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D'Hondt, the end of history and the cunning of reason 0:30 Thank you very much. As Bernard Bourgeois has just reminded us, Jacques D'Hondt was president of the Société française de philosophie for ten years, from 1981 to 1991. So, if you will allow me, it is in this capacity that I would like to speak briefly, as acting president, having succeeded, as it happens, Bernard Bourgeois, now our honorary president, who himself, as he recalled, succeeded Jacques D'Hondt in the presidency of this institution.
1:04 So this also means that if I am speaking here, it is not at all as a Hegel specialist, which I am by no means, but nonetheless it has not escaped me that the great thesis, Hegel, philosopher of living history, which you had the excellent idea of republishing, is distinguished in particular by a radical questioning of the ready-made ideas and often unjust accusations of which Hegel had been the object.
1:43 Not to mention the misreadings that have sometimes affected his thought. So I would like to take two or three examples quickly to briefly illustrate this point. Regarding, first of all, the refrain about the end of history. Jacques D'Hondt, it seems to me, sets the record straight, and indeed Bernard Bourgeois recalled this a moment ago—the very title of the book bears witness to this in a way: "No victory of reason against history."
2:19 The philosophy of history is above all a philosophical reinteriorization of the human past, which necessarily closes in the present. Better still, the lectures on the philosophy of history set forth, according to Jacques D'Hondt, a philosophical history, rather than a philosophy of history.
2:51 And the introduction—what Hoffmeister published under the title "Reason in History"—has precisely the aim of accounting for, of giving reason to, this project. So there is no lesson of history other than a philosophical one. One does not prophesy, one does not close things off, one acts, one becomes, one lives, and one turns, of course, toward the future, as Bernard Bourgeois recalled a moment ago.
3:27 History is a collective adventure, which has no end, and whose telos, even, perhaps remains enigmatic. In this regard, moreover, Jacques D'Hondt rightly draws the reader's attention to the importance of the effect of surprise, which would be, I quote him, a sort of universal law of history.
3:58 On the importance of the unexpected, I quote him again, to a certain extent, the only future that men can expect. The only future that men can expect. Now, no doubt a distinction should be introduced here between, let us say, on the one hand, the ruse [of reason], which marks the opposition between intention and event—the event itself, moreover, remaining unpredictable.
4:30 A vision that fits, this time clearly, in the wake of Mandeville, Adam Smith, and even Kant, and which, in its generalization, maintains a connivance with what Hegel calls—the word may come as a surprise—Providence, going so far as to liken his philosophy of history, as you know, to a theodicy—that is to say, precisely, for Jacques D'Hondt, a theodicy, for Jacques D'Hondt, an unconscious thought, these are his own terms, an unconscious thought.
5:10 So, a distinction between this ruse and, on the other hand, what we might today call perverse effects, which might be situated in the wake of the Scottish historical school—I am thinking in particular of Robertson—and naturally, I imagine, though I do not recall precisely whether Jacques D'Hondt had identified the source, in Hegel secret, this is illustrated for example by the case of the arsonist, driven by a spirit of vengeance, who did not imagine that his act would bring about the destruction of an entire district of the city.
5:56 Perverse effect, unexpected and perverse effect. But whatever the heterogeneity of ends, ultimately, misfortune, suffering, just as much as the working out of particular ends—first and foremost, personal interest—all of this constitutes the mainspring of history, that is, the immanent dialectic of historical becoming. As for, finally, Hegel's supposed conservatism, his so-called defense of the Restoration from the chair in Berlin.
Hegel's supposed conservatism 6:43 An accusation, moreover, that already existed during Hegel's own lifetime. Jacques D'Hondt recalls that Hegel, I quote him, "disgusted"—these are his words—disgusted by the nobility, preferred the bourgeoisie and worked toward its success as a constant admirer of the French Revolution, of course, while never ceasing to contest bourgeois values, as is illustrated by the famous paragraphs of the introduction to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
7:18 And this by sketching, or barely sketching, only an uncertain profile of the current historical moment—an uncertain profile. The very idea of restoration, of a return to the past, would be, at bottom, merely the fruit of amnesia. The domain of history is neither repetition nor treading in place, but rather creation, turned precisely toward the future. "It would be difficult," writes Jacques D'Hondt in this book, "to imagine a doctrine more fundamentally hostile to any idea of restoration, political or otherwise.
