The end of the future: Hegel and the political ecology of deep time

Stefan Skrimshire
rary environmental literature, the communication of passing points of no return in global warming In short, anything can be said about world history, anything levels often presents crisis in terms of the acceptthat might occur to the most disordered imagination. Theres ance of cycles. Mark Lynas, only one thing that cant possibly be for example, has written of a said about it that its rational. propensity to view climate Stefan Skrimshire is a lecturer in Theology Youll choke on the word. and Religious Studies at the University of change today in terms of (Dostoevsky [1863] 1989, p.21) Leeds, UK. He is the author of Politics of human powerlessness as a Fear, Practice of Hope (Continuum: 2008) kind of geological fatalism In 2007 the designer clothes and editor of Future Ethics: Climate (Lynas 2007, pp.257258): brand Diesel ran a series of Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (Conthe ability to view planetary advertisements that marked tinuum: 2010). change within a larger tempothe birth of what can only be ral narrative, and certainly one described as climate change chic. Portraying the new trendy lifestyles of a glo- that projects beyond the life of the human species as bally warmed world, actors sipped Martinis from we know it. If this last perspective is true, what is sigthe rooftops of a Manhattan submerged in water; St Marks square was overrun with parrots; and lovers nicant is not so much that it represents the erotically applied sun cream on a palm beach next to attempt to curb an attitude of human hubris. a Mount Rushmore half-submerged by ocean. All Rather, it is the relatively sudden popularity of were stamped with the tagline Global Warming the idea that human agency has also become swallowed up in some larger meta-narrative in Ready. What is revealed in this cultural phenomenon which the end of the story is beyond human of crisis consumerism? Some contemporary projec- control. The issue, in other words, is not whether tions of the future today can be seen to ironise human action in the world is in reality capable of planetary catastrophe.1 We hear time and again that reversing trends in global warming already set in despite a greater access than ever before to the place (a point on which many scientists are knowledge of planetary crisis (whether economic or already sceptical), but how this self-awareness is ecological), contemporary social and political atti- narrativised in culture. How, for instance, might a tudes are marked by an ability to absorb its cata- narrative of inevitable crisis translate ethically strophic tone. This has led some to speak of an into behaviour in the present? Does viewing accommodation with crisis in afuent societies; of global warming as the outworking of a bigger apocalypse as way of life or dwelling place.2 cosmic cycle diminish the ethical responsibility of We note a culture of ironic self-distancing towards industrial nations to reduce carbon emissions the future through the static spectacle of consump- that will continue to threaten the lives of those in tion. But it is the rhetoric of climate change in the developing world? Does it lead to the sort particular that raises the most pressing concern with of ironic celebratory tone of Diesels crisis this discourse of crisis readiness. In contempo- consumption?

Introduction

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These are some of the concerns that lead us to pursue a search for the philosophical roots of contemporary crisis thinking. Analysis of the social perception of crisis is a study which requires an inherently interdisciplinary approach (see Amsler 2010). What I propose in the following is to offer to this debate the fruits of research in philosophies of history from European Enlightenment thought. And this entails interrogating the very emergence of a philosophy of progress. Where does the idea of progress come from? Amongst its pre-modern antecedents stands apokalypsis, or revelation: a literary genre that introduces the meaning of history as divine destiny unfolding in time. The history of the apocalypse genre presents a vital insight into the way that future crises of humanity, and of the earth, are imaginatively constructed and have shaped European thought. This includes a pivotal moment in the development of a philosophy of progress through Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, I hope to prove that a critique of a specically Hegelian philosophy of history illuminates this paradox about the conceptualisation of future crisis. The critique reveals crisis to be something that is internalised and celebrated. To do this I shall outline the importance of two developments in modern European thought that help us appreciate the paradox inherent to Hegels thought. The rst is a secularised, apocalyptic, linear model of history as directed towards an end. The second is the persistence of cyclical models of time that describe change as the repetition of death and rebirth according to patterns of equilibrium and restoration.

Apocalypse: arrow of history

The secularisation of apocalypse thesis attempts to paint the Enlightenments linear, teleological view of history as the secularisation of an originally theological concept. As Karl Lwith puts it, a philosophy of history is essentially the belief in an ultimate meaning to successive events. It was therefore entirely dependent on theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of history as a history of fullment and salvation (Lwith 1949, p.1). Examples include the eschatological enthusiasm of Francis Bacons scientic revolution and the faith in Reasons irrepressible unfolding in Lessing, Fichte, and Hegel. Fundamental to all of these philosophers was the principle of the narrative meaning of history.

The theory has not been without its critics. The most famous objection to Lwith came from Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg suggested that what really dened the transformation of thinking about divine providence into its secular historical paradigm was not the direct transfer of theological goods to a secular context. It was, rather, its embellishment and naturalisation through the discoveries of natural science, and of astronomy in particular (Bull 1999, p.118). Astronomy played a crucial role in the secularisation of apocalyptic belief since it generated perspectives of a cosmic sort of progress. The perception of progress on vast, planetary timescales that had been denied a medieval scientic consciousness (Bull 1999, pp.117118). Regardless of who in the Lwith Blumenberg debate is correct, the latter perspective opens up a useful dimension to my inquiry. Namely, the idea that the scientic pursuit of a philosophy of progress in essence functions as the revelation of the hidden secrets of the universe. And this is, of course, also a belief that borrows heavily from its roots in apocalyptic thought. As the biblical scholar John J. Collins has pointed out, the traditional biblical and non-canonical apocalypses were not simply accounts of world history that cohered around specic eschatological formulae (details of the end of the world). What is implicit to apocalypse, according to Collins study of the genre, is of far greater signicance to my argument: apocalypse texts convey an ethically loaded injunction that there is a higher experience of life to be revealed and discovered that far surpasses the world that is visible and conceivable to the human (Collins 1997, p.92). Understanding apocalypse is vital to a critique of a western philosophy of history, then, because apocalypse represents the belief in an ability to access that hidden truth through revelation and the decoding of its signs. It is no coincidence that a connection between a Protestant theology of providence and the new science of astronomy had its parallel in biblical, apocalyptic interpretations of the movements of the heavens, at a similar period.3 A paradox arises immediately from this association between apocalypse and modern philosophy. For revelation, in religious traditions, is at once mysterious and encrypted (reliant on the art of de-coding); and yet also universally accessible to rational beings. This last qualication was of course a key premise of much eighteenth- and

