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popular spirits, analogous to that of the individuals, as the true life of the generality. In
truth however the categories of the people and of the popular spirit are themselves
transient, not just their specific manifestations. Even to the extent that today s newly
appearing popular spirits are supposed to carry further the burning torches of the
Hegelian world-spirit, they threaten to reproduce the life of the human species at a lower
level. In view of the Kantian generality of his period, of visible humanity, Hegel s
doctrine of the popular spirit was already reactionary, cultivated something already seen
through as particular. Without hesitation he participates with the emphatic category of the
popular spirit in the same nationalism, whose funestes [Latin: fatal, sinister] overtones he
diagnosed in the young frat-house [burschenschaftlichen: traditional German fraternities]
agitators. His concept of the nation, the bearer of the world-spirit in monotonous
variation, reveals itself to be one of invariants, with which the dialectical work,
paradoxically and yet in accordance with its one aspect, overflows. In the undialectical
constants in Hegel, which punish the dialectic as a lie and yet without which no dialectics
would be, there is so much truth, as history takes its course as monotony, as the bad
infinity of guilt and atonement, which Hegel s star witness Heraclitus already cognized
and ontologically exalted in archaic times. But the nation  the terminus as much as the
thing  is of a recent date. After the fall of feudalism, a precariously centralized
organizational form was supposed to restrain the diffuse natural associations for the
protection of the bourgeois interest. It had to become a fetish, because it could not have
otherwise integrated human beings, who economically needed that form of organization,
just as much as it does them incessant violence. Where the unification of the nation, the
precondition of a self-emancipated bourgeois society, failed, in Germany, its concept
became overvalued and destructive. In order to seize the gentes [Latin: country], it
mobilizes additional regressive recollections of the archaic tribe. As an evil ferment, they
are suited to hold down the individuated, equally something late-developed and fragile,
where its conflict with the universality is about to recoil into its rational critique: the
irrationality of the ends of bourgeois society could scarcely otherwise have been
stabilized than with effectively irrational means. The specific German situation of the
immediate post-Napoleonic era may have deceived Hegel about how anachronistic the
doctrine of the popular spirit was compared with his own concept of the Spirit, out of
whose progress the progressive sublimation, the emancipation from rudimentary natural-
rootedness is not to be expelled. In him the doctrine of the popular spirit was already
false consciousness; ideology, though provoked by the need of the administrative unity of
Germany. Masked, coupled as the particularity with what is now existent, the popular
spirits are proof against that reason, whose memory is nevertheless preserved in the
universality of the Spirit. After the tract on eternal peace the Hegelian eulogy of war can
no longer hide behind the naivete of insufficient historical experience. What he praised as
substantial in the popular spirits, the mores, were even then already hopelessly depraved
into those archaic customs, which were dug up in the epoch of the dictatorships, in order
to officially propagate the disempowerment of the individuals by the historical trend. The
mere fact that Hegel must speak of the popular spirits in the plural, already betrays the
obsolescence of their alleged substantiality. It is negated, as soon as a plurality of popular
spirits is spoken of, or an internationale of the nations is envisioned. After Fascism it
resurfaced.
Popular Spirit Obsolete 333-335
Through its national particularization the Hegelian Spirit no longer includes the sort of
material basis in itself, which it would like to claim all the same as the totality. In the
concept of the popular spirit, an epiphenomenon, collective consciousness, a stage of
social organization, is opposed to the real process of production and reproduction of the
society as something essential. That the spirit of a people is to be realized, that it would
be  made into an extant world , says Hegel,  is felt by every people. 32 Today hardly so,
and where peoples are made to feel so, then for ill. The predicates of that  extent world :
 religion, cults, morals, customs, art, constitution, political laws, the entire extent of its
institutions, its occurrences and acts 33 have lost what counted for Hegel as their
substantiality, along with their self-evident character. His injunction, that the individuals
would have  to form themselves, to make themselves according to the  substantial
being of their people,34 is despotic; it was already in his day incompatible with the
meanwhile equally obsolete Shakespearian hypothesis, as it were, that the historical
generality would realize itself through the sufferings and interests of the individuals,
while it is merely drilled into them, as the healthy popular sentiment of those who are
caught in its machinery. Hegel s thesis, that noone could  leap beyond the spirit of [their]
people, any more than one could leap beyond the earth ,35 is in the epoch of telluric [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]