It is well known that James Joyce modelled his final novel Finnegans Wake on the philosophy of history of the Italian jurist Giambattista Vico:
In a word, here is all humanity circling with fatal monotony about the Providential fulcrum—the “convoy wheeling encirculing abound the gigantig’s lifetree”. Enough has been said, or at least enough has been suggested, to show how Vico is substantially present in the Work in Progress. (Beckett 9)
Beckett was the first to mention Vico, but almost everyone who has written about the Wake since has discussed his influence, for Joyce forces him upon the reader’s attention. His name is used over and over again, usually in a context concerned with the theme that history repeats itself ... (Atherton 29)
What is not so well known is that Joyce also had another philosopher of history in mind when he first put pen to paper. As he explained to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was mystified by a fragment of Work in Progress involving a confrontation between St Patrick and George Berkeley:
I am sorry that Patrick and Berkeley are unsuccessful in explaining themselves. The answer, I suppose, is that given by Paddy Dignam’s apparition: metempsychosis. Or perhaps that theory of history so well set forth (after Hegel and Giambattista Vico) by the four eminent annalists who are even now treading the typepress in sorrow will explain part of my meaning. (Letters 9 October 1923, Gilbert 204)
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is not often mentioned in connection with Finnegans Wake, but during the earliest stages of the drafting of the novel, his influence on the evolving structure of the book was arguably as great as that of Vico.
It is even possible that Joyce initially overlooked Vico’s cyclical philosophy of history when he was searching for an architectural template for Finnegans Wake. He was certainly aware of Vico and his philosophy of history when he first conceived the novel. We know for a fact that he was familiar with the Neapolitan during his sojourn in Trieste. Between March 1909 and August 1910 he lived on Via Vincenzo Scussa in Trieste, about 1 km from the Piazza Giambattista Vico, which he regularly traversed (Norburn 41-49, Ellmann 1982:309). In 1910, he moved to Via della Barriera Vecchia (now the Corso Umberto Saba), which is even closer to the Piazza Giambattista Vico (Norburn 49). In July 1913, when he was living on Via Donato Bramante, he was appointed to teach English and English commercial correspondence at the Scuola Superiore di Commercio Revoltella (Norburn 58):
His official position at the school made him even more sought after as a teacher than before, and his unpunctuality and eccentric methods were countenanced by indulgent pupils. Among these was Paolo Cuzzi, now an eminent Triestine lawyer, who heard about Joyce from Ettore Schmitz, and took lessons from 1911 to 1913. Joyce was impatient with the early stages of learning; he brought Cuzzi quickly through the elementary Berlitz texts, then moved on to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But the principal part of the lesson was devoted to conversation ... A favorite subject was Thomistic morality, about which Joyce theorized with precision and ingenuity. But often their subjects were less predictable, as when Cuzzi, who was studying Vico in school, discovered that Joyce was also passionately interested in this Neapolitan philosopher. [Footnote: Joyce also knew Croce’s Estetica [Aesthetics], with its chapter on Vico.] (Ellmann 1982:339-340)
His enthusiasm for Vico and his philosophy may even go back to his student days in Dublin:
... scholars are still uncertain about the time and circumstances in which Joyce actually came upon Vico. Some assume that Joyce may have heard about, and perhaps even read, Vico while he was still a student at University College Dublin (1898-1902), where one of his teachers, the Jesuit Father Charles Ghezzi, introduced him to Dante, Giordano Bruno, and other major figures in Italian literature and philosophy ... As will become clear below, Joyce discovered Vico in Italy (i.e., the Italian quarters of Trieste) and in Italian, and definitely used the Italian text as his prime source. (Mali 74-75)
And again:
Despite Joyce’s statements that Vico’s Scienza nuova is the work behind Finnegans Wake, and the fact that Joyce read and remarked on his interest in Vico in his early years in Trieste (he perhaps knew something of Vico even much earlier) ... (Verene x)
Vico Road in Dalkey—close to Clifton School, where Joyce taught for a few months in 1904 (Norburn 19-20)—is mentioned in Ulysses. Vico is not explicitly mentioned in any of Joyce’s earlier works, but John Hunt, Professor of Literature at the University of Montana and creator of The Joyce Project, is satisfied that he was familiar with the Neapolitan’s work long before he began Finnegans Wake:
Joyce was certainly reading Vico by the time he composed Nestor [Ulysses, Episode 2], and he would not have used the philosopher’s name without awareness that he might be sending his reader off in search of literary echoes. The question, though, is whether he built Viconian ideas into Ulysses. There are no other details in Nestor that might reasonably be regarded as allusions to Vico.