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nineteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. At its root, then, apocalyptic thought describes a relationship between religious truth and an ability to unlock the narrative meaning of a political context. It describes the movement of the divine within time. And it does so in such a way that ordinary perceptions of temporal reality are disrupted, and human authority and prediction challenged. Prophecy is reworked through a heightening of the corruption of the present up to the point that it must be completely destroyed and overturned. This leads to a more or less dualistic schema, a radical dichotomy between the present age and the age to come (Rowland 1982, p.25). In the canonical Jewish apocalypse one thinks of the encrypted messages given to Daniel, in which the fall of successive empires is foretold. In the Christian apocalypse is revealed to John of Patmos not only the interruption of material power and the crumbling of earthly dominions, but also the concept that time itself will be no more. In its emergence as literary form, apocalypse therefore fullled an unprecedented role in the narrative of political history and progress more generally. It described for the rst time the identication of historic events as purposive. Mircea Eliade, one of the foremost theorists of religion in the mid-twentieth century, identied the historic importance of this emergence for western thought. Ancient religions from the Near East were united, he thought, by the myth of eternal recurrence. Through practices of archetypes and of repetition, primitive religions had expressed a belief in the eternal return of creation to a mythical or archetypal existence. Thus, life cycles were observed through the passing of time (seasons, days, lunar cycles, and solar cycles) and the continual rebirth of the life-giving or cosmogonic act.4 What does the history of apocalypse narrative tell us about the development in western thought of a consciousness of crisis more generally? Ritualising periodic death and rebirth in the pre-history traditions is to be interpreted, according to Eliade, as a way of dealing with the vicissitudes of existence. With the birth of the apocalypse narrative in Zoroastrian faith is introduced the concept of the intervention of the creator God. This God promised to level creation in the last days and inaugurate the nal phase of history. Taken to its historic conclusion in the Hebrew narrative, two essential concepts emerge. First, historic events, including calamitous events, are explicable (have meaning)

and revelatory (are accessible). Second, history reveals a singular divine will: the epiphany of God, as Eliade puts it. In the context of this divine will, violence in history appears no longer as arbitrary and no longer as endlessly repeated (Eliade 1954, p.104). Provoked by attacks by warriors from abroad; assimilation into foreign culture; oppression by colonial overlords; or the vicissitudes of climatic change, apocalyptic texts bring direct relation between external crisis and moral progress. With apocalyptic religion a faith in total, not partial victory over disorder and chaos was inaugurated. From the cradle of civilisation in the Near East emerged a faith in history in which human destiny had nally become decoupled from its primitive dependence on innite, repetitive natural cycles. The relationship between human destiny and a theological optimism has consequently been the hallmark of a philosophy of progress. Despite the best efforts of Augustine of Hippo to spiritualise the narrative of apocalyptic prediction, the future of the world was continually ritualised into a story of epic eschatology, because of which degeneration would not prevail forever.5 Committing oneself to the City of God meant enduring the crises of the present without ignoring the ethical and political challenges it presented. But it could assume its ultimate destination to be better than the present. How do we nd the persistence of this linear apocalyptic approach to history in a gure like Hegel? Hegel describes history as the development of Spirit in time. If God is disclosed therefore, it is through this unfolding of secular history. But other interpretations point out that this supposedly secularised theory of progress in fact carries a thoroughgoing apocalyptic sensibility, via its mystical and heterodox associations (ORegan 1994). The most popular amongst these is the alleged traces of inuence of Joachite apocalyptic prophecy in his thought. Joachim of Fiore was a Calabrian abbot who broke away from the Cistercians in the late twelfth century to found his own esoteric order. He is best known for developing a prophetic system that divided world history into three status or ages according to a Trinitarian model. The age of the Father corresponded to that of the Old Testament. The age of the Son represented the age since the birth of Christ to 1260 (when Joachim believed would begin an end to the age of the church). The age of the Spirit, for Joachim in the mid-thirteenth century, had only

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just begun. This latter stage was marked by the surge in pietistic monastic life. It was a movement that had massive inuence on the adoption of Joachite and apocalyptic spirituality in subsequent movements of the spiritual Franciscans and other mendicant movements (see, for instance, Burr 1993, pp.89105). Joachims writing therefore represents one of the rst inuential philosophies of history that was both millennial and progressivist. For Joachim, the coming millennium was seen both as the Sabbath the seventh period of the church in accordance with the seventh seal and the third in a Trinitarian periodisation of divine history. Joachim also represents a decisive break from the a-millennialism initiated by Augustine. This is because Joachim constructed a careful hermeneutics of historical events according to revealed scripture (West and Zimdars-Swartz 1983, p.103). In philosophical terms, and given the longreaching inuence that Joachim had in subsequent centuries up to the present day (see, in particular, Reeves 1999), the shift is monumental. Furthermore, its inuence reached as far as the development of Hegels Lutheran philosophy. Historys culmination was once again a realm of knowledge no longer out of bounds to mortal men. Instead, a system was created for interpreting the successive progressions of humanity as leading towards a visible improvement of the Christian church. Moreover, in this vision the present age of the spirit can be seen actively as the culmination of all the trials that had gone before. As Eric Voegelin wrote of the transition, through Joachim, the Augustinian pessimistic waiting for the end of a structureless saeculum has disappeared (Von Sivers 1997, p.130). The inuence of Joachims Three Ages on German idealism is well argued. Lessings The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780 and itself highly inuential on Hegel, perhaps dened best the new conuence of Enlightenment faith in the progress of human society with religiously revealed faith in divine providence. Lessing allowed that perhaps the theories of certain enthusiasts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries . . . were not so empty speculation after all (Lessing 17741778). The correction offered by Lessing of these premature predictions of the progress of the human race was that they required the enlightened entrance of reason such as only Germania had come close to.

