IV. Phenomenology of the Undead - Bridgewater College



IV. Phenomenology of the UndeadSpirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and movement in this ether of its life and is Science. In this, the moments of its movements no longer exhibit themselves as specific shapes of consciousness, but—as specific Notions and as their organic self-grounded movement. Whereas in the phenomenology of Spirit each moment is the difference of knowledge and Truth, and is the movement in which that difference is cancelled, Science on the other hand does not contain this difference and the cancelling of it. On the contrary, since the moment has the form of the Notion, it united the objective form of Truth and the knowing Self in an immediate unity.G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of SpiritI was in New York for a conference and trying (doubtlessly without success) not to look like a tourist. That meant miles of confused walking, but I was nonetheless entertained. My wanderings had brought me to a posh block in the Meatpacking District, where I was enjoying window shopping for dinner. I had no real hope of actually entering any of these establishments. I had gleaned from TV and movies that good restaurants in New York require reservations, and so I assumed that to be true. But before the long retreat towards the East Village and affordable Indian, I was enjoying reading the menus outside the doors and goggling at the prices. I was reading the description of a duck dish (white truffle & honey?), when I forgot myself enough to mutter, “Sweet, Jesus!” and swallow involuntarily.“Indeed, the duck is divine,” said the man who had appeared at my side. He looked vaguely Mediterranean, trim, and in a timelessly smart three piece suit. “Oh, excuse me,” I said, flustered. “I’m… I’m just kicking the tires.”“Well,” he replied with a wan smile. “If I may be so bold, might I suggest that this… “dealership” is possessed of exceptional mechanics and a wonderful line of gastronomic vehicles.”His accent was strange. Some words like “dealership” were swallowed like an American. But “mechanic” sounded vaguely French. And the cadence of his speech was English with each word spoken with relish.“Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t have a reservation,” I added lamely. But then I rallied a bit. “And, I’m afraid my tastes run more to Toyota than Citro?n.”He smiled; evidently gratified I could hit a simple volley. “Ah, but your invocation of the Christ belies the modesty of your tastes, my friend. As it happens, I do have a reservation, and I am without a companion this evening. Is there any chance that I might prevail upon you to join me?”Of course, I was a bit taken aback by the offer, but it was said with equal parts entreaty and challenge. I felt like I was being asked by a little old lady if I was strong enough to carry a moderately-sized box an insignificant distance.“Well, it’s a generous offer, but I wouldn’t want to impose,” I said with a Midwestern smile.“Nonsense,” he said with an aristocratic snort. “You would be doing an old man a great service by providing him company.”That was odd, as my prospective friend had less grey hair than me, but my culinary lusts were getting the better of me, primed as they were by cable travel shows and the smell wafting out of the bistro. So, I cordially accepted the invitation. We exchanged introductions. He said his name was Ives Adam. I told him mine: Benjamin Arnold.Upon entry my patron was greeted with warm familiarity as “Mr. Adam” by the maitre d’, and we were led up a staircase, away from the crowded main floor, to an otherwise empty party room. I must have looked uncomfortable, so Mr. Adam explained that his consistent patronage had led the proprietors to indulge his “desire for a bit of quiet.” The nonchalance of the waiter, the cheery décor, and the still-evident murmur of the diners below reassured me.Mr. Adam insisted on the prix fixe menu, to which I readily agreed because I had no idea what that meant, and I did not wish to appear stupid. I reassured myself that you only live once, how much could it turn out to be, $200? We chattered on a long time while Mr. Adam slowly perused the wine list. I answered the standard questions from Mr. Adam about my life. He was kind and immediately personable, seeming genuinely interested in my family and work. He was a bachelor, he said, who had been working in trade, and then as an advisor to the US government. He had something to do with monetary policy, trade liberalization, and international regulatory regimes for derivatives and credit default swaps. In the end, he chose champagne for the appetizers (Louis Roederer Cristoal Brut) and Bordeaux for the main course, Chateau Leoville Poyferre St. Julien. I smiled cluelessly while he ordered. Appetizers turned out to be platters with little bits of meat and fish with brioche. We had duck rilletes, a sort of p?té served on the toast; then saucisson russe, pieces of what looked like sausage but tasted like savory-sweet cookies; and several sausages with unusually large unctuous bits. “Aioli de la Mer” turned out to be little anchovies, sardines, and pieces of tuna that we dipped in an amazing mayonnaise sauce that definitely did not come out of a jar with a blue label. I considered joking that this was the best tartar sauce I had ever had, but I tried to remember that I was feigning sophistication. Instead, I asked Mr. Adam to tell me more about derivatives regulation. He took great pleasure in doing so. And he took special pleasure in my enjoyment of the meal. I could hide my lack of knowledge about the cuisine and equity repurchase agreements (I thought), but I couldn’t hide my evident pleasure in the food.“Oh, that’s wonderful!” I said upon tasting the grilled octopus.Mr. Adam matched my enthusiasm by rhapsodizing over the freshness of the tuna. The sight of each other’s honest pleasure seemed to synthesize an especially rapid growth in intimacy. Of course, the wine must have helped. By the time the remains of the appetizers were cleared away, we were chattering away like old friends. The conversation turned from banalities to deeper topics, especially politics, history, and popular culture. He seemed to be knowledgeable about everything from conflicts in the Chinese Communist Party to Canadian rock and roll. He even made a witty reference to the HBO series True Blood, which got us onto the topic of vampires. I expounded on how I was interested in what the culture’s fascination with vampires truly meant. I said something about how I thought it was “a typical nihilistic modern fantasy.”Mr. Adam, who had been laid back in his chair before the change of topic, leaned forward and said, with what I thought unwarranted enthusiasm, “I’m very curious as to what you mean by that, Mr. Arnold.”“Please, just call me Benjamin. Well,” I replied. “All these stories seem to revolve around sex with vampires. The vampires seem to represent the modern incarnation of the divine, only a divine consistent with the modern libertine pursuit of pleasure. Sex with the vampire is a dream of unity, of absorption into this fallen god of pleasure. That the vampire is overpowering, vastly stronger, lightening quick, and with the power to “glamour” or hypnotize their victims into consent absolves people of the sin of indulging their carnal appetites. Even when the vampire in the story is somehow good, he represents a hope for immortality that betrays a latent belief in the meaninglessness of regular life. And when the vampires are evil the resulting death and carnage is our atonement for the pleasure we take in the vampire fantasy. We want the vampires’ pleasure without limits, without superego, and that desire is precisely the apple in the Garden of Eden that merits the vampire’s bite and death.” I glanced to my companion, self-conscious about the speech but pleased to have gotten it out so well.“Interesting,” said Mr. Adam, stroking under his chin. “I myself have thought about this for quite some time, especially comparing the current wave of interest to the previous ones. For instance, vampire myths roughly consistent with the current one first arose in Southeastern Europe when those regions where Christianized. The vampire who rises from the grave undead is the old pagan gods re-narrated into the new Christian idioms of resurrection and sacramental blood-drinking. To my mind, the vampire became a symbol for the remainder of a world largely rationalized and demythologized. Thus whenever things cannot be explained using rational Christian principles, the irrational and contingent is accounted for by demonic forces.”