The reluctant pluralism of J. G. Herder

Review of Politics

Volumn 62, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 267-293

  Linker, Damon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248086134     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500029466     Document Type: Review

References (124)

1. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 37.
2. For some other statements of contemporary pluralism, see: John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 2-3, 6,12,19, 21-2, 39,47-8, 52, 77,140;
3. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 69-73 and chap. 9
4. "From Post-Liberalism to Pluralism"; James Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), parts 5 and 6;
5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Although Rawls tries to distance himself from Berlin's pluralism (and indeed from all "comprehensive" theories, pp. 145, 155ff.), he also writes that "a modern democratic society is characterized...by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines" (pp. xvi-xviii, 37) and that "pluralism is the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions" (p. xxiv).
6. Similarly, Charles Larmore in The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 7, tries to distinguish his own view (that "about matters of ultimate significance reasonable people tend naturally to disagree," p. 173) from pluralism (which he holds to be "an eminently controversial doctrine that many reasonable people do not accept" (pp. 173-74)). However, since Larmore's political philosophy (like that of the later Rawls) is based on the assumption that appeals to an absolute standard of the Good must inevitably turn out to be partial and partisan rather than genuinely universal, it can be described as pluralist for the purposes of the discussion in this article. When discussing contemporary pluralists and pluralism in this article, I will primarily be referring to those (like the authors listed above) who are sympathetic to Berlin's generally liberal political theory, not those "postmodern" pluralists who see their rejection of universalism as opening up the possibility for an explicitly antiliberal politics based on agonistic contestation between rival individuals and groups. Richard Rorty is one theorist who would seem to straddle both groups, although his relatively moderate, liberal political views ultimately place him closer to Berlin.
7. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 79-80.
8. For Berlin's most thorough discussions of monism, see "The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will" (Ibid., pp. 207ff.
9. and "The Originality of Machiavelli" in Against the Current, ed. Henry Hardy (New York, Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 67ff. Throughout this article, I will employ the term monism as Berlin does, to denote the opposite of a pluralistic view, i.e., one that is universalistic in scope. However, I recognize that the dichotomy he sets up between the two views is too stark when it is used to characterize the history of Western culture. While his approach to that history is an improvement over a certain philosophically-minded tradition of German (and, more recently, also French) historiography that likes to portray the West as having been on the road to logocenrric homogeneity since the time of Socrates, Berlin's tendency to claim that the bulk of Western thought has been consumed with the monistic "pursuit of the ideal" while a mere handful noble dissenters (basically the ancient skeptics, some modern romantics, and himself) have exhibited the courage to face the pluralistic truth is not much of an improvement.
10. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 11, 80.
11. Also see, more generally, "Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought" in the same book.
12. Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought, Ibid., pp. 79-80.
13. The most important are: "Herder and the Enlightenment" in Vico and Herder (New York: The Viking Press, 1976);
14. "The Counter-Enlightenment" in Against the Current;
15. and "The Pursuit of the Ideal" and "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West" in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
16. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 37.
17. Berlin, Vico and Herder, p. 176.
18. See, for example, Charles Taylor, "The Importance of Herder" in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
19. and Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 13-29, 80-87, 567-69;
20. Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 93-8
21. The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chap. 2
22. and The Morals of Modernity, pp. 161-62;
23. Gray, Enlightenment's Wake, pp. 136,154, 165,177.
24. In making such an argument, this article is very much in line with current trends in Herder scholarship, in both America and Germany, where the interpretation of Herder as rabid nationalist (and even a proto-fascist) has long been passe (although it does occasionally reappear; for a recent example, see the tendentious treatment of Herder in Alain Finkielkraut, La defait de la pensee (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1987)).
25. For an introduction to recent scholarship on Herder, see the essays collected in Johann Gottfried Herder: Geschichte und Kultur, Martin Bollacher (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen and Neumann, 1994)
26. Johann Gottfried Herder: Innovator through the Ages, ed. Wulf Koepke (Bonn: Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1982)
27. and Herder: Language, History, and the Enlightenment, ed. Wulf Koepke, (Columbia: Camden House, 1990).