So it is in Hegels philosophy that a lineage from the Joachite status to the Enlightenment can most fruitfully be traced.6 Lessings appeal to patience of those enthusiasts who might not yet recognise the workings of divine providence (Go thine inscrutable way, Eternal providence! Only let me not despair in Thee, because of this inscrutableness) can also be seen in that inherent ambiguity of Hegels philosophy of history with regard to whether the time he presently occupied could be said to be the culmination of historys Absolute towards which his whole philosophy is directed. Like Joachim, for Hegel the realm of the spirit is also one of freedom and equality of the community which could only be achieved after the successive stages preceding. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel uses the Trinitarian model to describe the successive stages not only of divine revelation but of the realisation of Spirit in history itself.

Deep time: the paradox of progress

If a secularised apocalypse, culminating in German idealism, provided fertile ground for viewing history in terms of narrative with a beginning and an imminent end, the early history of geology provides the little appreciated underside to this story. For the model of times arrow was not without a competitor in the scientic and philosophical Enlightenment. Stephen J. Gould makes this point in outlining the historic signicance of the discovery, by James Hutton in the late eighteenth century, of deep time. Hutton, often cited as the father of modern geology, is best known as a champion of uniformitarianism. This is the belief that the world is constituted by slow-moving forces internal to the earth itself that continue just the same today as it has throughout its life. Observations of the upward intrusion of rock from (for example) plate tectonics, to form horizontal against vertical sedimented layers (unconformities) appeared to conrm this revolutionary proposal of continuous creation. That is, they painted a picture of the earth as in continuous regeneration by successive cycles of erosion and uplift of geological forces, as opposed to the notion of continual erosion of an earth that had been formed by some singular event in the (not too distant) past.

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What is the relevance of bringing in the key arguments of modern geology here? It helps us to understand the different conceptions of time that lie at the heart of modern European thought about future crises. Huttons Theory of the Earth, published in 1785, was alleged to do two key things. First, it was thought to banish the unempirical principle of catastrophism. Catastrophism was the notion that the shape of the earth is the product of past events of large-scale geological catastrophe, and is now gradually eroding away. Uniformitarianism was thus thought to have veried for the rst time the absolute vastness of time against the accepted literalist biblical interpretation that the earth was no more than a few thousand years in age. Second, Hutton had introduced to geology the principle of cyclicity, as opposed to viewing times arrow in linear fashion. This inaugurated a paradigm shift that allowed the conceptualisation of endlessness. The famous words of Huttons treatise sum this up well: If the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we nd no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end (quoted in Gould 1988, p.65). The distinction between cyclical and linear portrayals of geological time is of great signicance to the parallel shift in thinking I am trying to describe within a philosophy of history. Uniformitarianism opened the way not only to viewing the history of the earth as one of cosmic vastness (cyclical patterns in geology were also linked to a Newtonian picture of the revolutions of the planets). It also called into question the very meaning or possibility of history at all, seen as a narrative with a beginning and an end. Nietzsche later arrived at a similar conclusion from a quasimetaphysical and existential point of view: the possibility that the present moment was the product of revolutions of eternally returning sequences through innity. What Huttons early expressions of geological change did was to consciously avoid all reference to history proper as a concept at all. He avoided, that is, notions of directionality, sequence, narrative, and, crucially, progress. Huttons earth was one not dened by apocalyptic sensibility to the quickening of human progress or the limited lifespan of the earth. It was, instead, marked by constant ux, movement, and equilibrium when seen within the vast timescales that geology revealed.

How, then, does the success of a cyclical view of global crisis sit with the secularisation thesis of apocalypse theory the narrative of history as having a beginning and imminent end? The answer lies in the rhetorical success that a times arrow model had over its cyclical counterpart. This success was guided to a large extent by the emergence of a powerful theory in the form of species evolution. As Gould details, purely cyclical, nonprogressivist accounts of the formation of the earth did not sit well with the emergence of paleontological accounts of the apparent arrival of the human species at a certain point in time only. In the end, the progressivist implications of Darwins arguments won the day. A cyclical view of time employed by early geology to explain the ability of the earth to maintain equilibrium throughout millennia of apparent change and disruption was a successful idea. But it would be accompanied henceforth by a view that these changes demonstrated a far bigger, narrative direction in which the human was playing a decisive part: the world was evolving and progressing. This cyclical development is important, nevertheless, because, at least in the form that Gould presents the argument, it proves that the two models of time employed to make sense of the world times arrow and times cycle have both been indispensable metaphors for describing planetary crises. What this brief allusion to the history of geology reveals, therefore, is the intellectual roots of thinking about environmental crisis in terms of an overarching, long-term and potentially never-ending narrative of catastrophe that lies literally underneath our feet. Huttons conviction that the earth might never have had a beginning, nor need it necessarily have an end, might seem like the scientic antithesis to a linear apocalyptic view of history as outlined at the beginning of this article with reference to Lowiths secularisation thesis. But in the almost contemporaneous developments of Hegels philosophy of history, they nd the perfect synthesis. That is, in Hegel we witness a view of crisis as stitched into the notion of history: crisis is involved in the revelation of truth itself.

