Irrationality by Smith Justin E. H.;

Author:Smith, Justin E. H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

The World-Soul on Horseback

On October 14, 1806, Napoleon’s troops engaged Prussian forces in the Battle of Jena. Just under seven thousand French troops were killed or wounded, and around thirty-eight thousand on the Prussian side.14 The day before, G.W.F. Hegel had observed the French leader entering his quaint university town on horseback. In a letter to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, the philosopher would effuse: “I saw the emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance.”15 This single individual, Hegel wrote, while “concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,” nevertheless “reaches out over the world and masters it.”16 What Hegel means by “world-soul” is complex and would draw us considerably off course if we were to attempt to do it justice. In brief, it is something like the philosophical reflection of the course of humanity’s development through history. It exists objectively, and not simply as the narrative that we give to history in order to make sense of it. And it encompasses both the emotional and the intellectual realms of human life. The history of the world is the history of the unfolding of this spirit. For it to be embodied or concentrated in a single person is for that person, by accident or by will, to come objectively to hold the destiny of the world in his hands.

That sometimes the weight of the world can fall into one’s hands quite by accident is, some have argued, crucial for understanding Hegel’s take on Napoleon. This issue has lately been of some importance again in discussions of political leadership in Europe. In an October 2017 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, President Emmanuel Macron of France went into considerable detail in clarifying his position in relation to Napoleon Bonaparte. The German interviewers had asked him whether he agreed with Hegel that one man, such as the French emperor, can steer history. Macron denied that this is what Hegel said: “He wasn’t being nice to Napoleon,” Macron explains, “because he of course knows that history can outflank you.”17 Hegel had believed rather that an individual can “embody … the zeitgeist for a moment,” but that “the individual isn’t always clear they are doing so.”18 Nonetheless, Macron reveals that he aims to do so himself, and to do so with clarity. “I think it is only possible to move things forward if you have a sense of responsibility. And that is exactly the goal I have set for myself: to try to encourage France and the French people to change and develop further.”19

Months of speculation about the new president’s Napoleonic ambitions could not have been more decisively confirmed. He goes on to declare that what must be restored (and what, presumably, Hegel had seen Napoleon as providing) are, precisely, “grand narratives” of the sort that French postmodernist philosophers of a generation earlier, such as Jean-François Lyotard, had mocked and dismissed. In his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard had gone so far as to assert that the grand narratives that had supported the Enlightenment project are inherently unjust.

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