28. Koepke has also produced a useful short intellectual biography of Herder: Johann Gottfried Herder (Boston: Twane, 1987).
29. A more thorough bibliography of Herder scholarship can be found in Johann Gottfried Herder, Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, ed. Marcia Bunge, (Indianapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
30. To this day, the best comprehensive introduction to Herder's thought in English remains F. M. Barnard's classic,Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
31. Throughout this article, I will be using the term pluralism primarily to mean cultural pluralism, as opposed to a more narrowly political notion of it. There are two reasons for this emphasis. First, Herder does not really have much of a political philosophy, narrowly defined; that is, he rarely discusses political matters in the manner of Aristotle or Hobbes, for example. Rather, he has an overwhelmingly cultural view of human sociality. Second, today's Berlinean pluralists themselves usually discuss politics in the Herderian, cultural terms employed here.
32. See, for example, Herder, Audi ein Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, in Werke in zehn Bdnden, vol.4, ed. Jiirgen Brummack und Martin Bollacher, (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, [1774] 1994), pp. 32ff.;
33. Herder, Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity, trans. Eva Herzfeld (New York: Ed.D. diss. Columbia University, 1968), pp. 182ff. When an English translation of a work exists, I cite it immediately following the German citation. Quotations within the text are taken from those translations, although I have often significantly altered them to improve clarity and accuracy. Despite his concern with ensuring that the particular not be lost in the universalism of discursive rationality, Herder cannot be assimilated to the Counter-Enlightenment as unambiguously as Berlin often tried to do. Although in some of his writings (especially prior to 1778) Herder does indeed rail against many of his contemporaries using an overheated rhetoric no doubt derived as much from Rousseau as his work as a Lutheran pastor, there are enough continuities between Herder and his contemporaries in the Enlightenment to make any attempt to separate them fraught with difficulties. One such continuity is with Montesquieu, whose concern for capturing the diversity of the material he studied was a major inspiration for Herder, although the latter wished to go farther in this direction than his French counterpart had done. Other continuities between Herder and Enlightenment figures will be noted in subsequent footnotes. The literature on the complicated relationship between the Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment, and Herder is vast, especially in Germany.
34. See, for example: Emil Adler, Herder und die Deutsche Aufklarung (Frankfurt am Main: Europa Verlag, 1968);
35. Jiirgen Brummack, "Herders Polemik gegen die 'Aufklarung'" and Ulrich Gaier, "Gegenaufklarung im Namen des Logos: Hamann und Herder," in Aufklarung und Gegenaufklarung in der europdischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989);
36. Marion Heinz, "Kulturtheorien der Aufklarung: Herder und Kant," inNationen und Kulturen: Zum 250: Geburtstag Johann Gottfried Herders, ed. Regine Otto, (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen and Neumann, 1996);
37. Wilfred Malsch, "Herders ambivalente Zivilisationskritik an Aufklarung und technischem Fortschritt," in Herder Today: Contributions from the International Herder Conference: Nov. 5-8,1987, Stanford, California, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, (Berlin und New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990);
38. Michael Maurer, "Die Geschichtsphilosophie des jungen Herder in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Aufklarung," injohann Gottfried Herder, 1744 - 1803. Studien zum Achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Gerhard Sauder, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1993);
39. and Robert Norton,Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Despite the numerous continuities between Herder and his Enlightenment predecessors pointed out both in these studies and in subsequent footnotes, I continue to maintain that Berlin was right to fasten on to Counter-Enlightenment tendencies in Herder's thought.
40. For a discussion of my own views on this complicated matter, see "Culture, Community, and Counter-Enlightenment in the Thought of J.G. Herder" (Presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, G A).
41. See Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 33, 39 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, pp. 184,193).
42. See, for example, Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Werke in zehn Banden, vol.6, ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, [1784-1791] 1989), pp. 649-50;
43. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1800), p. 452.
44. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 39 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, pp. 192-93).