Hegels apocalypse
Hegels concept of progress shares many aspects of this balancing act between the directional, apocalyptic thrust of history on the one hand and cyclical

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theories of crisis on the other, as outlined above. And the way he combines them can be crudely described as an attempt to distinguish carefully between the rational idea of providence and the irrational or extra-rational behaviour of external nature, the regular behaviour of the stars, or the innocence of the plants (Hegel 1990, p.141). Hegels Philosophy of Nature bore little relation to a close empirical study of geological or ecological change. It was founded upon a denition of nature as the very essence of externality: the idea in the form of otherness (Hegel 1990, p.140). How, then, does Hegel conceive of progress within its ecological home? And how, more importantly, does this view relate to a consciousness of crisis? Whilst he was keen to show that nature progresses as a system of stages (Hegel 1990, p.141), Hegel actively opposed the then edgling theory of evolution. He taught that because nature is the realm of necessity, not freedom, it was not involved in any factors of chance, as the theory of natural selection implied (Houlgate 2005, p. 173). Like Kant, Hegel viewed nature as merely the background occasion against which the process of human history may occur, governed by the laws of Reason. As Lwith put it, Hegel believed that nature has no independent positive signicance . . . nature was for him merely the natural arena of the spiritual events of the world (Lwith 1964, p.214). We observe in his theory, therefore, a triumphant decoupling of human destiny from its primitive dependence on innite, repetitive natural cycles. The overwhelming legacy of Hegelianism (through its inuence on Marxism, for instance) in this respect is the realisation that through human labour the necessity of nature is brought into relationship with the freedom of the subject and something is produced towards an end (Lamb 1987, p.174). To speak about the anticipation of crises in natural systems within this scheme, therefore, would appear only to refer to a wider understanding of historic events tending towards rational ends, despite appearances to the contrary. The appearance of ecological crisis, we might surmise, would thus operate in the same way that perhaps Hegel accepted political calamities in his time. The expression of this gradualist justication of historic eras in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History is well known. Successive civilisations articulations of the goal of human freedom culminate in the expression of Christian philosophy. It is the latter stage of human thought that represents Reasons

crowning achievement, the realised telos of universal freedom. Hegel is clear about the relationship of Providence or the workings . . . of Gods hand to his own philosophy. He states that in a retail version of the view of Providence (Hegel 1988, p.16) (in which an individual is merely aware of Gods unexpected grace in his or her life), discernment might be allowed in isolated cases. But his own philosophy of world history is of a totalising, far grander kind. It therefore leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of Reasons governance of the world. What does this inheritance of a historicised eschatology tell us about the development of crisis thought in Hegels philosophy? The clue lies in the principle of dialectic. Ultimately, Hegels thought carries over the idea that historys consummation, its eschaton, was conceivable and experienced in some sense as already achieved. That is, history is immanentised for his own age in the triumph of reason over the vicissitudes of nature and repetition. There was already a strong precedent for this. Behind Hegel stood such luminaries of this faith in the fullment of science as Francis Bacon, also richly inuenced by Joachim. It is also signicant to trace Hegels Trinitarian dialectic as the radical departure from Kants idea of human moral progress. Hegel rejected fundamentally Kants careful antinomic division between the innite and the nite. Instead, for Hegel, innity was capable of being reconciled in time. A theory of progress was logically connected to the immanence of God, or the Absolute, in time, and not merely in some point in the future. For Hegel, [The Christian religion is] the religion of reconciliation (Hegel 1985, p.65). The consequences for analysing the development of a perspective on future crisis are great. For Hegels scheme implies the rejection of the possibility that future events may fail the human project. This stood as a direct challenge to the inuence of Kants rationalist view of history. The achievement of perfection was, for Kant, a desire inscribed onto the heart of reason but never achievable, creating an innite series of nearing the goal, but never reaching it. But this gave no real, historical motivation for aligning ones will with the outworkings of reason itself. It could only produce the contradiction that there was no motivation for any progress or any history (Bull 1999, p.115). In Hegels scheme, however, this sense of failure is to be avoided at all costs. Dialectic means that the

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eschaton is, with the culmination of history in the age of the Spirit, already being achieved. What should interest us most about this development is the transformations of temporal language in respect of the progress of the future. Cyril ORegan has termed Hegels philosophy a revisionist concept of eternity. This is because it reects a quality of history not reduced to timelessness but to a concept of transformed time itself (ORegan 1994, p.303). Hegel is notoriously ambivalent about the ability to describe the social and political form of the eschatological community. Yet it is possible and important to note the quality of a transformed relationship with the external, natural world, and what this implies for a theory of future, planetary crisis. For Hegel, the consummation (end) of history means that all is subsumed into the being of Spirit. In this case nature becomes the eternal externalisation (Hegel 1977, p.492); the Spirit emptied out into Time (p.492). This does not conform to a millennialist reading of history, in which the eschaton is feverishly expected. Rather, it describes a stage which was to be believed to be occurring now, or at least in its nal stages. What is implied by this position for a vision of the future as crisis? There is a temptation to view a theory of progress as necessarily tending towards a continued optimism; the ability to overcome the terror of history through human ingenuity. Within linear apocalyptic thinking, in other words, there is an assumption that history must appear as a permanently futuristic, utopian, and forward thrust. And this is as true of a faith in rapid, revolutionary change of a Lenin, or the gradualist timescale changes of a Kant. Either interpretation differs radically from Hegels incarnational dialectic. This dialectic redened the future as the totalising transformation of the present: the glorious future made immanent to historys now. A sense of historical optimism in the end of history is often falsely attributed to Hegel as the prediction that history will be brought to a close through technology and social engineering (Stewart 1996, p.209). But this sort of utopian manifesto is clearly very far from his religious vision of the nal eschatological community. The latter is inherently practiced as the State, in which all individuals achieve true freedom and mutual recognition. Hegel was conscious of the temptation to be impatient with this concept and to wish an eruptive revolution as the culmination of history. In his way, therefore,