“Hmm, it sounds like you’re pointing to the kind of mass hysteria about witches that gripped New England and resulted in the Salem Witch Trials. Outsiders and happenings that couldn’t be assimilated to or mastered by the laws of Christendom were assumed to be animated by an alternative power of the devil.” I thought for a moment. “If that’s the case, then we have a genuinely new phenomenon in the current vampire craze. You’re saying that vampires were the malevolent threat of the other outside. Now they are the core of the interior self, desire objectified and projected out into a fantasy. Does that make sense?”“Indeed, that is very well put, my precocious new friend. Undoubtedly it is a new form of the myth. But it is nevertheless not new but a synthesis of old forms. The myth is the remainder of a religious or ideological scheme that attempts to explain all of reality. But this system eventually goes into crisis when it becomes apparent that its terms or laws are not independently true but dependent on other concepts. For instance, after Christianity concludes that Jesus is the Truth, the Word made Flesh, St. Augustine faced the fact that this understanding was dependent on Greek philosophical concepts that presumed the possession of the Word or Truth would bring victory over the Flesh. But our North African saint knew he still burned with lust. The conflict is resolved by placing both concepts under a new one. So, now both Word and Flesh are dependent on Grace. Augustine is dependent on God for both truth and virtue. And then it begins again.”That was a lot to take in. Luckily, the main course arrived, giving me time to process. That was difficult to do given the delicacies presented. I had ordered the aforementioned duck confit in figs, pine nuts, white truffle & honey. Mr. Adam was brought the dry-aged shell steak in Roquefort sauce. The duck was, indeed, a revelation.Mr. Adam’s account, in contrast, was more difficult to swallow. But I tried: “Do you mean that vampire stories and theology are both just self-justifications for human failing? That both are an evolving series of excuses made up by children who haven’t done their homework?”Mr. Adam looked, for the first time, scandalized. “No, no, my dear Mr. Arnold. I would never claim anything so impious. The evolution of history is not driven by some random irrational series of drunken lurches. No. The growth of the organism is governed by underlying absolutely rational laws. We amidst the natural process of development may not see the end until the end, but all the developments up to now certainly follow this progressive path. The science we have is imperfect, but it is certainly no mere myth in the way you mean. In the same way the vampire before you may be imperfect, but he is certainly no myth in the way you mean.”That last bit sounded odd, an oddness compounded by the odd intense gaze Mr. Adam fixed me with. I shook it off. “Oh. Do you mean to say, then, that myths about vampires are getting us closer to the truth about human beings? I mean, do you agree with me that the vampire stories of contemporary culture point to an essential nihilism in the modern soul?” I was confident enough that I had resolved the topic that I turned back to my duck confit.“Ah, you are absolutely right symbolically, but you are missing the substance. Perhaps a substantive illustration is in order.” He paused a long moment. “Here, I would like you to sample my entrée.” When I looked up from my plate, Mr. Adam had produced his desert fork with a piece of meat on the end. He extended it in an elegant gesture across the table.A little self-consciously, I accepted the fork and quickly popped the morsel into my mouth. As I chewed, the sublime flavor that filled my mouth was almost overwhelming. For one thing, it was the tenderest meat I had ever eaten. It broke against my teeth more like the juicy cells of a grapefruit than a piece of beef. But then the flavor was similarly unlike any beef I had eaten. The dominant flavor was earthy, like morel mushrooms mixed with the taste of darkly roasted nuts. And then there was a smoky note, like the finish of an Islay single malt Scotch. Indeed, it was peaty. And as those cells broke my mouth was filled with that slightly ferrous tang of fresh blood. So it was rare, but unlike any underdone burger I had ever had. The overall effect was less fresh blood and more fresh-cut grass, lilac, and oregano. It tasted complex and old, reminiscent of the effect of Indian food on my palate, as if you can sense thousands of years of culinary refinements.“My God!” I said with real reverence. “That’s amazing! So that’s what a ‘30-day dry aged’ steak tastes like?”“No,” he calmly replied. He looked me squarely, intensely, in the eyes.“No?” I asked, perplexed.“It is not the steak. It is… me.” He kept his gaze steady, but lifted his left hand to the side of his face. The round muscle below the thumb had been cleanly cut away. But it wasn’t bleeding, and Mr. Adam didn’t seem to be in pain. I suppose I should have screamed or run out of the restaurant in a panic. But instead I was just very, very confused. It didn’t make sense. I gave a lame half-chuckle, like someone who doesn’t get the joke and is hoping it will dawn on him without too much humiliation. But Mr. Adam’s eyes registered no mirth, no pain, not even contempt for me or pride in his clever parlor trick. He looked only curious, as if he didn’t know what I’d do.“My God,” I said in quiet wonder.“No, I’m just a simple vampire,” he said. His gaze, I now realized, held me lightly but firmly. I didn’t feel paralyzed as much as stunned. I was stunned. All I could do was say, “I don’t understand.”Mr. Adam nodded; his gaze was still steady. “I know you don’t, so let me make a few things clear, my dear man. Then you may leave if you wish. First, the legends are true to an extent. There are vampires. And vampires are immortal, unless someone goes to the ungentlemanly extreme of beheading one of us. I am a vampire. But, I mean you no harm. All that disagreeable business about vampires wantonly feeding on and killing human beings is stuff and nonsense. It is merely fantasy. I have invited you to dinner only with the ulterior motive of friendship and honest communication, not to (how would you say it in the parlance of the day?) suck you dry.” He chuckled lightly at the idea, as if murder was just something childish or silly.“Now, I would very much like to continue our most excellent repast, but certainly I understand if you harbor prejudices against immortal beings that preclude our continued discourse. And I must apologize for the rather dramatic and shocking fashion with which I revealed my nature to you. My only defense is that you must realize, how would you say it…, coming out presents insuperable challenges? Please let me beg your forgiveness, Mr. Arnold. And as a small recompense for your patience, allow me to treat you to dinner.”Mr. Adam smiled warmly, and then he blinked both eyes like someone with dry contacts. He said, “So, will you ask another question, Mr. Arnold. Or will you flee?”I did not. I was, oddly, no longer captivated by my companion’s stare. But my curiosity had gotten the better of my caution. Perhaps it was because I didn’t really believe he was a vampire, yet.“That was disgusting!” I said with a grimace and quiet vehemence. “How could you do that to me? That was revolting!” I felt a gag was in order, but my contorted expression was wholly faked. My mind wanted to wretch the morsel up again, but instead of being filled with bile, my mouth was still haunted by the incredible flavor I had experienced.“Indeed, I very much agree. But it was a gift, don’t you see, Mr. Arnold. My body broken for you, as it were.” His mouth formed an ironic smile at this sacrilege. He looked at me with an almost boyish entreaty for approval of his wit.He sensed my indignation weakening, so he plowed ahead, to give me time and space to turn towards him.“I am aware that vampire flesh holds tremendous attraction to men. That is the reason there are so few of us left.”“Few of you?” I stammered, surprised.“Yes, there were never many of my kind. But the ancients learned our secret. And they hunted us as a delicacy. They killed most of us way before the beginning of the Common Era.”“But I thought vampires could reproduce by biting human beings or making them drink vampire blood,” I said.“No. That is only a superstition. The myth that eternal damnation as a vampire awaits those who drink the blood of Satan is merely the opposite of the eternal life in heaven promised to those who take Communion. Vampires cannot reproduce. Not sexually and not in any of the other ways proposed in the myths.”