However, Ellmann does note a possible echo in Scylla and Charybdis. He quotes a passage from Benedetto Croce’s description of Vico’s ideas in the Estetica: “Man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over again the paths he has already traversed, reconstructs the whole ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge” (Ellmann, 1982:340n). As Ellmann recognizes, this sentence shows a striking resemblance to the theory of peripatetic solipsism that Stephen advances in the library. (John Hunt)
Nevertheless, there is little evidence that Vico was in Joyce’s mind when he began work on Finnegans Wake—or Work in Progress, as it was initially called—in the autumn of 1922. It was only eighteen months later, in the spring of 1924, that he realized how useful Vico could be. By then, he had drafted about half a dozen chapters of the book:
Wim Van Mierlo explains in his essay on III.1-2 that the turning point for Shaun, and indeed for Finnegans Wake, came when Joyce read a book by Léon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation et les grandes fleuves historiques [Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers]. Metchnikoff describes Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theories of corsi and ricorsi as the underlying dynamic for historical progress. Joyce had already been interested in Vico, but this book seems to have energized his thoughts on the matter and especially on how he could deal with Shaun. (Crispi & Slote 19, 350-351)
As Van Mierlo puts it:
To Joyce this passage [Metchnikoff 8] must have suddenly appeared like a déja vu. It came, so to speak, as a vindication of his own creative enterprise, and it prompted him to record in his notebooks: “[Shaun] zigzag v[ersus] spiral / corsi ricorsi Vico” (VI.B.1:29). One of the earliest allusions to Vico in the Wake’s textual dossier, this note has still [nothing] to do with any three- or fourfold patterns of cyclicality, but the idea of flux and reflux, a movement to and fro, comprises for the first time an element of the book’s larger unifying design. We might identify this note as a turning point, a first indication of a contrapuntal structure that Joyce was beginning to develop. (Crispi & Slote 351)
Joyce read Metchnikoff’s book as part of his research for I.8 (Anna Livia Plurabelle) in early 1924—after he wrote that letter to Weaver, which mentions both Hegel and Vico (in that order)—so we cannot claim that he had forgotten about Vico until Metchnikoff reminded him of him. Nevertheless, after this date, Hegel is barely mentioned again. It was Vico who ultimately dictated the overarching structure of Work in Progress.
Although Hegel and Vico both discerned a cyclical pattern in human history, their philosophies of history are very different. Vico’s is like a wheel that turns in place, traversing the same ground over and over again, whereas Hegel’s is like a spiral staircase, which ascends as it turns. For Vico, history repeats the same pattern, while Hegel believed that each revolution brought humanity closer to the realization of the Ideal or Absolute. Mr Deasy’s characterization of human history in Nestor is essentially Hegelian:
All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. (Ulysses 34)
It is easy to see why Joyce was attracted to Vico and ultimately repelled by Hegel. He was always suspicious of the idea of progress in history and never lost what Ellmann called his nostalgia for the Aristotelian Middle Ages (Ellmann 321). In 1911, in an essay on the Renaissance, Joyce wrote:
The much trumpeted progress of this century consists for the most part of a tangle of machines whose aim is simply to gather fast and furiously the scattered elements of profit and knowledge and to redistribute them to each member of the community who can afford a small fee. (Barry 187)
Ultimately, the only lasting impression Hegel made on Finnegans Wake lies in its fourfold structure. In Vico’s philosophy of history, there are three phases through which civilization passes in each cycle, whereas Hegel’s philosophy of history discerns four (see below). It is often said that Joyce, in adapting Vico, promoted Vico’s transitional ricorso [reflux] between successive cycles into a fourth age on the same level as the other three, but perhaps he simply Hegelianized Vico’s cycle.
In The Books at the Wake, James Atherton briefly mentions Hegel in connection with the cyclical structure of Finnegans Wake:
The book is, Joyce has told us, a universal history according to the cyclic theory of history, usually associated with Hegel, which Joyce took from Vico’s New Science. (Atherton 18)
In the appendix, an Alphabetical List of Literary Allusions, we find the following:
HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Works.
N—107.36 [RFW 085.40]: Hallhagal; 416.32 [RFW 323.32]: The June snows was flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes (Hegel was a voluminous writer—hence “tomes”—who taught that the order and connection of our thoughts are involved in the order and connection of things, and presupposed that Being and Knowing are identical. The atmospheric conditions in the Wake become chaotic to refute—or perhaps confirm this—as “the June snows ... flocking” on to the volumes of Hegel’s works suggest that Joyce’s concepts of Knowing and the universe are less than Hegel’s). (Atherton 254)
Joyce surely did not read the complete works of Hegel, so where did he acquire his knowledge of Hegel’s cyclical philosophy of history—which, pace Atherton, may be the only Hegelian concept relevant to Finnegans Wake? None of Hegel’s works appears in the library of books Joyce left in Trieste in June 1920, when he moved to Paris. Nor do any Hegelian texts feature in his Paris library.