Hegel warned against a pre-emptive millennialism, just as Augustine had. Instead, Hegel insisted that the realisation of Spirit is a slow process and one that is occurring all around us, unfolding all of the time: a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images (Hegel 1977, p.492). It remains for us to see exactly what the nature of this new, consummate experience of the crisis of the present, implies for a philosophy of the future.

The end of the future

Bringing this analysis back to my original problem, I now want to ask how the development of a philosophy of progress came to shape a consciousness of an indwelling of crisis. How can a consciousness of planetary crisis, or the inevitable end of human life, possibly relate to Hegels analysis of endzeit understood as the consummation of temporal, nite history? (McCarney 2000, p.173). In Hegel the end of history is expressly not a discourse on the possibility of human extinction (McCarney 2000, p.173), or even the collapse of human civilisation. What, then, has his legacy been to political thought on historic crises? Despite the varieties of its interpretation through Heideggerian, Marxist, Kojevian, or Fukuyamian lenses, Hegelian philosophy looms largest as a method of interpreting historic accomplishment. The notion of accomplishment stands at the heart of speculative logic itself. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel is explicit in his intention to write a philosophy whose very appearance marks the act of completion of knowledge. It is this aspect that makes his philosophy a science: to the goal where it can lay aside the title love of knowing and be actual knowing (Hegel 1977, p.3). Why is this signicant? Through the historic emergence of thought in speculative form, Hegel conrms the telos of progress as the culmination of the history of thought up to this point where the Absolute is grasped by human consciousness and hence philosophical thought comes to the end of its quest. But he also does much more. For speculation essentially indicates the stage in human consciousness that is a reection of itself, as a realisation of its own completion. This means that speculation as an activity, if it can be called such, is fundamentally a passive one. This is expressed nowhere more clearly than the famous conclusion to the Phenomenology. There the culmination of history, Spirits self-consciousness or self-

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recognition, is understood as an internalising selfexamination. It is recollection, the inwardizing, of that experience (Hegel 1977, p.492). Glenn Alexander Magee makes much of the ancient Greek roots of this notion of knowledge as recollection, and its connection to the act of speculation:
the term speculation comes from speculum meaning mirror. What does the speculative philosopher mirror? Speculation holds up a mirror to the Idea itself: It allows Idea to comprehend itself . . . The Philosopher is a vehicle of the muses: an oracle through which the Spirit expresses itself, an automatic writer who passively watches the play of the dialectic as it develops on his page. (Magee 2001, pp.8889)

Magee goes on to argue for the mytho-poetic and aesthetic elements of Hegelian speculative thought. But what stands out for my purposes is this emphasis on the static, inwardising, mirror-like activity by which any talk of the unfolding of a future history must now be framed. Indeed, we arrive here at the most crucial and problematic paradox of Hegelian thought. It concerns whether or not it is possible to conceive a future at all. It is the contention of many noted commentaries on Hegel (most notably Malabou 2005) that what his thought announced with the self-realisation of Spirit in history, was a declaration of the end of futurethinking. This is not, of course, to claim that the very concept of the future, or even knowledge of the future, was questioned. What was questioned, rather, was the anticipation of denitive future events or points in time that would justify the crises of the present. To actively and feverishly await a future solution is to deny that the totality of being is unfolding. In Hegelian philosophy, goes the argument, stands the insistence that history is now unfolded as much as unfolding. It is a sentiment that we nd in Hegels views on historic events, such as the famous anti-utopianism of his preface to The Philosophy of Right:
since philosophy is exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a world beyond which God knows where or rather, of which we can very well say that we know where it exists, namely in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination. (Hegel 1991, p.20)

or messianic hope in the face of crisis. There is no better yet to come outside of what already is immanent to history. It is therefore the connection of the two central concepts, progress and contradiction, seen through an apocalyptic lens, which ultimately connects Hegels thinking about history on the discourse of future crisis. The anticipation of global disaster needs to be read in terms of a faith in contradiction (the overcoming of crisis through its subsumption) within the process of historical progress. As Paul Miklowitz has written, it is this aspect of Hegels eschatological scheme that raises the business of philosophical speculation to the audacious level of the end of thinking, striving, and waiting itself. The eschaton is achieved in time, as the overcoming of contradiction:
Reconciling nite and innite, immanent and transcendent, in the Gnosis of rational speculation, the here-and-now becomes Absolute: a consummation once devoutly to be wished is blasphemously achieved. (Miklowitz 1998, p.92).

