant, and Hegel himself. He, in turn, applies it widely in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, affirming that its traces can be “always found” in philosophies of the past, if only implicitly (1995: 2.243). The reason is that, despite its phenomenal history, it is the logically necessary articulation of the Hegelian Idea, hence universal and essentially timeless.

5 Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, 139. For more on this, see Rockmore, Hegel's Circular Epistemology. Hegel himself concludes the Encyclopaedia with a discussion of the relationship between logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of mind (Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, §575–77). On knowledge as a “circle” (kyklos), with parts intimately informing and becoming each other, see Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §15–18.

6 Herodotus: 9.122, cf. 1.142, 2.35, 2.77, 3.106. Such Herodotean passages have, for some readers, suggested an “environmental determinism,” traceable in other contemporary texts like the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places 12, 23; see Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion, 102ff; Lloyd “Egypt,” 433; Raaflaub, “Philosophy, Science, Politics: Herodotus and the Intellectual Trends of his Time,” 161–3.

7 Ionia, Homer: Hegel, Science of Logic, 496. The British Hegelian Bosanquet revisits the idea concisely: “Undoubtedly man lives the life of his planet, his climate, and his locality, and is the utterance, so to speak of the conditions under which his race and his nation have evolved” (The Philosophical Theory of the State, 31).

8 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 274.

9 Hegel's examples for original history feature four Greeks (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenphon, Polybius) and four others (Caesar, Guicciardini, Frederick the Great, Cardinal de Retz). For universal history, he names two Romans (Livy, Diodorus Siculus) and one other (Johannes von Müller). French pragmatic history and German critical history: The Philosophy of History, 6–7. On German critical history, cf. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, §549 with The Philosophy of History, 10–11, 279–80 (on Niebuhr) and Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.1049–50, 1087 on Wolf.

10 Hegel's theoretical claim is reflected perhaps in the exasperation he voices with the merely subjective assumptions of August Wolf (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.1049–50, 2.1087; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 2.72), Niebuhr (The Philosophy of History, 10–11, 279–80 (“Niebuhr's History can only be regarded as a criticism of Roman history”), 302–3, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: 2.1099), and theologians (The Philosophy of History, 10–11), and in his consequent preference sometimes for more uncritical historians (The Philosophy of History, 7, 279; Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1.291).

11 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 9.

12 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 11.

13 The final sentences of Hegel's Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit articulate how philosophical history and present modernity comprehensively and timelessly embrace all previous historiographies and cultures, respectively: “While we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past— however extensive its periods— only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially; distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present” (The Philosophy of History, 78–9; cf. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1.38–9 with its image of the “Temple of Memory”).

14 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 1.

15 Spiritualizing activity of “phantasy”: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 2.564–57; cf. The Philosophy of History, 234–7 on manteia, or “poesy” (236).

16 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 44.

17 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 11.

18 See Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus; Thomas, Herodotus in Context; Boedeker, “Epic Heritage and Mythical Patterns in Herodotus.” The “patterns of thought” that Raaflaub's Herodotus share with contemporary “leading intellectuals” include, most notably, the very Greek penchant for “schematization … polarity between opposed things, antithetical patterns, symmetry and linear as well as cyclical developments” (“Philosophy, Science, Politics: Herodotus and the Intellectual Trends of his Time,” 155–6).

19 “No man can overleap his time, the spirit of his time is his spirit also” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 2.96; cf. 1.45 et al.)

20 See Creuzer's 1798 essay, Herodot und Thukydides, with discussion and contextualization in Momigliano, “The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography,” Morley, “The Anti-Thucydides: Herodotus and the Development of Modern Historiography,” 156–7.

21 See especially Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History; cf. casual remarks by van Wees (“there are of course deeply unmodern moral and religious dimensions to his [Herodotus's] work” (“Herodotus and the Past,” 348), or Hornblower (“a modern (or Thucydidean) attitude to divine epiphanies: obviously, they did not really happen” (“Herodotus and his Sources of Information,” 379)), to take two examples.