“So what in the myths is true? Do you run from garlic? Is that why we are having French rather than Italian? Does the sight of a cross bring you pain? And will you burn to a crisp in the light of the sun?”“All, nonsense. Are you disappointed?” Mr. Adam smiled.“A little. But it’s not as bad as finding out there is no Santa or the Easter Bunny,” I said.“Well, Mr. Arnold, I will allow my brethren to speak for themselves,” he replied solemly.When I responded with a momentary credulous look of surprise, Mr. Adam broke into genuine laughter. “My dear Mr. Arnold…” he said, overcome with mirth.I smiled too, but then it hit me. “Mr. Adam, if vampires can’t reproduce, and vampires have been waning since before the first century, then that suggests that you are… How old are you?” It was staggering to think he could be 2000 years old.“I am afraid that I honestly cannot answer that question, Mr. Arnold. I simply do not know precisely. My conscious accounting of time only began when human beings began to account for time. Reckoning time by the cycle of the moon began about 6000 years ago. Human beings tracked the solstices much earlier. If we go by the time scheme developed by modern scientists, I think I can safely say I developed consciousness of my existence and hence real memories around 200,000 years ago with the emergence of human beings themselves. But I know my existence extends significantly farther back than that. I have what I call sense memories that go far back to your earliest ancestors. When I see an anthropologist’s rendering of what Australopithecus looked like, I can reconstruct those ancient feelings such that I feel, now, like I see an old friend. Beyond that there is only… an intimation. I have the sense of wandering for eternity until company came.”My imagination was officially boggled. “Do you mean to tell me that you may be as much as a million years old?”“Yes. That’s a nice round figure. Let’s just call me a meganarian.” He spread his hands out to present himself. I just sat and stared for a while.“You don’t look your age,” I deadpanned.“You’re too kind. I try to stay out of the sun and use moisturizer,” he said with feigned sincerity and then a wink.But once I had begun to process Mr. Adam’s simple claim to be a million years old, I began to think about the greater significance of what else he had said.“Wait a minute. Mr. Adam, could you please go back and elaborate on what you said. What did you mean about the difference between real and sense memories? Is the problem that you simply have too much time to remember and you have forgotten your earliest days?”“Ah, yes, very good, Mr. Arnold. You have picked up precisely on one of the more interesting things I have to tell you. Although it is certainly true that I have had a very, very long life. I think my memory works similar to your own. I can no more recollect minor details of, for instance, what I ate for lunch last week than you can. But I can recall important events and feelings from a long time ago as well as you can. They stick in the mind so to speak. But I have only the vaguest intimations of memory from before the time human beings taught me language. Without concepts to organize perceptions into experiences and a concept of self to organize the experiences into memory, life has only sensual immediacy. Certainly life then must have been visceral, pressing, and wholly engaged in the present. But, as such, life was also ephemeral, wispy, unreal. I think of it as my crudest, animal era of existence.” Mr. Adam said the last bit with certain distaste, as if he were a little shamed by the admission.But something didn’t make sense about it. I replied, “But why didn’t you have language among your own kind,… a vampire language?”“Well, you must understand that, while vampires are very much human-like in many ways, in important respects we are as different from people as can be. We have no sociability or mutuality with our own kind. I do not understand it myself. Perhaps because we do not breed and have never needed one another to survive, we have never developed a care for each other. When I encounter another vampire, I cannot see him, so to speak. I realize it is another vampire, and I see his body, but I cannot register him as another sentient being. It is like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing but a glass in a frame. That, I believe, is the substance of that particular vampire myth. I daresay that one of my more clever brethren must have put out that piece of lore, so that he might be able to “prove” he was not a vampire. I admire such pluck in an abstract way, but I do not now nor have I ever felt solidarity with other vampires. Perhaps it is analogous to how you must feel about your 32nd cousin twice removed.” He gave me an off-hand gesture.“I don’t.”“Precisely.”“So, you are saying that you learned language from human beings?”“Indeed. Although it wasn’t much of a language at first, as you might imagine.” He gave his special condescending chuckle again. “But you can imagine that this period in my existence looms especially large in my consciousness. Having even the crudest concepts with which to parse the world meant that things that had been blurred in mere sensibility suddenly came into a comparatively sharp focus. That was my Eden. Oh, the world seemed so beautiful.”“But how did you learn language? Did you live with a tribe of human beings?”“No. I picked it up slowly, I think, in the course of… this is most embarrassing to admit… hunting.” Mr. Adam looked at me with a stare approaching the stunning power of his earlier looks. “You must understand, Mr. Arnold. That is not who I am anymore. I have not eaten a human being in a very long time. The very thought is as repulsive to me as I presume it must be for you. But I have hunted human beings… for eons. I have often wondered if the selection of prey by vampires had something to do with the evolution of human beings.” “You should have seen you then. You were glorious. You presume that men lived in tribes. That was somewhat later. In the earliest period, human beings roamed the forests and plains singly or with only a few companions for a brief period of time. At that stage you were somewhat less human and more like me. People had not yet become weak from relying on tools and companions. They could run with the speed of a panther, spring great distances onto the backs of a deer or ground sloth, and they had the strength to quickly break an animal’s neck. Males and females were not easily distinguishable except when the females were pregnant or nursing. Then, human beings were bold, fearless, and cunning. Worthy prey.” Mr. Adam looked wistful, and, for the first time, hungry.“So in that the vampire legends are true?”“Yes and no. The vampire legends that arose in the 18th and 19th centuries doubtless arose due to the crude state of science. As old taboos wore off, modern curiosity made people begin to examine corpses. But they did not understand anything about the process by which a human body decomposes. So when they found their Uncle Zoltan surprisingly ruddy and with flesh engorged, with receded gums and bloody mouth, they assumed the poor fellow had slipped his grave to feed on his neighbors. Take that and add to it the growing suspicion that the aristocracy was a parasitic class and you get Count Dracula. No, those elements of the legend do not rest in my vampiric indiscretions. I had long, long since given up feeding on humans. But it is certainly the case that vampire legends are much much older. Some of these are doubtless rooted in the events of our youthful… enthusiasms. Ah, the cheese course!”I had forgotten that we were in a restaurant in New York. The waiter appeared with a platter of cheeses, each with a helpful little identifying card. There was Camembert (the only one I recognized). My favorite turned out to be a sheep’s milk cheese called Cardonbert from a farm in Upstate New York. It was soft with infused flowers. It had a rich flavor with notes of sea salt and grass, and it melted in the mouth. There was also a faintly sour and sharp cheese called Laguiole and a bright orange cheese with hints of butterscotch called Mimolette. But the wonders of the cheeses couldn’t distract me from the more incredible conversation.“So were you ever friends with these early homo sapiens?” I asked.“No. Friendship requires virtue, love, and a self-conscious choice of companions. None of those existed at that time in either people or vampires. There were no virtues, but also no vices. There was nothing to cause jealousy, envy, or contempt. All lived in the limitless bounty of nature. But I shouldn’t say there was no virtue in man at the time. There was in man an embryonic kind of pity. Unlike vampires, humans empathize with and mirror each other.”