Joyce is known to have had a complete set of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Paris, which he consulted extensively while writing Finnegans Wake (Platt 3-4). In Volume 13, the article on Hegel runs to over seven pages, but there is very little here on Hegel’s philosophy of history—and nothing that is particularly relevant to Finnegans Wake:
The political state is always an individual, and the relations of these states with each other and the “world-spirit” of which they are the manifestations constitute the material of history. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History, edited by Gans and subsequently by Karl Hegel, is the most popular of Hegel’s works. The history of the world is a scene of judgment where one people and one alone holds for awhile the sceptre, as the unconscious instrument of the universal spirit, till another rises in its place, with a fuller measure of liberty a larger superiority to the bonds of natural and artificial circumstance. Three main periods, the Oriental, the Classical and the Germanic—in which respectively the single despot, the dominant order, and the man as man possess freedom—constitute the history of the world. Inaccuracy in detail and artifice in the arrangement of isolated peoples are inevitable in such a scheme. A graver mistake, according to some critics, is that Hegel, far from giving a law of progress, seems to suggest that the history of the world is nearing an end, and has merely reduced the past to a logical formula. The answer to this charge is partly that such a law seems unattainable, and partly that the idealistic content of the present which philosophy extracts is always an advance upon actual fact, and so does throw a light into the future. And at any rate the method is greater than Hegel’s employment of it. (Chisholm 206)
It is also possible that Joyce learnt of Hegel from a fellow student during his days at University College (now University College, Dublin). Thomas Kettle was the butt of one of Joyce’s occasional Limericks, in which he is explicitly described as a Hegelian:
A holy Hegelian Kettle
Has faith which we cannot unsettle
If no one abused it
He might have reduced it
But now he is quite on his mettle.
(Ellmann et al 110)
And that is as far as I can trace the subject.
Hegel never wrote a formal textbook on the philosophy of history, but he lectured extensively on the subject during his thirteen years at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (now the Humboldt University of Berlin), and he left in manuscript an Introduction to the course. After his death, this Introduction and the accompanying lectures were published with the help of Hegel’s notes and transcriptions made by students who had attended the lectures. There are a number of excellent English translations of both the Introduction and the lectures themselves. Those by Robert S Hartmann, H B Nisbet and Leo Rauch include only the Introduction, but as this contains the essence of Hegel’s philosophy of history, it is well worth studying on its own:
The German text of Hegel’s “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” was published posthumously. Since Hegel did not leave a final manuscript, but only lecture notes, the German edition must be considered an “edited” version, primarily, of course, based on Hegel’s own notes. These notes were supplemented and clarified by students’ notes, of which, fortunately, two extensive sets were found and utilized by the first editor of his work, Eduard Gans. (Hartmann xli)
The English reader is given here a translation not of the whole of Hegel’s philosophy of history, but of Johannes Hoffmeister’s edition of Hegel’s own Introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of world history. Since for Hegel philosophy is the science without presuppositions, through and through self-critical, and thus a self-developing whole or circle whose end is its beginning, any introduction to any section of it can only be a preliminary sketch of what is to come in the light of the whole. Hegel’s Introduction therefore contains his whole philosophy in epitome. (Nisbet vii)
Hegel himself never published his Philosophy of History, but left only his lecture notes on the subject when he died. Afterward, these were combined with transcriptions that had been taken down by his student listeners. The 1840 compilation, prepared by Eduard Gans and Hegel’s son Karl, is the version I have used (as reprinted in the 1928 Glockner edition of Hegel’s Sämtliche Werke). The complete volume comprises over 500 pages, the greater portion being devoted to what we might call cultural history. In the 150-page Introduction, however, Hegel presents his philosophy of history, and that is the text of this translation. (Rauch x)
The translations by J Sibree and by Robert F Brown & Peter C Hodgson include both the Introduction and the lectures:
The translator would remark, in conclusion, that the “Introduction” will probably be found the most tedious and difficult part of the treatise; he would therefore suggest a cursory reading of it in the first instance, and a second perusal as a resume of principles which are more completely illustrated in the body of the work. (Sibree 11)
With this book an entirely new version of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History is made available to the English-reading public. Earlier editions, in both German and English, amalgamated various manuscript and lecture sources into an editorially constructed text that obscured Hegel’s distinctive presentation in each of the five series of lectures he delivered on this topic. The present edition, based on German critical editions, publishes Hegel’s surviving manuscripts of his Introduction to the lectures, and then presents the full transcription of the first series of lectures, that of 1822-3. A second, later volume will publish the transcription of the last series, that of 1830-1, together with selections from intervening years. (Brown & Hodgson v)
Note that Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History should not be confused with his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, a different subject altogether.