Celebrating endlessness
The anticipation of the future for Hegel should be thought of as the very antithesis of utopian hubris,

The point of this analysis is to reinforce the revelatory aspect of the Hegelian dialectic of history and its impact upon thinking about crisis as both linear progress and the overcoming of the repetition of natural cyclical processes. For we must see, stitched into Hegels apocalyptic commitment, the idea, to which I have already referred, of the completion of nature itself into the life of Spirit. Hegels belief in the end of history through a triumph of dialectical reason (though, in reality, contextually specic to the triumph of Lutheran, philosophical Christianity and Prussian nationalism), is therefore the celebration of stasis. Such a celebration constitutes a distancing of human ends from the necessity of natural cycles of death and rebirth. The eschaton is that which erodes the need for striving or the overcoming of crisis. Successive philosophers have pointed out the consequences of this totalising and nullifying dialectic, and the eschatological expression of Hegels end of time. Catherine Malabou asks, for example, can there be any temporality which corresponds to this end of time except times stasis in the congealed form of a perpetual present? (Malabou 2005, p.4). Paul Miklowitz, too, argues that speculative thought is in essence the celebration of a repetition of the same. It is a step which in Hegel involves not the abrogation of history but rather its celebration, and its celebratory repetition (Miklowitz 1998, p.102). Hannah Arendt also

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made a similar point when she argued that Hegel establishes a time-space in which the very notion of an end is virtually inconceivable (Arendt 1993, p.75). For my own purposes, the references of these commentaries to a celebration of endlessness are important because (a) they recall an interesting parallel to the discoveries of deep time and Huttons geological suggestion of no vestiges of an end in the life of the planet, and (b) they suggest quietist political connotations. Hegel must have reected at times that the slaughter bench of history can appear to be no more than a cycle violence. Indeed, it comes as a strange consolation to learn that even after professing his optimism at the triumphs of Napoleons campaigns as the birth of a genuinely new age, by the time he reached fty, living in Berlin and writing the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel recognised ever-unrestful times of hope and fear. I had hoped for once we might be done with it. Now I must confess that things continue as ever. Indeed, in ones darker hours it seems they are getting worse (Hegel, The Letters quoted in McCarney 2000, pp.179180). This may go some way to temper the accusations that Hegel was myopically positive about his own contemporary historic events. But the most important point is that, for Hegel, the faith one must profess in historys progress is, with all its religious apocalyptic connotations, a clarity of vision and one that incorporates a long, and potentially endless, view of the future. Clearly Hegel is not bound to the pessimism of recurrent cycles of destruction. It is a religious vision, above all, since to regard the resolution of contradictions in history is to live the very selfknowledge of God. Reasons incarnation in history is the becoming of absolute self-knowledge, the innite becoming incarnate in, and with, the nite. To our critique, then, we need to add the other essential ingredient of Hegels apocalyptic. This is the notion of rupture, since the concept of reconciliation of contradictions entails the confronting, welcoming, and subsuming of the negative. As Richard J. Bernstein argues, this is parallel to the philosophers task of suspending the common sense desire to dissolve contradictions of nite and innite (Bernstein 1991). But in a well known passage from Phenomenology of Spirit it sounds rather more like a war cry, or at least the call to brace oneself for the tremors of disaster:

the Life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it nds itself . . . Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. (Hegel 1977, p.19)

The negative is a complex concept in Hegel but essential for our understanding here, and an essential component of dialectic itself. One of Hegels central premises is that reality is revealed simultaneously as that which is, and that which is not, on its way to becoming full potentiality (see Marcuse 1941, p.123). For Hegel, nature itself is to be viewed, at least in its abstract idea, in terms of the negative (Hegel 1990, p.140). Nature is, in a sense, not self-sufciently positive, independent of Logic, of the divine Idea. The above passage therefore conrms the expression of dialectic, with this powerful visual metaphor, as looking the negative in the face, recognising in the necessity of its cycles an obedience to eternal laws. The imperative that follows, however, is equally important: that we must continue tarrying with it. For we recall the very emergence of apocalyptic thought as the overcoming of repetition, its subsuming into a metanarrative of history. Hegel combines this revelation of reality with its necessarily negative incarnation. With this insight we begin nally to recognise a peculiar form of regard to the future and to future crisis consonant with the problem I described at the start. I outlined two models of time that have shaped European thought since the modern era: times arrow and the cyclical implications of deep time. Crisis, in other words, may be seen as both the transcendence of repetition and an acceptance of its necessity. It is the dialectical Aufhebung whose resting place is a nal, spiritual state of self-recognition. It is a regard, or vision, that prefers the internal acceptance of mature wisdom over the rash desire to spark change that he feared of the utopians. Hegel believed that utopians were people who were too wrapped up in the idea of new creation, a trend that had stunted philosophical as well as political progress: we are tempted to suppose that we must now begin and keep on beginning afresh forever (Hegel 1991, p.12). The alternative, for Hegel, was to view precedent moments in history as all incarnate in the immanence of reason in the present moment.

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Hegels legacy for political ecology

I have argued that Hegels apocalyptic philosophy of history was also a celebration of permanent unfolding. And this occurs against a backdrop in which geological, theological, and philosophical discourse combined both cyclical and linear models of time to explain this unfolding. I now wish to suggest that this can be shown to persist in a contemporary discourse. That discourse is a resurgence of interest in the cosmic cycles of death and rebirth that shape a certain form of political ecology. The rst thing to do is to distinguish carefully between an attraction to temporal stasis, and that of eternally repeated cycles. For Hegel was very clear that for him it is not cyclical patterns that constitute progress, but the very opposite: their sublation (Aufhebung), and hence our unchaining of historic progress from the vicissitudes of nature. And this antipathy towards cyclical thinking is related to Hegels Eurocentric caricaturing of the Oriental world precisely for the latters commitment to circular temporal models. In his commentary on Chinese and Indian Buddhism in particular, Hegel is intrigued by the elevation of Nature to the place of Absolute Spirit (whereas for Hegel Nature represents alienated Spirit). Hegel believed that since in Eastern thought all proceeded from and returns to Nothingness there could therefore be no element of freedom (Hegel 1956 p.168).7 These comments only reinforce the extent to which Hegel, alongside Kant in this case, have stamped the Christian, apocalyptic history upon the secular European consciousness. It is this heritage, moreover, that now confronts a crisis in thinking through its own ends. And in the light of my analysis of the persistence of a deep time perspective within this broader apocalyptic sensibility, we can now appreciate a greater tendency towards accepting the revelation of history in its cycles of death and regeneration. In 2007 an article in Orion magazine entitled The consolations of extinction (Cokinos 2007) typied this switch. It reminded its readers that whilst campaigning for environmental justice or conservation of wilderness were worthy pursuits, one should not lose sight of the fact that in the end all life systems must die, playing their own part in a longer-term cycle of death and rebirth.8 Arguably, such an attitude draws upon political discourses such as eco-feminism and deep ecology, which are keen to avoid an attitude of despair with