“So, when exactly did you gain the maturity to move past such youthful enthusiasms as hunting, Mr. Adam?”“I must admit my youth and adolescence was rather extended and went through several stages. It might be helpful to understand something of my own self-consciousness at this point. To be succinct, it may be fair to say that it did not exist. I had basic concepts but no identity, no sense of myself as a distinct individual. When I began to, interact shall we say, with human beings I had the first flickering of true consciousness. I knew I desired human beings. They recognized and feared me, and in that mirror I could, for the first time, see something of myself. And so I desired them, not simply as food (the world was lousy with beasts at the time) but to possess that fear.”I shuddered involuntarily. When he saw that he shuddered too.“Yes, it is horrible. But you must realize that this was absolutely essential (I use that word deliberately) for both our species. Without the antitheses (pain, hate, cruelty) the rational synthesis cannot be born: comfort, love, justice. And, so with my desire came death. I cannot deny that my hunger went unslaked for many thousands of years. I tasted the blood of many thousands of people, and I roamed the wide earth, a restless and untiring predator. But then, slowly, human culture began to happen. Human beings developed tools, more complicated language, gender differences, herding, agriculture, communities, art, and, especially warfare.”“There was no war before then?” I was surprised.“None worthy of the name. Of course occasionally human beings in their earliest states would kill each other. I suspect that they learned to desire the same fear that I did, but they learned quicker than me that the dead eyes of a corpse hold no true satisfaction. So, it was men who developed the first nobility. They learned to spare their prey, so the strong could continue to enjoy the fear, the bowed heads, and the labor of the conquered. That was how tribes and then cities developed. The first wife was a slave. The first father was a master. And with them the battle was drawn. For now there were things to really fight over: tools, land, livestock, women, gods. Of course, I’m over simplifying things tremendously. I am aware this establishment closes at 1 am.”“Did you have slaves?” The question was awkward. Why was it more awkward than eating people?“Yes, I began to keep slaves in ancient Sumer, present day Iraq, about 6500 years ago. But I was a nomad then. I held slaves in India, Egypt, Greece. It sounds barbaric now, and it was. But becoming a master was great progress for me. Indeed, at first it was worse. My greatest shame is that my move to lordship was motivated by decadence. I no longer wanted to hunt for food. But the taste of such domesticated food grew wearisome. I began my great fast from human food, and I became a master. So, you see slavery was rational and modern for that time. Slavery meant arts, building, cities, music such that had never entered the world before. If you could see how I was then you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I was strutting around in various elaborately tasteless costumes, acting the lord of the manor. We can see it as pathetic now, but you must comprehend how exalted it was over my previous existence.”“So what finally changed?” I interrupted.“I looked in the mirror again. Oh, it took a long time to see. Once again, the realization was not my own, but men paved the way. I couldn’t see the ground what with my nose in the air. But others could. The slave is the only one who truly knows what goes on in the master’s household. He knows that the exalted dominus is actually inessential and dependent. He would starve to death without his servants. He only gets a forced and superficial recognition, the recognition of masks and the negation of consumption. He stands on the shoulders of giants to merely eat and drink his fill. But such luxury is inessential, because time consumes all.”“Except you,” I pointed out.“As I said before, I am only exceptionally slow to follow the rule,” he replied, I thought, with unwarranted portentousness. He broke the following silence, again, with his condescending chuckle. “So how did you learn it?” “From a slave I bought from Greece. You know your Karl Marx got it half right. History is not always driven by the underclass, but it was then. The slave is superior to the master. As he can see himself in his work, he develops a self-consciousness superior to the master who only fights or consumes. He reasons much more deeply in his designs, in the meditation of the crafting, in the mediation on the form. The work talks to him. They converse back and forth, and in the yielding silence of the wood or stone, he first learns to listen. And that conversation eventually comes under a higher one. That is the synthesis of true thought, the dialogue in the mind that leads to truth.” Mr. Adam looked at me expectantly, as if he should have ended with a Tah-Dah!But I was still confused. “Did the slave teach you carpentry or philosophy?” “Philosophy or an early attempt at it: Stoicism. Then I tried Skepticism, Platonism, Epicureanism, and eventually Christianity. I did the working and craftsmanship as a sort of remedial course and to pay the bills.”“So you’re a vampire Christian now?”“No, no, my dear fellow. What is this 1640? I underwent a reformation in the 1740s. I yearned for ultimate heavenly freedom from my vampiric self, yet I was unhappily caught in a vampire’s body. The solution, for a time, was to serve my brothers by serving myself. I entered trade (wool, timber, I did a big bit with nails) and eventually helped form the London Stock Exchange in 1773. So you can see I was finally moving at the same speed as history. Well, I needed to go to school on the putts of George Washington, but I had myself in Paris by 1789 to stoke the fires of Revolution. Thomas Paine was a good friend of mine.”“You are moving much faster now.” I noticed. “How do you think I felt?” Mr. Adam agreed. “Here I was used to moving at a glacial millenarian time scale, and then I was living as if a year mattered!”“Was it you who invented the guillotine and the Terror?” I asked, getting back to business.“Mr. Arnold! That was a bit cruel! No, I had nothing to do with the Terror, but it did bring back memories of old times.” He looked wistful for only a second before plowing on. “I realized with lightning speed this time that British trade without a real community had no future except flirtation with a Romanesque Empire and a quick divorce. But the French general will without respect for the rights of particular individuals was no way forward either. The synthesis was a Continental European Federal State governed by liberalized Roman law and respectful of local custom.”“Sounds like a United States of Europe,” I pointed out.“Indeed. The question was how to bring it about. I tried Napoleon. I worked in Prussia for a while, then Russia. My German adventure was a disaster. But the European Union has now been seen past the crisis. China and India are on the path. Reason cannot but progress on…”“Despite the victims? I asked pointedly.“I thought you might point that out, clever fellow. But it is not quite the time for such introspection. If there is one thing experience has taught (and here you must agree I am unrivaled) it is that all things work together for good. Hopefully, now you understand the truth of what I said when we began this discussion: “The growth of the organism is governed by underlying absolutely rational laws.” This is the truth about vampires, human beings, and history. The legends assume that the truth of all three is magic. But now, you know in your belly as you do in your mind, that this is nonsense. The truth is historical and ideal but no less real and substantial. Of course, the ultimate truth can only be found at the penultimate point of history. We are now at that end.” He made a steeple with his hands at “point” and then spread them wide at the “end.”I was both amazed and appalled. “The end justifies the means? Is that all you mean?”He shook his head at me sadly and gave the condescending chuckle a final time. “Any fantastic end undoubtedly does not justify any means. But, it is also undoubtedly the case that only actual ends atone for specific means.”I shook my head. “And that end is you?”“Again, yes and no. I must come to an end, certainly to atone for my sins and to prevent the descent back into barbarism suggested by your analysis of the current vampire fad. But the end of me is not the end. The end is you, Mr. Arnold.” He raised his wine glass as if to toast me.