Susan Buck-Morss on Hegel, Phenomenology, and Universal History

"A New Humanism": An Introduction for Hegel 13/13

In two landmark essays, “Hegel and Haiti” and “Universal History, collected in her book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History,” the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss proposes a renewed and vibrant conception of universal history understood from a phenomenological perspective. Not from a historical perspective, as has traditionally been the case with historical theories of universal history, but from a phenomenological perspective.

Her argument is deeply political and has important ramifications for us today: her project is to raise our consciousness of political acts of struggle against forms of domination as a way to give them momentum; in effect, to embolden us all to political struggles for emancipation.

Buck-Morss seeks to recuperate the idea of universal history by transforming it into a phenomenological experience rather than a historical phenomenon. This is not self-evident, so I would like to discuss the idea here—or at least, to present my understanding of it.

The Debate Today

By way of background, it is important to underscore that the crux of the political debate surrounding the idea of universal history has shifted today. It is no longer a debate over competing visions of universality and universal history—so, for instance, a debate between a Hegelian statist conception of universal history (on a more conservative reading, involving the evolution of ethical life toward bureaucratic state forms), or a more revolutionary Hegelian history (on a more radical reading, involving the realization of human freedom through the French Revolution and Napoleon), or a Kantian cosmopolitan universal history, a Marxian communist horizon, or even a neoliberal end-of-history account (like that of Francis Fukuyama).

Today, due to the emergence of postcolonial critiques, subaltern studies, critical race theory, queer theory and other post-structuralist critiques, the fundamental political dispute on the Left is between those who want to recuperate universalism and those who believe it is a lost cause. Many critics of the concept of universality or universal values, and certainly of universal history, place the blame for the many waves of imperialism, colonialism, and colonial exploitation and violence directly at the feet of purportedly universal values, like freedom or humanity or dignity.

In the fray, Susan Buck-Morss argues for a rehabilitated idea of universality and humanism. And what is remarkable about Buck-Morss’s position is that she is advancing a universalist position (1) from the perspective of the revolutionaries and oppressed, so a universalism that is coming from the subjugated and not the victors; and (2) that is phenomenological, rather than historical. In the latter sense, it is Hegelian in character (or at least, a certain Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit), rather than Marxist (here too, at least, a certain Marx of historical materialism). Buck-Morss is not proposing a historical account, on my reading, and in this regard, her argument is different than Marx or others, like Frantz Fanon, who also drew on the lord-bondsman dialectics of Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Buck-Morss is not making a claim about history. She is not staking out a historical contention about progress or linearity or coherence in world history. She is offering a phenomenological account: it is about consciousness and changing consciousness. How then does that help, politically?

Let’s take this step by step.

Universal History

But first, here’s a quick refresher on the very idea of “universal history,” for those who are not steeped in the debates.

Typically, the idea of universal history is understood to be an approach to history that seeks to understand disparate historical events as part of a coherent and continuous trajectory at a global level. It attempts to make sense of different historical phenomena as part of a unified world history. As defined in the Intellectual History Review, “universal history seeks to account for the complexity of human history in a rational and systematic manner by assimilating individual historical events and phenomena to a general scheme or narrative.”^[1]

The idea goes back to the ancients and the effort to find meaning in history. It is often associated in modern times with Kant’s famous essay, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784). There, Kant suggests that the study of universal history might allow us to see “a regular movement in it [history], and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.”^[2]

As you recall from our seminar on Nietzsche, history, and genealogy with Cornel West, Hegel proposed a unique theory of universal or world history—involving the unfolding and realization of freedom during different epochs, from the despotism of ancient Asia, to the freedom of the few in ancient Greece, to the expansion to all people in the wake of the French Revolution (as I explained and summarized in this post). As we saw with Cornel West, Nietzsche launched a frontal assault on Hegel’s idea of universal history—and other critics, especially in the postcolonial and subaltern studies tradition, offered searing critiques during the twentieth century.

Recuperating Universal History

Susan Buck-Morss’s project in the two essays, “Hegel and Haiti” and “Universal History,” is to recuperate an ideal of universality and of universal history from the critique of Eurocentrism that has, rightly, undermined those ideas. And the reason, as I understand it, is to highlight and thus inspire political acts of solidarity and emancipation. To bring forth the political acts, the revolutionary acts of those peoples who fought against their subjugation and oppression.

These are the political acts that Buck-Morss valorizes—and think here of valorizing genealogies, which also may not be historical—in the very last paragraph of “Hegel and Haiti”: the revolutionary acts of Toussaint-Louverture, the words and poetry of Wordsworth, the acts of the Abbé Grégoire, and, as Buck-Morss writes, even Dessalines; as well as the acts of the “French soldiers sent by Napoleon to the colony who, upon hearing these former slaves singing the ‘Marseillaise,’ wondered aloud if they were not fighting on the wrong side; the Polish regiment under Leclerc’s command who disobeyed orders and refused to drown six hundred captured Saint-Domiguans.”^[3] In her own words, Buck-Morss’s ambition is to:

Rescue[] the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it. If the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis. […] What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What undisciplined stories would be told?^[4]

“A New Humanism”

Buck-Morss’s intervention is situated: by contrast to hegemonic neoliberalism which views itself as at the end of history on the one hand, and to the clash of civilization theories which lead to exclusionary politics on the other hand, Buck-Morss argues for recuperating an idea of universal humanity and universal history that is not subjugating of others.

“The task,” she writes, “is to reconfigure the enlightenment project of universal history in the context of our too-soon and not-yet global public sphere. It may be described as a new humanism, but if so, then without the ideological implications that the suffix, -ism, implies.”^[5]

A recuperated idea of universal history matters to Buck-Morss.^[6] Why, you may ask? To give momentum to positive change. To highlight the emancipatory moments in human history in order to recognize them, to see them, to valorize them, and to encourage others.