45. Herder, Ideen, pp. 294-295 (Outlines, pp. 194-95);
46. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 38-39 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, pp. 192-93).
47. For a thorough discussion of "expression," see the psychology laid out in Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seek, in Werke in zehn Banden, vol.4, ed. Jiirgen Brummack und Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, [1778] 1994).
48. On Herder's use of organic imagery, see Edgar B. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism in Herder's Early Works (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
49. Herder, Journal meiner Reise im ]ahr 1769, in Werke in zehn Banden, vol.9/ 2, ed. Rainer Wisbert unter Mitarbeit von Klaus Pradel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. [1769] 1997), p. 20;
50. Herder, Journal of my Travels in the Year 1769, trans. John Francis Harrison, (New York: Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1952), p. 221.
51. Herder, Audi eine Philosophie der Geschichte, p.72 (Yet Another Philosophy History, p. 245).
52. Herder, Ideen, p 573 (Outlines, p. 395).
53. FriedrichMeinecke'sHistons7n, trans. J. E.Anderson, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 295-372, also portrays Herder as a thinker searching for some universal standard or principle with which to counteract the relativistic implications of his own ideas. See esp. pp. 331,339-342,346,354-5. By maintaining, in essence, that his pluralism is true and, at the same time, that this truth is not altogether good for mankind, Herder expresses a concern that resembles the one that will preoccupy Friedrich Nietzsche one hundred years later. However, whereas Herder is primarily concerned with the detrimental effects of the truth of pluralism on the prospects for human happiness, Nietzsche will focus on the devastating consequences of the "will to truth" on the preconditions of human greatness. But this difference should not distract us from their striking similarity, both in their concern with the problematic practical effects of truth and in their apparent willingness to embrace a new myth as a solution to that problem, with Nietzsche espousing "the eternal recurrence of the same" and Herder proposing the theological philosophy of history examined below.
54. Herder, Ideen, p. 331 (Outlines, p. 221);
55. Herder, Audi eine Philosophic der Geschichte, p. 36 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, p. 194).
56. Herder, Audi eine Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 34 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, p. 185).
57. And, once again, this is only a problem for one who (like Herder) finds himself "outside" of any given culture's horizon through the influence of pluralistic ideas.
58. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 84 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, p. 265).
59. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, Ibid., p. 83 (p. 264).
60. Ibid., pp. 82-83,106 (pp. 263, 304).
61. Ibid.,pp. 89-90 (pp. 275-76).
62. Ibid., pp. 102,105 (pp. 298, 303).
63. Ibid., p. 106 (p. 304).
64. Herder Ideen, p. 343, and cf. 628 (Outlines, p. 230, and cf. 437).
65. See, for example, Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 84 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, pp. 265-66). Larmore is certainly aware of this universalistic side of Herder's work and even advocates following him in this respect (The Morals of Modernity, p. 162). However, he never engages in a systematic discussion of the details of Herder's theological philosophy of history-the only ground on which the latter thinks transcultural moral judgments can be made.
66. See Hans Adler, "Herders Holismus," in Herder Today.
67. For discussions of providence, see Herder, Auch eine Philosophic der Geschichte, pp. 19-20,21,36-37,39-40,45-46,50,56,57-58,59,82-83,86,89-90,97-98 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, pp. 161-62,165,189,194, 204, 210, 220, 222, 224, 262, 269, 275, 289-90).
68. Herder has in mind such authors as Voltaire and, especially, Iselin.
69. See Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 38-39, 41, 54-55 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, pp.192,196, 217).
70. As this summary statement makes clear, Herder was much influenced by G. W. Leibniz, especially in the latter's vision of the world as comprised of a diversity of dynamic and energetic substances (or "monads") acting in harmony with one another, each expressing its motive appetites (or "entelechy"), offering a unique perspective on the ordered totality of which it is a part, and experiencing "the greatest happiness possible in the whole." See Leibniz, "Two Dialogues on Religion," In Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 334-35;
71. Monadology, in Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 76-77;
72. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 29-33, 121-22;
73. Beate Monika Dreike, Herders Naturauffasung in ihrer Beeinflussung durch Leibniz'Philosophie (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1973);
74. Herder, Ideen, pp. 197-99 (Outlines, p. 130).
75. On Herder's use of analogical reasoning in his philosophy, see Hans-Dietrich Irmischer, "Beobachtungen zur Funktion der Analogie im Denken Herders," in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift fiir Literatur wissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, March, 1981, pp. 64-97.
