Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 to 1831) was a German philosopher who read the whole of human history as a story of progress, in which Spirit, working through peoples and their states, comes to know itself as free: first one person is free, then some, then all. For him freedom is fully real only inside a rational state, and peoples without a state stand outside history. Therapeutic Shamanism tells the story the other way up, holding that for most of human history people lived as free equals without any state, and the coming of farming and then of city-states was a Fall, not an ascent.
Who was Hegel? #
He was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and studied theology at the seminary in Tübingen from 1788 to 1793, where his friends were the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. After years as a private tutor he joined Schelling at Jena in 1801, and in 1807 published the Phenomenology of Spirit. He then edited a newspaper in Bamberg and ran a grammar school in Nuremberg, before taking chairs in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1816 and Berlin in 1818. His Science of Logic, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821) followed. He died in Berlin in 1831, and his lectures on the philosophy of history were published after his death.1
What did Hegel teach about history and freedom? #
That history has a direction, and the direction is freedom. World history, in the formula of his lectures, “is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” What moves history, on his account, is Spirit (Geist), the shared mind and life of a people, coming over time to understand what it is. He traced the stages broadly: in the ancient empires of the East only one person, the ruler, was known to be free; the Greeks and Romans knew that some are free; and in the modern Germanic world it came to be known that all human beings, simply as human beings, are free.2
He did not pretend the road was gentle. He called history “the slaughter-bench” on which the happiness of peoples and the virtue of individuals had been sacrificed, and asked to what final purpose. His answer was that Reason works even through the selfish passions of individuals, using them for ends they do not see, which he called “the cunning of Reason”. The suffering is real, but on his reading it is not wasted.2
What part does the state play? #
The central one. For Hegel freedom is not being left alone to do as one likes. It becomes real only when people live inside institutions that they can recognise as the expression of their own reason: the family, the working life of civil society, and above all the state, which holds the other two together. In the Philosophy of Right he rejected the idea of a social contract, and argued that the state should contain the market and offset its harms, though not abolish private property.3 The state, in the history lectures, “is the divine Idea as it exists on earth.”
It follows that peoples without a state have no history in his sense. They live in what he called prehistory, which lies outside his plan, and “they have not attained historical existence.”4 The long human past before writing, cities and governments is, for him, the waiting room of history.
Did Hegel glorify the state, and is he to blame for totalitarianism? #
People have disagreed about this for a long time. Many critics have read his account of the state, propped up by speculative metaphysics, as a forerunner of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century.5 The best known is the philosopher Karl Popper, whose The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) attacked Hegel as an apologist for the Prussian state and an ancestor of modern tyranny.
On the other side, the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, in his essay “The Hegel Myth and Its Method”, complained first that “Popper’s treatment contains more misconceptions about Hegel than any other single essay”, and charged him with quotations stitched together from different contexts and with mistranslation.6 Many later readers take Hegel as a supporter of progressive but non-revolutionary politics, and point out that his followers split into a conservative right and a radical left, from which Karl Marx came.5
How does Hegel’s story of history stand against the Fall? #
The two stories run in opposite directions. In Hegel’s, history climbs, from peoples with no state and no history, through empires, to the modern state in which all are known to be free. In Therapeutic Shamanism’s account, for by far the greater part of human history people lived as hunter-gatherers, in bands with no permanent leaders, where order came from the cooperation of equals, “order without top-down government”, and where power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this took the place of power over others.7 The break from that animist way of life began with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this in the Neolithic, from around 11,000 to 10,000 BC, and accelerated with the first city-states from around 4000 BC. That is the Fall, and the state and its hierarchies are among its fruits, not the summit of human freedom. See What is the Fall? and How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
The word itself tells the same story. ‘Civilisation’ comes from the Latin for citizen and city, and so means city culture; yet dictionaries define it as an advanced stage of development, and one even gives the example that people “slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization”.8 Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer calls the period from 4000 BC to the present civilisation, and calls the hunter-gatherer ancestors primitive and savage.9 Where Hegel places the stateless peoples before history, Therapeutic Shamanism sees in them the template for living well, and sees the forgetting of that time, what Daniel Quinn called the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer, as part of the damage. Many native cultures kept a story of a golden age in the past, when humans lived in harmony with nature, against which a people could measure how far it had strayed; the Taker culture lost that story and replaced it with stories of conquest and domination.10 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Is there any common ground? #
Some. Therapeutic Shamanism also sees a widening of freedom in recent centuries. Following the psychologist Steve Taylor, it speaks of a post-Fallen recovery beginning around five hundred years ago and gathering pace since: the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, the vote, workers’ rights, child protection, animal welfare, the environmental movement and a growing acceptance of gay, bisexual and transgender people. Hegel’s freedom of all and this list of hard-won freedoms name some of the same changes.11
The differences lie in what the changes are and who brings them about. For Hegel they are Spirit reaching its goal through the state, and the goal is guaranteed. For Therapeutic Shamanism they are a recovery, a slow return of the empathy and fairness hunter-gatherers already lived by, wrung from the powerful by campaigning, petitioning and revolt, and nothing about the outcome is guaranteed. Whether humanity comes out of the Fall changed for the better is “far too early to tell”, and depends on what people choose to learn from it.12 See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
Is Hegel’s Spirit the same as Spirit in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
No, though the shared word invites the mix-up. Hegel’s Geist is mind or spirit in the sense of a people’s shared reason and culture, coming to know itself through history, laws and institutions. In Therapeutic Shamanism, Spirit is what everything is made of, conscious and present in stones, plants and animals as much as in people, and Spirit is also the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer part of the self, kept in balance with the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul. Hegel’s Spirit comes to know itself in history, in states and, at its height, in art, religion and philosophy; Spirit in the animist sense was there long before any state, and in every being.13 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Why does it matter which story we tell? #
Because the stories a culture tells about its past shape how it lives. A story of history as progress teaches that what came before was lesser and what comes next will be better. A story of a Fall teaches that something precious was lost and can be remembered. Hegel saw history as the advance of freedom through the state; Therapeutic Shamanism sees in the stateless past a freedom worth remembering, and treats any future freedom as a matter of recovery and choice.