“Me?” I was genuinely perplexed.He nodded. “Yes, you. You now understand the whole story. Not just my story, mind you, but your story. You have in your self-consciousness, in your respectful revulsion and pity for me and your pity for the silent victims in the story, the realization, the synthesis of both the universal development of the human mind and your own particular self-consciousness. In your compassion we have a particular realization of universal humanity. I believe that calls for a toast with a premium Swedish vodka!”I leaned back in my chair, stunned again, and somehow disappointed to be at the end.~Of the four chapters in which I try to explain being out of the moment, this was the most difficult one to write, because I really like the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel. Rather than being in the moment, I more often find myself out of the moment, in the critical and analytical perspective made possible by Rousseau and Hegel. It’s a lofty perch. They allow you to climb above the everyday concerns and prejudices that trap most people in a narrow worldview. Instead, they allow you to understand the wide panorama of history. And by telling a powerful story for unpacking the meaning of the past, one that reveals the present moment in a new brighter light, they make it possible to imagine a brighter future. If the philosophy of the moment seeks to unlock the power of the present, Rousseau and Hegel unlock the power of the past and future, the power of history.That power comes from revealing that truth is historical. That means that the truth, especially the truth about the character of human beings, changes over time. So, for instance, if someone like Locke says that human beings are naturally individuals who pursue their desires, Rousseau and Hegel point out that this is true only for certain people at a particular historical time and place. Individualism, they can argue, may look natural in our world but in different eras people thought about themselves in a very different way. Human, character, in short, evolves over time.But that doesn’t mean Rousseau and Hegel thought that all truth was just cultural. No, they were still very much within the tradition of philosophy begun by Plato. To them history doesn’t reveal that all events and human character are contingent social constructions. Rather, it reveals the logical direction history is moving towards, towards greater reason and truth. Such history must cover eons of time, another reason why this story was difficult to write. I needed a coherent story that would cover thousands of years, involve individual characters, and be relatively brief. Hegel’s own story, the Phenomenology of Spirit, is interminably long, doesn’t have any personal characters and it’s written in a style that makes it almost indecipherable. So it wasn’t much help. Rousseau’s most important work (to my mind), Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, was shorter and clearer, but it also lacked characters. My solution, as the reader already knows, was vampires. They can live across great swaths of time, and they have more narrative charisma than any other creature in fiction. But Hegelian vampires would have to be significantly different than the standard ones presented in early 21st century pop culture.To my mind, the standard vampire represents the fantasy of complete being in the momentary. When a human being becomes a vampire, they are suddenly yanked out of the traditions and norms which place limits on the pursuit of desire. They also tend to have a variety of magical abilities, which give them the power to satisfy these desires. The drama in the stories, then, is driven by the conflict between vampires’ residual humanity and this possibility for the limitless satisfaction of the passions. The vampire thus expresses a fundamental dualism that may be as old as history. On the one hand there is a natural material existence, traditionally understood as evil, and then there is an abstract spiritual existence, traditionally understood as good. What is particularly interesting about vampire stories, for us, is that while our philosophical and religious tradition (remember Plato?) places the immortal rational spirit over the material body, in vampires the mortal spirit serves an immortal body. Reassuringly, for us, crosses, wooden stakes and light can kill them.Hegelian vampires cannot express such dualism, because Hegel was a monist, what he called an “absolute idealist.” He thought that only one thing was true: Spirit. This leads to a lot of confusion about Hegel’s thought, because we tend to think of spirit as a kind of magical soul-stuff that dwells in matter. In other words, our common sense understanding of spirit makes us assume that idealism denies the existence of matter. But of course that’s a ridiculous position.What Hegel meant by spirit is actually closer to mind or reason. To say that the ultimate reality is spirit simply means that knowledge requires the development of reasons or concepts for understanding our world. In contrast to Kant, who thought that the mind necessarily possesses categories for understanding experience, Hegel thought that such categories had to be developed or evolved over time by the mind or human spirit. What all human minds do is deal with the phenomena by evolving concepts that account for our experience, including the concepts we develop for dealing with our internal experiences of ourselves, our self-consciousness. At any point in time these concepts and self-concepts will be incomplete and fail to grasp the full truth. But, as the mind is rational, Hegel thinks that this process will be rational, leading to ever greater truth. At the end it will have found the absolute truth. And what is that truth? Well, just as Plato had said that knowledge of the truth is freedom, Hegel would say that this rational development of concepts and self-consciousness is free. As the essence of humanity is this development towards its ultimate end, the essence of human freedom is the absolute kind of knowing the human being possesses at the end of the historical development of self-consciousness: consciousness of the historical development of one’s self-consciousness itself.Thus there is nothing at all magical or spiritual (in the conventional sense) about Hegel’s truth, absolute spirit. It is merely the presupposition that as the human mind is rational, over time it will progressively develop itself to realize both knowledge and its own freedom.The vampire in my story expresses Hegel’s idea of spirit by not being particularly magical. He is simply a natural being with a much greater life span than human beings. He’s sort of like a tortoise in that way. But more importantly, he illustrates Hegel’s account of how human consciousness and concepts developed over eons of time. Traditional vampires are either inhuman or stuck at the stage of human consciousness in which they were made. Therefore, they can only illustrate otherness, how human consciousness in different times and places is fundamentally different. A vampire made in 1600 at the age of 9 would be stuck in that historical consciousness forever. (Some of the best vampire stories revolve around this attribute.) But Hegel’s point is not just that historical differences exist but that reason advances precisely through the encounter with such otherness. So I gave my vampires no particular nature of their own, especially one that would reflect a fundamentally parasitic relationship to humanity. What defines vampires is not their dependence on human blood but their dependence on human consciousness in precisely the same way that Hegel defined humanity in terms of a need for relationships with others, especially their otherness. Hegel’s point is not just that we need each other to maintain life or even a good life. His point is that the freedom of self-consciousness itself can only be developed in relationships with other people. Without social relationships human consciousness, and hence humanity, in itself could not develop and, thus, would not exist. Mr. Adam’s life story illustrates what Hegel means. Vampire nature like human nature is based on nothing but desire. But because vampires in my story have no need, and hence no desire, for other vampires they could not develop beyond a fundamentally animal nature without human beings. This animal nature expresses the complete immediacy of being in the moment of total union with nature. There is in that moment nothing but the feeling of the senses without any mediation of any concept or thought. In other words, if a vampire sensed an Australopithecus 500,000 years ago he wouldn’t have registered it in anything like the same way we would, because he