8:01 It is impossible to regard Hegel," he says—and this is underlined—"as the philosopher of the Restoration." In this respect, the very conduct of the citizen Hegel would confirm, if need be, the absurdity of the recurring accusations. This is what Jacques D'Hondt addressed in another book, Hegel en son temps [Hegel in His Time]. Now, we need not, of course, dwell on the rather comical and somewhat rocambolesque episode reported by Rosenkranz in his 1844 Life of Hegel.
Hegel in his time: the clandestine Hegel 8:42 I mean the nighttime expedition on the Spree by a few students whom Hegel decided to accompany in their wish to show their solidarity, their support for a comrade held in the prison of the Prevotship. We need not, of course, recall this episode, which is quite interesting in itself, but we can recall, as Jacques D'Hondt does precisely in Hegel en son temps, a few notable facts.
9:19 So, if you will allow me, I will let him speak. Here is what he says in Hegel en son temps, pages 245 and following: "In his youth"—I leave the floor, of course, to Hegel—"a regime of tyranny taught him the necessary art of dissimulation. He took part very early on in clandestine activities. In our view, given the conditions in which the seminarians of the Stift in Tübingen lived, at the time of the French Revolution, they secretly organized a revolutionary political club.
10:01 Hegel shows himself there to be the most ardent orator. French newspapers circulate in secret. It is forbidden to receive them, to pass them on, to read them. The Stiftler comment on all of it, on the content. Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel take part in the planting of a tree of liberty. But that will only come later. The club of the Stift helps a particularly compromised comrade flee to France, protects soldiers of the Republic held prisoner by the Allies, sometimes organizing their escape.
10:38 It was early on that Hegel political awakening took place. He composed political pamphlets later, in Bern, a bit stronger than his friends on the council kept for themselves. If he did not publish many of the works written during this period, it is not that he considered them insufficient. But external motives account for his discretion: fear of censorship, of the law, of hostile public opinion, etc. A significant fact.
11:09 Hegel's first publication is that of the Letters of Jean-Jacques Cart, a Swiss jurist—a revolutionary work which he translated into German and annotated while remaining anonymous. Did the authorities in Berlin know that Hegel had once devoted himself to such work?" So, I think this is finally the moment to recall that Jacques D'Hondt was, within the Combat group, a great Resistance fighter, and that it is obviously no accident that the last chapter of Hegel en son temps is entitled "Hegel clandestin" [Hegel in Hiding].
11:49 and insists precisely on the idea that Hegel's politics seem to have been that of calculated risk. It goes as far as possible while avoiding crossing the point of rupture, but not without boldness. There, that is all I had to say. In conclusion, I would simply like to inform you that the Société française de philosophie plans to devote a session specifically to the study of Jacques D'Hondt's work in October 2014.
12:28 Thank you for having invited me, and I am delighted that you have anticipated our meeting. Thank you very much. Well, I would like to follow on somewhat from what I had planned to say, starting of course from a theme raised by Dominique Pagani and, without quite saying so, at the end by Bernard Bourgeois in his closing remarks—that is to say, this philosopher of dialectic himself, with the philosophemes carried in the background, with two names which are
Heraclitus, Diderot and forty years of companionship 13:38 in the background and, so to speak, carried within Bernard Bourgeois's remarks. One, of course, is Heraclitus. The agreement of connivance between agreement and disagreement is obviously Heracliteanism par excellence, and this is also what one traditionally, and rightly, sees as the first and deepest expression of dialectic.