regard to human agency. An ethical consequence of deep time thinking, according to such traditions, might be to reorient the moral status of humanity in the context of the wider intrinsic value of the biosphere and perhaps even the cosmos, from which life was born. Some, for this reason, have argued that deep time can be constructed with a view to deepening an ethical commitment to the present. The process theologian John Cobb once wrote, for instance, that viewing our species from the point of view of the total natural process does not mean adopting an attitude of calm detachment (Cobb 1972). However, I would argue that a fear for calm detachment is not at all misplaced, and is in practice conrmed by the Diesel example I gave at the beginning of this article (which would be better characterised as celebratory detachment). Adopting a perspective that looks at a cosmic bigger picture may function precisely as a narrative that belittles, if not renders irrelevant, any anticipation of near-future events in the history of the planet. And this is a view, I would suggest, that bears some similarities with the inwardness of Hegelian dialectic that I have described above. A deep time perspective does indeed represent a form of consolation, inasmuch as it resists the temptation to feverishly anticipate near future events as somehow denitive of whether humanity has been saved or not. Despite the struggles for survival of all living things, one can adopt an attitude not dissimilar to Hegels realisation that in the greater, vaster scheme of the progress of the world, all is as it ought to be. Of course, the key difference here is that Hegel could never have anticipated the projected demise of the human species, nor that of the life of the planet, in the ways that our own society is capable. Hegels understanding of the life of the world and the future of humanity will differ radically from our own. But the point of reference I want to make between Hegels discovery and our own is perhaps far simpler: that today, when we shift attention to those perspectives of vaster timescales, future ceases to hold the sense that it once did, the anxiety that it once produced. To contemplate a future far beyond the existence of the human or even of planet earth requires that one detaches oneself from the hopes and fears for the future that dene our imminent anticipations (or indeed the hopes and fears of Hegels retail version of Providence) and to nd solace instead in the immanent and ultimate meaning of the

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present moment. I am not arguing that contemporary culture shares Hegels condence in the achievements of Reason in world history, far from it. I am arguing only that we share the legacy of his ability to view the crises of human history as subsumed within a bigger unfolding narrative. Indeed it is this narrative that allows us to make sense of, and remain detached from, the vicissitudes of such crises. A human propensity to fear imminent events of catastrophe on the one hand, or to hope for an imminent arrival of some saviour event on the other are, of course, today as prevalent as ever. But I want to suggest that today such sentiments sit paradoxically alongside an attraction to the bigger picture of deep time, and not always for the ethical reasons that environmentalists may wish. For example, a rhetoric of natural cycles is normally the rst port of call for climate scepticism (a good example was the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007). Climate sceptics usually assert that the anthropogenic elements of current warming patterns are greatly overplayed: what we are experiencing now is the outplaying of natural cycles over which we have no control. In a sort of parody of the exchange that took place in the late eighteenth century between uniformitarianism and catastrophism, climate sceptics again evoke the rational claims of an ever changing and evolving planet against the belief in denitive and nal catastrophic events. With a twist of irony, therefore, a deep time perspective also represents the return to archetypes, or the natural rhythms of ecological balance, which climate sceptics are keen to claim as rationalisations for the shifts in global temperature. But one should also suspect that such rationalisations rely upon a generalisation of the concept of cyclical that ignores exactly to which timeframes such cycles might refer. As with all emotive discourse about the future and the end there is often a tendency to assume that speaking of the future of the world may refer interchangeably to geological, human-historical, and cosmological futures. But clearly the emotive and moral associations of these timeframes are not equal. And it is this confusion, perhaps, which has encouraged a view of imminent and planetary crises to become subsumed into a larger, generalised discourse about the future of the life of the cosmos. A deep time perspective can thus also be recognised in our cultural fascination with the con-

tinuation of planetary life after the inevitable demise of the human. This is manifest in the recent explosion of thought experiments on the survival of life on earth after humans have disappeared: thought experiments such as Alan Weismans The World Without Us (2008); Jan Zalasiewiczs The Earth After Us (2008); the National Geographics Aftermath: Population Zero (2008); and the History Channels Life After People (2008). Literary and cinematic explorations of the survival of humanity (though usually only a remnant) after planetary catastrophe do of course persist with equal fascination. But I would suggest that it is the new incursion into social consciousness of the former examples that poses the most interesting transformation in ways of imagining the future. For what they represent is not so much the ability to imagine cataclysmic ends in the life of our species, but rather the desire to see the next stage of life on earth as an essentially painless transition: in none of the examples cited is a period of suffering, war, or disease suggested by which human civilisation would be reduced and threatened.