wouldn’t have had any of the categories that we use to organize and make sense of our senses. No concepts or categories, no thought. Hegel’s assumption is that in the absence of such categories there would only be sensory stimulation and an attendant set of reflexive responses. Such a state of sensual immediacy offers an interesting contrast to being in the moment. On the one hand, such immediacy is akin to being in the moment because there are no preconceived notions, no memories about the past or worries about the future that could limit the sheer overwhelming abundance of what may appear in the wide-open manifold of the senses. This limitlessness of experience would have something of the character of the eternal or transcendent. But on the other hand, this sort of being in the moment would lack any focus on the significance or meaning of anything, as there is no concept of a self that the experience could have meaning for. Thus being in the moment might be a comportment that tries to recapture something of this primordial unity with the world, but through the human perspective of self-reflection rather than through a return to an original animal un-consciousness.But, interestingly, that turn towards reflective reason is somewhat dependent on this vision of primordial Eden, this utopian picture of complete peaceful unity with nature. We can see this in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose thought is an essential precursor to Hegel’s. Rousseau appears in my story in Mr. Adam’s account of the original human beings, before we developed language and society. The idea that we were perfect animals, healthy and powerful, without vice and without virtue except for a natural pity comes from Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality.Rousseau’s argument was the first to establish the idea that the truth about human beings is historical. He developed it in response to the philosophies of Hobbes and (especially) Locke. What Locke had done (as we saw in chapter III) was base his philosophy on a state of nature story that justified certain core assumptions about human beings as true: we are all free and equal rational individuals who pursue their desires. What Rousseau did was to tell an alternative state of nature story that showed how Locke might be accused of reading contemporary human character back into the state of nature. Locke, Rousseau argued, claimed to be accurately portraying the primitive essence of man, but it was modern man that he was really describing. Instead, Rousseau asked us to imagine what human beings would be like not only before governments were instituted, but also before any form of society existed as well. That means Rousseau asks us to imagine what human beings would be like before the creation of families, culture, tools, religion, tribes, and even gender roles and language. Rousseau’s answer to that thought experiment is human beings as the vampire Mr. Adam found them at the dawn of human history. At that stage, Rousseau argued, human beings lived in a Garden of Eden where nature provided for all human needs, and it also provided human beings with the great strength and (very small) intelligence to take advantage of this bounty. The reason why some are weak, poor, or evil, then, is not that they are naturally inferior or wicked. Rather, Rousseau suggested, they are made that way by the corrupting influence of society. The reason women are usually smaller and weaker than men is that their natural strength has atrophied from a lack of use due to gender roles imposed by society. The reason some people are wicked is that society introduces a host of new things to desire and distributes them unequally, so that individual passions become enflamed. In short, in Rousseau’s most famous formulation, while human beings were/are born free, everywhere in modern life they are in chains. We are enslaved to masters, political authorities or employers who have been clever enough to grab power, enslaved to laws or cultural norms that reinforce the power of those authorities, or enslaved to the desires and passions that society creates.Note how Rousseau’s historical point of view allows him to criticize both the aristocratic culture of ancient regime France in which he lived and the developing modern liberal culture of England and the French philosophes. The result is a philosophy that puts human beings into a double bind that powerfully leads away from the moment. On the one hand, Rousseau’s thought points away from modern liberal individualism and the freedom of the merely momentary. If our desires and individualism are socially constructed then they cannot represent genuine freedom. But then we cannot be free in ancient or pre-modern societies either because these also enslave us to social norms, hierarchies, and other socially constructed desires. As we are thus caught in the cave, Plato’s freedom of knowledge seems hardly possible. And we have no chance of getting “back to the garden” either by returning to a natural pre-social freedom. Attempts to create such utopian communities have proven them to have an exceptionally short lifespan. For instance, the state of nature at Yasgur’s Farm lasted all of three days. What we seem to be left with is the cultivation of individual personality in opposition to society. But it’s difficult to know what the content of such a free personality would entail. Rousseau’s position suggests that there is a moment of authentic freedom (that ideal of an organic peaceful unity with nature), but he also gives us analytical tools that make us suspicious that progress towards such a moment is really possible, at least for individuals by themselves.Ultimately, Rousseau suggested (in The Social Contract) that part of the solution would be for people to submit to the collective rationality of “the general will” discovered through the legislative institutions of the modern state. The other element is the sort of careful education of personality we find in Emile. Then dependence on impersonal true laws rather than the will of others would approximate the independent freedom of individuals in the original Eden, when we were only dependent on impersonal laws of nature. But these are hardly solutions in Rousseau, as he leaves us with the uneasy sense that the attempt to impose a rational moral order through artificial human institutions will tragically fail in comparison to the latent providential natural order of things. But if the moment of freedom comes ultimately from such an impersonal providence, or impersonal law, it doesn’t seem possible at all for an individual to be in the moment. The moment is caught up in the momentum of supra-individual historical/ natural forces.Hegel provided a much greater sense of optimism that such a moment can be reached in history, but this moment (we shall see) will create the same problem for being in the moment as in Rousseau.Hegel took Rousseau’s insight that human nature is shaped by historical conditions and developed it as part of a more integrated philosophical system that explains how it is possible for Rousseau’s ideal of self-reflective freedom to be realized in history. So, rather than explaining how human nature has been corrupted from its original nature and outlining how this nature might be healed, Hegel described the development of human beings from Rousseau’s original state as a rational, progressive, and inevitable historical process in which it will be healed. My vampire, Mr. Adam’s, account of the development of his own self-consciousness models Hegel’s account of this development through distinct stages of world history. In the first stage, the vampire developed concepts and categories for organizing experience when he learned human language. He describes these as allowing him to resolve the world into clarity for the first time. But more interesting than this are the following stages, which illustrate the evolution of his self-awareness or self-consciousness.In order to understand that we need a basic understanding of Hegel’s account of how reason works through the dialectic. The reason we are drawn to dualism (the idea that there are internal spiritual knowers and external material things), according to Hegel, is that fundamentally human thinking develops through relationships with objects that at first seem external but are eventually unified with the internal self. The inner experience of self, which we are sure of, first confronts some object that we aren’t sure of. We want to possess, incorporate that thing into the certainty of our inner experience, but it frustrates us precisely because we initially see it as different, external to us. The inner experience of self, what