“Heroism” and the “World Soul” at Jena

“The flattering portrait Hegel wrote of Napoleon to his friend has subsequently spiraled into mythic legend. Why did Hegel have this seemingly lofty view of Napoleon?”

There are two stories concerning Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s encounter with Napoleon at Jena. The first is apocryphal but romantic and sublime; Hegel was supposedly penning his final touches on The Phenomenology of Spirit when the guns of battle roared behind him and, in a chaotic moment of genius, edited a few sections based on Napoleon’s invasion. The second is verifiably true; Hegel wrote a letter to his friend and former colleague Friedrich Niethammer: “I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” The flattering portrait Hegel wrote of Napoleon to his friend has subsequently spiraled into mythic legend. Why did Hegel have this seemingly lofty view of Napoleon?

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart—then part of the ancient Duchy of Württemberg. His father was a low-level bureaucrat to the Duke of Württemberg and his mother the daughter of a prominent lawyer and legal scholar who was in the service of the duchy. He attended the theological school at Tübingen, where he was roommates with Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling. An early enthusiast of the French Revolution, like many young middle-class Europeans, the excess of the Terror turned him sharply in opposition to the extreme form of revolutionary Jacobinism that swept that country, but he nevertheless remained an admirer of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

The first story concerning Hegel and Napoleon is my favorite, if for no other reason than it provides a frantic imagination and context to an always overlooked section of The Phenomenology. Near the end of his long-winded explanation of the emergence of culture from the World Spirit, Hegel concludes his thoughts by reflecting on “Absolute Freedom and Terror.” Like Edmund Burke, Hegel considered the French Revolution and its consequences “the greatest world event of our time.” The sublime activity of the Spirit, in trying to make the rational actual, leads to terror—hellfire—rather than any heaven.