76. Herder, Ideen, pp. 508, 669-70 (Outlines, pp. 348, 466).
77. Herder, Gott: Einige Gesprache, in Werke in zehn Ba'nden, vol.4, ed. Jiirgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, [1787] 1994), p. 775;
78. Herder, God: Some Conversations, trans. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940), p. 173;
79. Herder, Ideen, pp. 139,155-60 (Outlines, pp. 87, 99-102).
80. Herder, Ideen, p. 160 (Outlines, p. 102-103).
81. Herder, Ideen, Ibid., p. 372ff. (p. 25 Iff).
82. See also the whole of Ideen (Outlines, book 4, chap. 6), titled "Man is Formed for Humanity and Religion," as well as: "In the end, religion is the highest Humanity of mankind" (Ibid., p. 160 [p. 103]).
83. Ibid., p. 161 (p. 103).
84. Ibid., p. 189 (p. 124).
85. Ibid., p. 162 (p. 104).
86. See, for example, Ibid., p. 333 (pp. 222-23);
87. see also Berlin, Against the Current, p. 12.
88. Herder, Ideen, p. 154ff. (Outlines, pp. 98-102).
89. Herder, Ideen, Ibid., p. 710 (p. 492).
90. Ibid., pp. 708, 714 (pp. 491,495). Emphasis in original.
91. Herder, Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanitat, in Werke in zehn Ba'nden, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, [1793-1797] 1991), p. 130. Emphasis in original.
92. See also Herder, Ideen, p. 716ff. (Outlines, p. 497ff.).
93. In envisioning such an end to his philosophy of history, Herder was clearly following the lead of one of his most esteemed representatives of the German Enlightenment: G. E. Lessing, who also conceived of historical progress in terms of the reform of Christianity. See his "Education of the Human Race," in hissing's Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 82-98.
94. Cf. also Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Part Three.
95. Herder, Ideen, p. 147 (Outlines, p. 93).
96. See also the following passage for the salutary effect of his philosophy of history: "history no longer appears to me what it once did, an abomination of desolation on a sacred earth" (Ibid., p. 344. [p. 231]).
97. Ibid., p. 342 (p. 229).
98. Ibid., p. 342 (p. 229).
99. Ibid., p. 509 (p. 348-49).
100. Ibid., pp. 512-513 (p. 351).
101. Ibid., p. 567-568 (p. 391), emphasis added.
102. Ibid., p. 569 (p. 392).
103. Ibid..
104. One of the most important concepts in Herder's writings, "force" (Kraft) was also one of the most common scientific and philosophic concepts in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries more generally. Often used synonymously with "cause" (as when Newton held that the "force of inertia" was the "cause" of motion), force was one of several concepts that early modern thinkers developed to explain the determinateness of appearances within the world-that is, the reason why things appear as they do rather than some other way. Herder appeals to an all-encompassing notion of force from the opening pages of the Outlines, where he posits the existence of a vital force of growth and regeneration that pervades all the parts of the universe, and then goes on to assert the following as one of the fundamental principles of his philosophy of the natural world and human history: "Wherever there is an effect in nature, there must be an effective force" (Herder, Ideen, p. 87 [Outlines, p. 50]). According to Herder, "organic life forces" permeate all living things, including human beings, who are an "abyss" of forces; even God, according to Herder, is best understood as a "primordial force of all forces" (die Urkraft aller Krafte) (Herder, Ideen, pp. 89-93 [Outlines, pp. 51-53]; Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden, pp. 331-332,337-40,385; 88 Herder, Gott, p. 710[God, p. 104]).