we are certain of, is the thesis of the dialectic. The thing that resists our knowing is the antithesis. What reason does is realize that the object is, in fact, not different than itself. It is something perceived by the mind just as the mind itself is perceived. Thus knowing unites the self or inner experience and the object under a higher concept. Hegel calls that unification a sublation, and the resulting new conception is called the synthesis of the dialectic. This all begins to make sense when we see the particular stages through which self-consciousness develops. In an early stage, the self exercises its self-certainty by destroying something external to it. This means the self projects itself through the project of consumption or annihilation. The vampire does this by eating people. The object at this stage is literally incorporated into the self as food. But how adequate or satisfying is that project for the self? The answer is “not very,” because the vampire just gets hungry again. He’s sort of like a toddler knocking over a tower built by his dad. The toddler gets a momentary confirmation of his self when the tower falls. He knows, “I’m the being that destroyed the tower!” That realization is the sublation: the self is literally the unity with that destruction, the being that negates the object. But then he confronts the disorder of the blocks on the floor, and he realizes how inessential he is (nothing more is happening!), so the whole thing needs to be repeated again and again. But the destruction of passive objects is only satisfying to toddlers and toddler vampires. Self-consciousness moves forward when it begins to relate to things not as just objects, but as other self-consciousnesses. So the vampire develops a more advanced self-consciousness when he understands that human beings are not simply foodstuffs, but beings with consciousness like his own.The problem is that the teenage vampire is still immature and self-centered. He doesn’t merely destroy the other, but he insists on utterly dominating it by making it his slave. This is a more satisfying project for the self, because it can enjoy both greater consumption by enjoying the slave’s labor (rather than simply enjoying the slave himself) and the slave himself recognizes the master’s power and consciousness through his deference and fear. But, again, there are limits to how satisfying the self-consciousness of a master can be. The master feels exalted by the bowed heads of his slaves, but he nevertheless suspects this is only a forced recognition from someone who is only a little better than an object. In our example of playing with blocks, the master is like a child who enjoys the parent’s attention more than knocking over towers. But, eventually, even teenagers will get bored with whining for the game to continue.And so self-consciousness evolves to the next stage that corresponds to another era of history. A much greater certainty of self can be achieved in the consciousness of the slave, who can see proof of his own consciousness in the durable things he makes. That process of imagining some project, making it, and then refining it over time leads to a much higher kind of thinking, basically the thinking of persons who makes their own block-towers. So the dialectical conflict between the master (thesis) and slave (antithesis) ultimately results in a synthesis of a new kind, the development of modern liberal society and liberal self-consciousness, where everyone sees themselves as an individual who unifies the master and slave by mastering himself through freely chosen work. (I’m skipping some stages here, ones involving Greek philosophical schools and Christianity, which Hegel thought of as the recompense of slaves who turn to an inner freedom when they are denied full freedom by masters).You might notice how in Locke’s philosophy the story begins and ends here, with individuals making voluntary contracts and the freedom of the momentary. But Rousseau and Hegel disagreed that this exemplified the full freedom of human beings. The problem is that there can be no sublation between two completely individual and independent persons. Rand drew the logical implication. People can trade but they cannot share anything. Rand insisted that this preserved the freedom of individuals to pursue their own projects of self-realization. However, Hegel points out that someone buying something from you in the marketplace is only pursuing her own private interests, so you can’t be certain, again, about the truth of your project, your self-projection. To get that certainty or security, you need them to give you recognition, to recognize your self-consciousness. If everyone is only out for themselves, that kind of genuine mutuality, a synthesis between consciousnesses, is lacking. But an even deeper problem is that all the goals of liberal individualism (hedonistic pleasure, artistic self-expression, non-conformity to corrupt society) lack a justification for why these projects are authentic to the unique identity of the individual self. Liberals assume that any choice that is chosen without outside constraints is free. But Hegel argues that mere choice lacks a rational reason for the choice. For instance, if I ask you why you like a pop song, it’s just not good enough to say, “Because it makes me feel good!” And, similarly, it’s not good enough to give the hipster answer that you don’t like it because all the stupid people do. It’s the same argument Rousseau made. You’re no more free if you follow the crowd, push against the crowd, or go off by yourself. Hegel said that good reasons can only come from a deeper sort of mutuality or agreement between self-consciousnesses, one that would reassure me that my projects are really mine, secure recognition of that individuality from others, and one that secures the projects and recognition for others as well. According to Hegel, the only solution is mutual identification with a supra-individual spiritual community: a modern state with distinct cultural goals with which we individually and mutually identify and a universal law that protects our particular interests. I tend to think of this as a synthesis or compromise between radical individualism and traditionalism. You can only get recognition for your individual projects if they are connected to the rational spirit embodied in the cultural traditions of your community, but the community respects your individual approach to that tradition. In Hegel’s original telling of this story, this solution is found in the Prussian state circa 1810, which combined traditional German culture with a revival of Roman universal law. This means that confirmation and recognition of individuals’ endeavors comes from their common roots in a set of coherent and common German traditions. The idea seems to be that there’s a spirit of the German people, a rational set of practices and values that have evolved over time that express both the particular local conditions of German life, and the unique contributions of the German people to the development of universal humanity. This means that the state is going to be respectful of both the particular spirit of freedom in local or regional communities and the universal spirit of human freedom that respects individuals. And individual Germans are going to be aware of the importance of the German spirit to their own self-consciousness. This may sound a little odd to our ears, because we live 200 years later, when people identify less with a particular ethnic identity (one homogeneous culture) and increasingly with multicultural cosmopolitanism, the blending of cultures in a global economy. But the basic Hegelian principle is the same. The rational development of spirit, the human mind, has resulted in a set of ethical and legal principles that are encoded in law and which have evolved to be consistent with the evolved self-consciousness of citizens. Since people develop their own individual projects to be consistent with these principals, the result is a perfect synthesis between the universal law of the community and the particular interests of its members. In other words, history has culminated, ended, in a set of concepts that realize the absolute freedom of human beings in knowledge and self –knowledge. Basically, these concepts are the political, economic, and scientific institutions and laws of the modern federal, liberal and democratic state. Such a law is exemplified, in the story, by Mr. Adam working to establish the European Union. In this he resembles the famous Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojéve, who worked after World War II to form the precursor to the EU in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs.Once