I will conclude this article with some quotations from Leo Rauch’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History (With an Appendix from the Philosophy of Right). It is, however, doubtful whether they cast any light on Finnegans Wake.
It is quite possible that Joyce never actually read any of Hegel’s writings and was only familiar with the barest bones of his philosophy—namely, the cyclical aspect of history—which he picked up at second hand. There are only a handful of allusions to Hegel in Finnegans Wake. James Atherton only found two (see above), while Adaline Glasheen suggested a few others (Glasheen 123).
The Family may be reckoned as virtually a single person; since its members have either mutually surrendered their individual personality, (and consequently their legal position towards each other, with the rest of their particular interests and desires) as in the case of the Parents; or have not yet attained such an independent personality—(the Children—who are primarily in that merely natural condition already mentioned).
The abstract yet necessitated process in the development of truly independent states is as follows:—They begin with regal power, whether of patriarchal or military origin. In the next phase, particularity and individuality assert themselves in the form of Aristocracy and Democracy. Lastly, we have the subjection of these separate interests to a single power; but which can be absolutely none other than one outside of which those spheres have an independent position, viz., the Monarchical. Two phases of royalty, therefore, must be distinguished—a primary and a secondary one.
Changes in the world of nature—infinitely varied as these might be—reflect nothing more than an eternally repeated cycle. In nature there is nothing new under the sun, so that the many-sided play of natural forms carries with it a certain boredom.
World history in general is thus the unfolding of Spirit in time, as nature is the unfolding of the Idea in space. [RFW 302.07-10]
The Sun, the Light, rises in the East ... World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end.
World history is the process by which the uncontrolled natural will is disciplined in the direction of the universal, the direction of subjective freedom. The East knew (and knows) only that One person is free; the Greek and Roman world knew that Some are free; the Germanic world of Europe knows that All are free [as persons]. Accordingly, the first political form to be seen in world history is that of Despotism, to be followed in turn by Democracy and Aristocracy, and finally by Monarchy.
The first stage of world history, therefore, is that of the Oriental World. Its basis is in the unmediated consciousness, the substantive spirituality to which the subjective will relates itself primarily in terms of faith, trust, and obedience. In its political life we find a realized rational freedom that develops, without advancing to subjective freedom. This is the childhood stage of history.
At this point history passes over to central Asia, but only in externals, without connection to what went before. If we continue with the comparison of history to human growth, we can say that this is the boyhood stage of history, no longer behaving with the calm and trust of childhood, but rather in a rowdy and aggressive way. The Greek World may then be compared to the period of adolescence, for here we see individualities being formed. This is the second main principle in world history ... This is the realm of Beautiful Freedom.
The third stage of world history is the realm of abstract universality: this is the Roman World, the hard work of history's manhood. The mature man does not act with a despotic arbitrariness, nor according to his own caprice (however attractive that caprice may be); instead, he works for the common good, in which the individual is submerged, attaining his own ends only in what is shared.
With this we enter the fourth [stage] of world history, that of the medieval Germanic World-history's old age (if we continue the comparison to the cycle of aging in the individual). In nature, old age is weakness; but the old age of the Spirit is its complete ripeness, in which Spirit returns to unity with itself, but as Spirit. This world begins with the reconciliation that has occurred in Christianity. But this is a fulfillment that is only implicit, not fully present in the external world. Accordingly, its beginning is really in the enormous antithesis between the spiritual/religious principle within, and the barbarian reality outside.
341: World history is a court of judgment because in its implicit and explicit universality, the particular is present only as ideal.
342: World history is the necessary development of the elements of Reason out of the concept of Spirit's freedom alone, along with the self-consciousness and freedom of Spirit. It is the display and actualization of the universal Spirit.
343: Spirit’s history is its act. Spirit is only what it does, and its act is to make itself the object of its own consciousness, to apprehend itself as Spirit, explaining itself to itself.