14:13 The other—and this is something I will come back to as well—alongside Voltaire, whom I will return to at the end, is the name that illustrates, both for Hegel and, as it happens, for Jacques D'Hondt, the name of Diderot—I will come back to this at the end. So this agreement, these names, these terms, these ways of thinking, I believe—I say this somewhat to my own chagrin—contribute now to reconciling me with this dialectic which I long distrusted, given the clichéd function it served for decades. I mean it is time to return to it, but I would rather, on another level,
15:23 come back here to considerations of living history, or historiographical history, personal history, since it falls to me now to express the emotion I feel in putting into perspective more than 40 years of lessons received from Jacques D'Hondt in the practice of philosophy—40 years of collaboration, exchange of common or parallel works, friendship, conversation, since the mid-1970s, when I was beginning my academic career and could benefit from the already rich prestigious past he had as a Resistance fighter, as Didier Deleule just mentioned, as a militant, as a leader in the academic field, as a specialist in German philosophy, in Hegel and Marx, from his past
16:34 and his ongoing present as a trainer of students, teachers, and high-level researchers, as a founder of research centers and institutes, which Bernard Bourgeois spoke of, up until his final years when, confined to his home by his state of health, he still benefited—too rarely, admittedly, both for him and for them—from the visits of a few of his closest friends, colleagues, and disciples. To conclude my remarks, his work still offers me new insights and new resources, for example in writing a study on Marx, Molière, and the reversal in the name of interest, in which I find much to enjoy, for example in the texts recently gathered by Éric Puisais and Fiorinda Li Vigni, the texts he had devoted to Diderot, to Rameau's Nephew, and to their afterlife in Hegel and in Marx—for it is not only through
Rameau's Nephew, Nerval in Vienna, and censorship 17:44 the translation by Goethe—it is an eminent figure of the Phenomenology of Spirit—but also because Rameau's Nephew was likewise one of Marx's favorite texts, a text that also created a bond, a connivance, between Marx and Engels, or again in the chapter "Hegel clandestin" of his Hegel en son temps, or again in his 1982 article on theory and political practice in Hegel, on the problem of censorship—for once again we have not finished with that either, in its ever-renewed forms, from media censorship in our own time to the self-censorship of exchanges practiced between one and the other. That is all on this brief point; allow me just, sir, there is always
18:55 a serious content to an episode, and to recall Gérard de Nerval—I believe a dreamer, a wanderer, a stroller, a madman, who quotes Hegel of all people at the end of the preface to Les Filles du feu, which was not exactly common at the time; hardly anyone in his circle talked about it—and who found himself, for reasons that need not concern us today, in Vienna around the 1830s, and he needed money, so he did some little freelance pieces, reviews of plays, and of course he was waiting for the censor's approval. When it did not come, he went to see the director of censorship, using his connections, and the head of censorship of the Holy Empire said this extraordinary sentence to him: "Sir, you are here in the freest place in the Empire—the censorship offices." What a fine dialectic! There, that is also an occasion to recall—forgive me, excuse me—when one thinks that the Holy Alliance is the ancestor of NATO, it gives a certain topicality to what I am saying. Sorry, but I must also recall, I had the occasion
20:05 to do so—it is well known—last summer in Porto, in connection with a conference on censorship and self-censorship in theater, that this is also why we encounter, why we find again, Molière—one might be mistaken about this—because the struggle against censorship also often passes through, at least often, forms of complicity with censorship as well, knowing how to turn censorship's own game against it. That, Molière, like Hegel, was well positioned, as one would say today. There, please, go ahead—concerning
The isomorphism between the Revolution and the dialectic; Heine 21:16 Jacques D'Hondt's relations with Hegel's thought and the French Revolution. I would recall that D'Hondt was one of the masters of the socio-historical contextualization of philosophy, and among interpreters of Hegel's thought, he is the one who dwelt the most on the influence of the French Revolution on Hegelian philosophy, even bringing out connections between the unfolding of revolutionary events in France and the structure of the Hegelian dialectic. This isomorphism between history and philosophy underlies his fundamental claim that Hegel is the philosopher of the French Revolution. It is in the name of this conviction that he undertakes, throughout his work, the vast operation of demystifying the image