22 Herodotus has, in fact, been called a universal or world historian: MacKendrick, “Herodotus: The Making of a World Historian.”

23 “Of these historians, whom we must make thoroughly our own, with whom we must linger long, if we would live with their respective nations, and enter deeply into their spirit: of these historians, to whose pages we may turn not for the purposes of erudition merely, but with a view to deep and genuine enjoyment, there are fewer than might be imagined” (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 3).

24 Egyptian monumental architecture, exemplified by the work of Sesostris: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.646, citing Hdt. 2.108; cf. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.638–41 on towers of Babel, Bel, Ecbatana (with Hdt. 1.98). Rigidity of Egyptian sculpture partly to Egyptian caste systems: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.781, citing Hdt. 2.167; cf. Hdt. 6.60). Phoenicians: The Philosophy of History, 190–1; cf. 183–4 (trading Mesopotamian, Assyrian cities). Zoroastrianism: The Philosophy of History, 177. Regarding Africa, Herodotus's story of the Nasamonian youths, who travelled south to a river with crocodiles, where all the people are goētoi (Hdt. 2.32–33) becomes an ingredient in Hegel's analysis of early African sorcery religions (The Philosophy of History, 93–4). This is not a complete list of Hegel's citations in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1956), or does it exhaust further citations in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1998) or Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1995).

25 See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 237–8.

26 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 104. Constitutional Debate, taken as historical, even though it was as “naïve” as Herodotus's retelling: The Philosophy of History, 190 (with Herodotus 3.80–83).

27 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.1062.

28 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 230–1. Herodotus's Proem: 1.1–5.

29 Achilles, Alexander: The Philosophy of History, 223–4, 234. Crusades: 391–2.

30 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 256–8.

31 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 257–8.

32 “Outside it [Greek history], everything else is terra incognita; and the history of peoples outside it can only be begun when they come into contact with it. This happened with the Jews in the time of the Ptolemies through the translation of the Bible into Greek, without which we would give little credence to their isolated narratives. From this point, when once properly fixed, we can retrace their history. And so with all other peoples. The first page of Thucydides, says Hume, is the only beginning of all real history” (Kant, Idea for a Universal History, Ninth Thesis: in Beck, Kant: Selections, 424n).

33 See Burrow, A History of Histories, 331–66.

34 Bowersock, “Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire,” esp. 66; cf. Nichols, “On the Philosophic Character of Tacitus's Imperial Political History.”

35 “There was a time when a man who did not believe in spectres or in the devil was called a philosopher” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1.57).

36 Perfect empiricist: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 2.133. Particulars: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 2.136–37.

37 Hegel often likens the Greek spirit to a sculptor, and in some passages envisions the great Greek figures as a hall of sculptures, though in the following Herodotus is not specifically named: “In its poets and orators, historians and philosophers, Greece is not to be understood at its heart unless we bring with us as a key to our comprehension an insight into the ideals of sculpture and unless we consider from the point of view of their plasticity not only the heroic figures in epic and drama but also the actual statesmen and philosophers … Pericles himself, Phidias, Plato, Sophocles above all, Thucydides too, Xenophon, Socrates—each of them of his own sort, unimpaired by another's; all of them are out-and-out artists by nature, ideal artists shaping themselves, individuals of a single cast, works of art standing there like immortal and deathless images of the gods” (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1.719–20).

38 Greece (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 2.9–10; cf. 1.148–52, 1956: 223). On the theme, see e.g. Schmidt's Germans and Other Greeks (2001).

39 One recalls that Hegel attended the Stuttgart Gymnasium, promoted Greek studies as headmaster of the Nürnberg Gymnasium, and continued to include a very significant Greek component in his Berlin lectures on art, religion, and philosophy.

40 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 11–12.

41 Lloyd, “Egypt,” 435.

42 Burrow, A History of Histories, 17.

43 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2.1062.”

This article (with its bibliography) is available on https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17496977.2022.2097410

Will Desmond

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