347: The nation—to which such an instance of the Idea pertains as a natural principle—is entrusted with implementing it as the World Spirit progresses in developing its self-consciousness. This nation is predominant in world history for this epoch—and only once can it be predominant and epoch—making in history ... This nation has an absolute right as the vehicle of the World Spirit in the present stage of its development. Against it, the spirits of other nations have no rights—and they, along with those whose epoch has passed, do not count at that time in world history.
347: The specific history of a world-historical nation comprises, on the one hand, the development of its principle from its infantile condition in the husk, to the time when it blossoms into its free ethical self-consciousness, and it forces its way into universal history. But on the other hand it also comprises the period of that nation’s decline and fall—for that is how the emergence of a higher principle is marked upon it as the negating of its own. This signifies the transition of Spirit to that higher principle, and therefore the passing of world history to another nation.
352: The principles of the various configurations of this self-consciousness [of the World Spirit] , in the course of its liberation [from the form of natural immediacy], are the world-historical realms, of which there are four:
353: In the first, or as an immediate revelation, the World Spirit has the form of substantial Spirit as its principle: the identity wherein individuality remains sunk in its essence, and unjustified on its own account (für sich). The second principle is this substantial Spirit in its knowing, so that this substance is its positive content, but it is also conscious of itself. This being for-self is the living form of Spirit-the beautiful ethical individuality. [This is an individuality combining the Beautiful and the Good as primary values (in Greek: kalokagathia).] The third principle is the inward deepening of this knowing self-consciousness, to the point of abstract universality, and thus to the point of Spirit’s infinite opposition to the objective world which has abandoned spirituality in the process. The principle of the fourth configuration is the reversal of this opposition by Spirit: by going into its own inwardness for its truth as well as its own concrete essence, it finally comes to be at home in objectivity and reconciled to it. In thus returning to the earlier substantiality, Spirit has returned from its infinite opposition. Spirit now creates and knows its truth as its own thought, and as a world of lawlike actuality.
354: In accordance with these four principles, there are four world-historical realms: the Oriental, the Greek, the Roman, and the Germanic.
355: A. The Oriental World. This first realm is the substantial world which is emerging from a natural patriarchal totality. In the perspective of this world, which is inwardly undivided, the worldly government is a theocracy; the ruler is a high priest or is even God himself; the state structure and legislation are at the same time religion—just as the religious and moral commandments, or rather customs, are state decrees. In the splendor of this totality, the individual personality has no rights and is suppressed ... The history of the actual world is poetry.
356: B. The Greek World. Here we have cultural life which still possesses the substantial unity of the finite and the infinite—but only as a mysterious foundation, repressed into an obscured memory, in cult practices carried on in caves, and in images retained by tradition. This background—gradually emerging out of self-differentiating Spirit into individual spirituality, and rebirth in the full daylight of knowing—is moderated and transfigured into beauty and the ethical life of freedom and happiness. It is therefore in this sort of world that we see the principle of personal individuality arising, although it is still not fully autonomous but is kept within its own ideal unity instead [e.g., the individual identifies with the city.] & a result of this inadequate individuation, the [Greek] totality falls apart into a group of individual national spirits on the one hand [e.g., Athens, Sparta, Corinth, etc.]; and, on the other hand, the ultimate resolution of the will is not yet placed in the subjectivity of independent self-consciousness but in a higher external power [e.g., Alexander]; the satisfaction of particular needs, moreover, is not yet a task accepted by free men but is rather relegated to a class of slaves.
357: C. The Roman World. Here the process of social differentiation is carried to the point where ethical life is absolutely torn asunder into its extremes: [private life versus public life], personal self-consciousness against abstract universality. This opposition begins with the antithesis between the substantive outlook of an aristocratic class and the principle of free personality in its democratic form. On the aristocratic side it deteriorates into superstition and the assertion of cold, greedy force; the democratic side sinks into the depravity of a rabble. The dissolution of the social totality ends with universal misfortune and the death of ethical life. National individualities die off and fade into the unity of a Pantheon [i.e., with the deification of emperors]. All individuals are degraded to the status of private persons, as equals having formal rights, and are held together by nothing more than abstract self-will driven to monstrous extremes.
358: D. The Germanic World. Spirit has thus inflicted injury on itself and its world—followed by the infinite grief for the Crucified God, for which the Jewish people was held in readiness. Out of all this, the Spirit driven back into itself, grasps the absolute turning point in the extremity of its absolute negativity: the infinite positivity of its own inwardness, the principle which asserts the unity of the divine and the human natures. This reconciliation (of divine and human) as the objective truth and freedom—that appears within self-consciousness and subjectivity—is a reconciliation entrusted to the northern principle of the Germanic peoples to fulfill.
And that’s a good place to stop.