22:26 of Hegel, opposing a multitude of arguments to the received ideas about Hegel as philosopher of the Restoration, official philosopher of the Prussian state, representative of conservatism. Jacques D'Hondt even goes so far as to write, about Hegel—and not only about the young Hegel—who, I quote him, "intellectually accompanied the French Revolution," and that no philosopher took up the cause of the Revolution more warmly. Among the precursors of this innovative way of understanding Hegelian philosophy, Jacques D'Hondt cites two names. The first is that of Heinrich Heine, whose History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany D'Hondt praises. It was Heine who, he believed, first sketched a term-by-term correspondence between the main stages of the French Revolution and the succession of systems of German philosophy—perhaps somewhat in jest,
23:36 but Heine said that Kant was the intellectual counterpart of Robespierre, Fichte that of Napoleon, and Hegel would have been the philosopher of the Restoration period. Certainly, Jacques D'Hondt calls this hypothesis of Heine's quite rash; he could hardly agree, especially with the description of Hegel as philosopher of the Restoration. But he retains the idea of a connection between the vicissitudes of German philosophy and the various religious and political situations of the thinkers who lived in Germany. The second name mentioned by Jacques D'Hondt, in an interview with Fiorinda Li Vigni—the text published by Città del Sole in Naples and also in French—to designate those who influenced him in his method of interpreting classical German philosophy, is that of Georg Lukács. He often recounted, among his circle of friends, the deep impression left by his reading of the book
D'Hondt and Lukács: the continuity from the young Hegel to maturity 24:46 by Lukács on the young Hegel, having taken the book with him during a vacation period—probably in the early 1950s—and remaining absorbed in his reading for several weeks, deeply taken up by the guiding ideas of this work. Among his papers, moreover, there is a text entitled "Lukács's Hegel," a lecture he gave in my seminar on the history of German thought at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He wrote, or said, in that interview: "What interests me in his work on the young Hegel, in the orientation of his thought, is the will to connect the philosopher's thought to social life and to the historical circumstances in which he lived." One can indeed detect convergences between Lukács's views and the interpretation of Hegel's work in Jacques D'Hondt's writings—on the decisive influence of the French Revolution on Hegel's relations
25:56 with the Enlightenment—relations of continuity, not only of discontinuity—on the reality of the young Hegel's views during the republican period of the early Hegel. Jacques D'Hondt, in Hegel, philosopher of living history, refers to Lukács's ideas on this subject: the early Hegel was a republican thinker with revolutionary views, on the critique of the conservative historiography of the Restoration, that of Von Haller, Savigny, and Ancillon, on affinities between Goethe and Hegel, between the Phenomenology of Spirit and the novel Wilhelm Meister, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. On all these points there are meeting points between the two philosophers, D'Hondt and Lukács. But whereas Lukács only conducted a detailed examination of the young Hegel's activity—it is only in his Ontology that he had to take into account certain aspects of the Logic—Jacques D'Hondt embraced
27:06 in his work the totality of Hegel's life and work, developing an innovative and profound interpretation of the philosopher's entire activity. On Hegel's positions in Berlin, that is, on the philosopher's mature period, Jacques D'Hondt's judgments seem to us more nuanced and more understanding than those Lukács expressed incidentally—and I say incidentally because Lukács published nothing significant on the final period of Hegel's activity—whereas the author of Hegel en son temps strongly emphasized what he liked to call Hegel's liberalism—liberalism in the original sense of the word, the love of liberty—the heterodox features of his thought in relation to the dominant ideology of the Prussia of his time. Lukács, while also emphasizing what separated Hegel from the reactionary thought of his time, remained more or less tied to the classical thesis of the conservative turn in the thought