Conclusion
Examining the apocalyptic roots of a Hegelian perspective has opened up a conceptual frame for better understanding the political paradox with which I started. It has revealed a perspective caught between the revelation of future crisis and the crisis of action: what does it mean to act at all within this environment? One cannot help but read Hegel with an implicit feeling that a sense of withdrawal remains at the heart of the end of history. A positive relationship with historic events remains ambivalent at best. A quietist, introspective colouring of the ultimate achievement of the understanding or of Spirit might therefore be thought of as an appropriate conclusion to this analysis of a Hegelian concept of progress. In its relation to the subordinate world of nite, natural cycles the telos of world progress is not to be threatened by the apparent unnaturalness of lived life. Hegels apocalyptic commitment is able to maintain both the continuation of natural cycles and the eschatological achievement by which humanity can rise above it, to allow its progress to be untainted by it. Indeed, in the Logic Hegel speaks of the maturity of religious thought that is able to realise the Absolute as the transcendence of the cyclical conict. It

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stands in stark distinction to the young, immature perspective that dwells only on naturalistic nitude:
All unsatised endeavour ceases, when we recognise that the nal purpose of the world is accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself. Generally speaking, this is the mans way of looking; while the young imagine that the world is utterly sunk in wickedness, and that the rst thing needful is a thorough transformation. The religious mind, on the contrary, views the world as ruled by Divine Providence, and therefore correspondent with what it ought to be. But this harmony between the is and the ought to be is not torpid and rigidly stationary. Good, the nal end of the world, has being, only while it constantly produces itself. And the world of spirit and the world of nature continue to have this distinction, that the latter moves only in a recurring cycle, while the former certainly also makes progress. (Hegel 2009)

I am fully aware that a huge gulf lies between Hegels knowledge of the physical laws of the universe and our own. I am aware also that such a gulf poses a great limit to how much we may

infer a continuing relevance of Hegels thought on contemporary attitudes to climatic crisis. Hegel could never have anticipated, for instance, that the very fruits of our industrial and scientic progress would contribute to the very destruction of that life-support system that today hangs in the balance. For this reason I explicitly limit my conclusion to the following claim: today, a Hegelian view of world progress can be seen in the belief that somewhere beyond these immediate, destructive, and nite patterns of nature, all is reconciled in the world of Spirit. In contemporary terms such a belief culminates in a sort of secular spiritualisation of the patterns of present. How might we understand this in our daily lives? For us, perhaps, world crisis exists but is simply subsumed within the inward reconciliations of progress and crisis, lived through the spiritualised consolations of extinction. Today we still have an awareness and a basic fear of what may lie ahead. But we have cultivated such vision alongside an ironic celebration of crisis in our midst.

Notes
1. This is far from contested, of course, as a new discourse of green capitalism and the promise of global salvation through expected breakthroughs in energy innovation and geo-engineering suggest. 2. The concept is Frederick Buells (2004). 3. Whilst an entirely distinct subject matter in many ways, the correlation of Lutheran theology, the scientic revolution, and Astrology is also of extreme pertinence in this area of apocalyptic and the philosophy of history. See Zambelli (1986). 4. Examples include the Egyptian invention of the solar year and the Babylonian creation myth. In the latter, the hero Marduk (identied later with kings in the role of re-enacting the moment of creation) slays his Great-great Grandmother Tiamat, and out of her carcass creates the cosmos. 5. A millennial view of the degradation of the earth was, however, preeminent in the theologies of some church fathers before Augustines time. In the third century CE the bishop of Carthage, St Cyprian, wrote of an apocalyptic awareness of environmental degeneration. Perhaps inuenced by Roman and late Jewish apocalypses (such as the Sybilline Oracles), Cyprian preached that the last days were not only to be expected on biblical grounds; it was also evident in the changing climatic and geological conditions. This observation is couched not in terms of a premature and unexpected death of the world, but by analogy with an ageing human: even were we silent, and if we alleged no proofs from the sacred Scriptures and from the divine declarations, the world itself is now announcing, and bearing witness to its decline by the testimony of its failing estate (Cyprian 1971, p.458). 6. Cyril ORegan has suggested that this transference of apocalypse theory is neither uncontroversial nor straightforward, and others have argued that such attributions are tenuous at best (Bull 1999, p.134). Evidence for Hegels carrying of Joachite theology is itself mediated by other sources, from Lutheran hermeneutics, to the mystic Jakob Boehme, and Valentinian Gnosticism (Magee 2001, p.240; see also Reeves 1999). Nevertheless, what is signicant for my purposes is that in Hegel a science of progress is predicated on a combination of revealed religion and the concept of a realised eschatology. In his system, this takes place through the realisation of Spirit at the apex of consciousness, or absolute knowing, moving towards the eschatological community of the Kingdom of the Spirit. As for Joachim, it was a realm

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dened by reconciliation of contradiction and the achievement of Gods self-reection through the spiritual community. In Hegel the moment of the Spirit is also that of the self-consciousness of the Community (Hegel 1985, p.371). 7. It is worth noting that Kant was similarly opposed to aspects of oriental thought, but in his case due to its alleged attempt to square the problem of imagining an innite series: what he caricatured as the monstrous system of Lao-kiun (probably Lao-Tsu), which actively promoted the feeling of nothingness that brooding upon the proposal of an innite series produced (Kant 1794, p.202). Kant had proposed that it was also the result of a human weakness to prefer the reward of eternal tranquillity over the duty to strive forever towards a goal in the innite future. Hegel, on the other hand, opposed the notion of cyclical recurrence of death and rebirth and an innite future, in favour of a thoroughly historicised achievement of Spirit, a realm of freedom that spiritualities of circular eternity and repetition could never achieve.

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8. Of course, the passage cited above speaks of the eventual death of planets and stars and perhaps ultimately the universe itself. But from a practical human perspective, the contemplation of such deaths represents a sort of cyclical process of which our existence has been a relatively short component: the idea that the universe will eventually die is arguably irrelevant to the practical ethical questions I am addressing.

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