Mr. Adam has seen the EU secure he has reached the end of history. The historical conditions for the full development of human self-consciousness have been met, except for the final stage: absolute knowing. This is accomplished by Mr. Adam explaining the history of spirit, the evolution of self-consciousness to his companion, our Midwestern narrator. At the end of the dinner, Mr. Arnold consciously understands the unity between his own individual self-consciousness and the universal development of self-consciousness accomplished by the human spirit through the ages of Mr. Adam’s existence. In that moment of realization Mr. Arnold has the same kind of certainty of consciousness in –itself that Hegel attributed at the beginning to sense-certainty, the moment of unity with nature without the mediation of concepts. Only now that nature is the organic unity of modern global society and human history. Mr. Arnold’s story is the story of humanity. But furthermore, that sense of certainty is combined with the freedom of Mr. Arnold’s individual self-consciousness, the for-itself of absolute self-awareness. Whereas before, in every act of knowing, the self developed itself by sublation of some different object, now Mr. Arnold’s object is nothing but himself and the realization of the completion of his freedom. His consciousness of how his own self-consciousness developed through history is the ultimate truth, the absolute end of the historical movements of spirit. Because he understands himself rationally and because he understands the reason behind his consciousness and his world, he is completely free.It’s especially important to note how such a truth can only be realized when self-consciousness has ceased to develop. This requires an end to history itself, a point at which self-consciousness can develop no further. Only then can we adopt Hegel’s universal retrospective gaze and recognize how human freedom has come to fruition. In the story, Mr. Adam figures he has reached precisely this end of history. He has succeeded in helping to mold Europe into a political union that approximates a universal law that realizes universal human freedom. The rest of the world is on the same track. This end of political history, he thinks, has been matched by an end in culture. All the basic permutations of culture are complete. In painting we went from Michelangelo, to Picasso, to Rothko. In music we went from Bach, to Igor Stravinsky, to John Cage. In literature we went from Shakespeare, to James Joyce, to David Foster Wallace. In chairs we went from Savaronola chairs, to Stickley Morris chairs, to Panton chairs. It’s all been done. All that’s left is tedious cycles of revival and syncretism, reusing and recombining the old. And since nothing is left to do after the swan song of a final dinner and confession, the vampire can step into his guillotine.So, why is this moment of completion, of absolute knowing, out of the moment rather than the ultimate consummation of the moment like Hegel says? Well, the most important answer is that this is a union of the individual spirit and the universal spirit in which the individual is clearly subsumed or subordinated under the universal. His character has been formed by gargantuan impersonal historical forces that he has really had no meaningful control over. His individual personality and life are inconsequential in comparison to these world-historical processes. His freedom is found in a passive, accepting kind of recognition of historical laws. Hegel thus secures freedom for humanity as a whole, but at the expense of freedom for the individual. This kind of thinking is representative of many philosophies that claim human freedom is secured by some kind of supposedly natural process but ends up subordinating human beings to that natural process. The most obvious example is orthodox Marxism, which took Hegel’s idealism, stood it on its head, and projected it into the future. The basic idea there was that liberal democratic capitalism was not the end of history, because it did not abolish the master/ slave relationship so much as reestablish it under the guise of employer/ employee. Marxists argued that, just as feudalism had logically and inevitably evolved into liberal capitalism, liberal capitalism would naturally evolve into communism. Now, we could argue this wasn’t what Karl Marx himself intended, but it seems to me that treating communist revolution as an inevitable, rational, and impersonal natural process led to some of the most inhuman and unjust practices of 20th century revolutionaries. Seemingly any kind of barbarism is authorized if it is on the same side as irresistible history.But we see similar kinds of inhumanity in other ideological movements that assume we must obey natural processes that will secure human freedom. Laissez-fare capitalism, for instance, assumes that if we subject human beings to the unfettered natural laws of supply and demand in the marketplace, the result will be a renaissance of individual responsibility, intelligence, and virtue. The idea that such natural forces will result in the immediate realization of imminent human character seems to me to be the mirror face of a communist Great Leap Forward. Both take Rousseau’s insight that human character is shaped by history, and assume we can create a higher sort of human being in the immediate future. Similarly, some people advocate a cultural libertinism with the idea that the overthrow of all traditional standards of right and wrong will result in a reconstruction of mores along purely rational and natural lines. Emerson may be right that such “wild liberty breeds iron conscience,” but I think it more likely to simply breed wild breeding. To borrow from Mark Twain, that sort of familiarity only leads to more contempt… and children.In short, Hegelian thinking represents the idea that the disorder and contingency of human life can be solved by creating a set of universal laws for society that mirror the laws of nature. All we need to do to solve any problem is apply this law to the specific situation. This law is therefore transcendent. Its rational principles are axioms of eternal logic. But if this is what counts as truth, no transcendence is possible for the individual in the moment. The moment can only be an episode in a much larger story, a frame in a film.Hegel’s moment is thus reassuring, I suppose, in that it tells us it will all work out for good (the story will have a happy ending), but I’m left with the disappointment expressed by the narrator at the end of the story. Is this truly the end? Are all the truly meaningful moments of human history over, leaving us nothing to do but straighten out some loose ends? And doesn’t it make human freedom itself seem like a loose end? Hegel’s story seems to deny not only our freedom in the present moment, but also the freedom of future individuals to shape their own destinies and the freedom of past generations as well. Since it holds that Rosa Parks was on the right side of history from the beginning, a side that would have won in the end whether or not she moved to the back of the bus, it becomes harder to celebrate her action as real heroism. And what reason would we have for acting on the side of justice in the future, when the tide of history will lift all boats anyway? This is not to say that Hegel’s and Rousseau’s historical and critical point of view is completely wrong. As I said at the beginning, their critical perspective is absolutely central to being in the moment. Without it we would be trapped within traditional, Platonic, or liberal cultural points of view without the resources for questioning their authority. And the same historical point of view that justifies universal ideologies can be deployed to deflate their pretentions. It may be absolutely necessary for us to look back on our history and tell ourselves stories to make sense of it all. And we may need the inspiration of a lost Eden or a Golden Age to mobilize ourselves to the potential in the moment. And, furthermore, the changes in human character over the ages, do give us hope that things and people can be reformed and made better. But it should be possible to find a plot, myths, and hopefulness that preserve the freedom of the moment. Of course, openness to the moment opens us up to the possibility of the indeterminacy and contingency of human life again, but it could be that if we look beyond the ideological truths that tell us what must be in time to the moment itself, we might find the transcendent within this contingency rather than the bottomlessness of the abyss. ................
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