Marx did this, famously, with his reference to the “old mole”—the idea that, even when revolutionary spirit is absent, hidden, invisible, it is there anyways, burrowing away, building tunnels, going forward, and will eventually resurface, as it had before. It is marching forward, it will reappear, in force, at which point we will all exclaim, “well done, old mole!”

This lends reality to our emancipatory ambitions. It shows us that they are possible and not merely pipe dreams. It gives them tangibility, and us, tangible expectations for change.

Now, Marx offered universal history as a historical matter. He described, famously in the opening paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto, the continuous history of recurring class conflicts between freemen and enslaved, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, leading to the ultimate class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the uprising of the proletariat, the end of all classes, and the withering of the state. That is, if anything, a universal history.

Buck-Morss offers something very different: a phenomenology. This is most evident, for instance, in the penultimate sentence of “Hegel and Haiti.” Notice how careful she is with her words:

What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization of absolute spirit?^[7]

It is a matter of consciousness, not history, and this relates directly to the Phenomenology. It is a question of us becoming conscious of those moments in history. Conscious, in order then to see them, to valorize them, to embrace them.

“Hegel and Haiti”

The point of “Hegel and Haiti” is not to demonstrate, as a strictly historical matter, that Hegel had in mind the Haitian revolution and the revolt of enslaved persons when he wrote the passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit on the lord-bondsman dialectic—or what came to be known in French philosophy, as a result of Alexandre Kojève’s reading and Jean Hyppolite’s translation, as the “master-slave dialectic.”

To be sure, there are historical facts. Hegel read the journal Minerva (see “Hegel and Haiti,” n.77, Hegel’s letter to Schelling from 1794). The journal Minerva extensively covered the Haitian revolution (see id. text at n.64).

However, I read Buck-Morss as not so much trying to demonstrate a direct historical link between the Haitian revolution and the passage in the Phenomenology on the lord and servant, but rather as highlighting the need to consider the Haitian revolution when reading Hegel’s writings on freedom and its emergence in world history. To be conscious of it. It is meant to address the acoustic separation between the Haitian revolution and Hegel’s writings on the emergence of freedom. Scholars refer incessantly to the French Revolution, but ignore the Haitian revolution. Buck-Morss offers a corrective, through this provocation, or what we might think of as a “critical fabulation,” to borrow a term from Saidiya Hartman.

The purpose is not to redeem Hegel or recuperate him or sanitize him or protect him from the righteous criticism of his racism and anti-Africanism. Nor is it to impugn him. It is not about Hegel. As Buck-Morss explains, “the point of returning to the historical moment in which Hegel incorporates Haiti into a European story that excludes Africa as insignificant is less to condemn the German philosopher than to take a step in redeeming ourselves.”^[8]

To redeem ourselves means to reject the beliefs that we project onto Hegel but still seem to believe—to reject our own misguided Hegelianism. To reject the belief, which too many of us share, that “the idea of progress justifies the imposition of democracy on others as a military project.”^[9] Buck-Morss offers a list of those misguided Hegelianism at page 118 of Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.

The goal, then, is to move in the direction of rejecting those forms of Hegelianism, including its cultural racism. And to embrace a kind of “new humanism” based on a renewed, phenomenological idea of universality.^[10]

Buck-Morss redeploys the concept of universality to cover not the acts of imperialism, but the act of revolt, resistance, and transformation. “Universality is in the moment of the slaves’ self-awareness that the situation was not humanly tolerable, that it marked the betrayal of civilization and the limits of cultural understanding, the nonrational, and nonrationalizable course of human history that outstrips in its inhumanity anything that a cultural outlaw could devise.”^[11]

Buck-Morss embraces this notion of universality as a form of radical imagination, necessary for emancipation. “Emphatic imagination,” she writes, “may well be our best hope for humanity.”^[12]

But that is not all. There is more. It may well be the best strategy forward: “Perhaps the most deadly blow to imperialism would be to proclaim loyalty to the idea of universal humanity by rejecting the presumption of any political, religious, ethnic, class, or civilizational collectivity to embody this idea as its exclusive and exclusionary possession.”^[13]

Conclusion

The goal is to think globally, and act locally, but think globally in a different way. Buck-Morss says this explicitly in the Preface. She embraces the idea of thinking globally, at the level at which we think about the world, but in an unprecedented way—in a way we have never done before.

Why never before? Because we—or at least us, Western thinkers—have never done it well. We have traditionally done it in a way that imperializes. We, Western thinkers, have expertise at that; but we do not have practice at thinking in a non-imperialist, non-colonializing way—a way that would lead to emancipation and liberation, rather than domination and subjugation. “We do not yet know how,” Buck-Morss writes.^[14]

The first step forward, then, is to gain consciousness. And that takes us right back to the first chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology. It is there, I expect, that we will begin our seminar with Susan Buck-Morss.

Welcome to Hegel 13/13!

Notes

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^[1] Nicholas Halmi, “Universal Histories.” Intellectual History Review 33 (3): 367–74 (2023), at 367.

^[2] Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784).” trans. Lewis White Beck, in On History, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963, available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm.

^[3] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 75.

^[4] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 74-75.

^[5] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 79 (emphasis added).

^[6] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 79 (“The argument is simply that with global challenges on every level, from the most material to the most moral, universal history matters.”)

^[7] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 75 (emphasis added).

^[8] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 118.

^[9] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 118.

^[10] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 119.

^[11] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 133-134.

^[12] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 144.

^[13] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. 145.

^[14] Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, at p. x.