105. See also the thorough discussion of the place of "force" in Herder's work in Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought and H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970).
106. Herder, Ideen, p. 626 (Outlines, p. 435).
107. Herder, Ideen, Ibid., pp. 655-56; 88 cf. 630 (p. 456; 88 cf. 438).
108. Ibid., p. 656 (p. 457). Herder conceived of human history as continuous with natural history. In holding such a view, he thought of himself as extending Kant's early (pre-"critical") speculations about the origins of the solar system into the human domain. See Kant, Universal Natural History, trans. Stanley Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academy Press, 1981). However, in his later, "critical" philosophy, Kant came to see nature as radically discontinuous with human history and culture. This disagreement lies behind their rancorous Auseinandersetzung of the mid-1780s.
109. Cf. Herder, Ideen, pp. 368-369 (Outlines, pp. 248-49)
110. and Kant, "Reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind," in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 201-220.
111. For enlightening discussions of the issues involved in their dispute, see Hans-Dietrich Irmischer, "Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse zwischen Kant und Herder," in Hamann-Kant-Herder: Acta des vierten International Hamann-Kolloquiums im Herder-Institut zu Marburg/Lahn 1985 (Frunkfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987)
112. and Susan Shell, The Embodiment of Reason (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 183-189
113. Herder, Ideen, p. 671 (Outlines, p. 467).
114. Herder, Ideen, Ibid., p. 632 (p. 432).
115. Herder, Gott, pp. 786-787 {God, p. 184).
116. Herder, Gott, Ibid., p. 792 (pp. 190-91). Herder thus stands firmly in the tradition of modern Lucretianism that includes Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
117. For Spinoza's considerable influence on Herder, see his God: Some Conversations as a whole. The main differences between the holistic account of the world that Herder eventually produced and the one articulated in Spinoza's Ethics arise from the former's insistence on the need for final causes. On this matter, Herder clearly sided with Leibniz. One could say that Herder's philosophy of history can ultimately be understood as an attempt to unify Spinozist pantheism with Leibnizian theodicy.
118. For example, although conceiving of each culture in history as both as an end in itself ami as a means to a higher end requires the denial of human freedom, that very denial seems to preclude moral action and thus also render incoherent the notion of Christian brotherly love that Herder prophesies at the end of history.
119. However, Charles Taylor is one Berlinean pluralist who recognizes and tries to build on both sides of Herder's work. For example, his monumental Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) is remarkably Herderian in spirit, with its sweeping, impressionistic historical narrative invoked in order to help his readers overcome the " meaninglessness" of the modern age (pp. 18-19).
120. For evidence that Berlin did think that some universally shared values exist, see Claude Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 65-68
121. and Morton Frisch, "A Critical Appraisal of Isaiah Berlin's Philosophy of Pluralism," Review of Politics 60 (1998): 421-33.
122. Similarly, Larmore frequently acknowledges the need to appeal to some standard by which we could "weigh" (although not "rank") (The Morals of Modernity, p. 162) the heterogeneous goods to which people are "reasonably attached," although he has yet to produce anything more than a preliminary sketch of how such an appeal to "moral knowledge" could be possible within a pluralistic paradigm in which it is supposedly impossible to acquire knowledge of universal goods (pp. 89-117). Likewise, Gray has claimed that individual regimes can be judged in the light of a "universal content of human well-being," although he never specifies what the content of this "universal moral minimum" might be, other than to assert that "the virtue of toleration is of universal value because of the universality of human imperfection"
123. (Enlightenment's Wake, pp. 84, 81, 30).
124. One might argue that Hegel, with his dialectical account of historical progress, is another. But Herder would certainly argue that the former's tendency to view all cultures in history prior to the advent of the modern age in Europe as "moments" of Geist that have been definitively surpassed demonstrates that his theory is a form of monism-and perhaps one of the most extreme forms ever conceived. However, this is not to suggest that Herder did not exercise a profound influence on Hegel's philosophical development. On this influence, see Taylor, Hegel.