28:16 of the mature Hegel. Without denying the existence of certain conservative, even restorative, aspects in the thought of the late Hegel, Jacques D'Hondt never stopped disputing those who defended the idea of Hegel's subservience to the Prussian monarchy, of a Hegel who would have sincerely and easily accommodated himself to the reigning political and religious regime, substituting, in Jacques D'Hondt's image, brackish water for the sparkling wine of his youth. He worked, at the opposite pole, Jacques D'Hondt, to show everything that separated Hegel from the position of a state philosopher, an apologist for the existing Prussian state, even emphasizing the elements of continuity between the positions of the young Hegel and those of the mature Hegel. The glowing praise lavished by the late Hegel on the French Revolution in his lectures on the philosophy of history—so at the end of his life, we recall
29:28 the words whose tone and warmth remain unmatched, as Jacques D'Hondt says, on the French Revolution: a splendid sunrise, a sublime emotion felt at that time, a true reconciliation of the divine with the world. This praise for the French Revolution appeared to Jacques D'Hondt as one of the strong arguments in favor of this conception of a continuity between the young Hegel and the mature Hegel. In vigorously contesting the thesis of a recantation by the mature Hegel, Jacques D'Hondt was keen also to distance himself from the views of Marx or Heine on this subject, not to mention his sharp rebukes addressed to Lucien Herr, who, in his famous and remarkable article on Hegel published in the Grande Encyclopédie, had defended the idea that Hegel's political reactionism flowed organically from his system—and Jacques D'Hondt, who greatly admired Lucien Herr, energetically disavows
Secret Hegel, French sources, and the Terror 30:39 this assertion. The fundamental research developed by Jacques D'Hondt on the relations of the young Hegel with the writings of certain Girondin revolutionaries—Bonneville, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Louis-Sébastien Mercier—with progressive Masonic circles of the time, or even with certain German Jacobins, foremost among them Georg Forster, the most Jacobin of the German Jacobins—renewed and considerably enriched the picture of Hegel's relations with the French Revolution, marking a decisive turning point in the interpretation of Hegel's work by identifying, for the first time, numerous hidden sources of Hegelian thought. In his book Hegel secret, all these theses were linked to the idea of a secret Hegel, a Hegel who has remained unrecognized, which D'Hondt defended with great conviction.
31:49 In the same spirit, in analyzing Hegel's relations with the political power of the time, he drew the distinction between an esoteric Hegel—one who found himself compelled to conceal certain of his convictions from the authorities and the public power—and the exoteric Hegel, the one who expresses himself in his canonical writings. These theses have given rise to much controversy, particularly in Italy, where they met with the critical comments of interpreters of Hegelian thought such as Claudio Cesa or, on another plane, Domenico Losurdo. The numerous studies devoted by Jacques D'Hondt to Hegel's relationship with France and the French form one of the most original chapters of his work. They were gathered, as has been recalled, in a volume published in 1998 by the publisher Olms in Germany, entitled Hegel et les Français. Perhaps the time has come to publish them also in France in the form of a separate collection.
32:59 On Hegel's relationship with the work of Voltaire, which Mr. Bourgeois rightly emphasized at length, Jacques D'Hondt wrote very illuminating pages, showing the closeness between the concept of esprit in Voltaire and the concept of the rational in Hegel. But it is the pages on the Hegelian critique of the abstract ideas in Rousseau, on the responsibility of the abstract ideas of liberty and will in Rousseau for egalitarian Jacobinism and for the Terror, that allowed Jacques D'Hondt to develop a very fine analysis of Hegel's position regarding the Terror during the Revolution. The abstract, indeterminate character of Rousseau's conception of will and liberty would explain, according to Hegel, the fury of destruction that characterized the Terror, to which he opposed the requirement, I quote him, of "a particularization of both institutions and individuals." The analysis
34:09 very nuanced analysis of Jacques D'Hondt brings out the ambivalence of Hegel's attitude toward the Terror: his deep revulsion toward it, his absolute moral condemnation, combined with a certain justification of its historical necessity. I cannot dwell any longer on all the studies devoted to Diderot, to Benjamin Constant, to Dom Deschamps, on the relationship between Hegel and the action of Napoleon, which are included in this book, but I conclude by saying that the dialectic of the French Revolution, as analyzed by Hegel, found in Jacques D'Hondt a subtle and extremely understanding interpreter, whose works on this subject are representative of his entire body of work, which contributed so much to the renewal of Hegel's image in contemporary philosophical consciousness. Thank you.
