(Chuck, repost this to the list, would you? Thanks.)
[Chuck was discussing an analogy: -Hegel to Prussia, Heidegger to 1930s Germany]
"Think about what it means to say that the Spirit of History resides, is inhabited, habituated, manifested as the political State." (CG)
Oh, I have done. Now, this isn't a claim I agree with, because I think there is no such thing as Geist (N.B., not the Spirit of History--just Spirit. History is the story of the development of spirit.) But I think what H means by that is that the consciousness that is for Hegel the subject of history is embodied in particular political institutions that develop, so that human history can be understood essentially as political history. The converse to this is Hegel's view that history is the story of freedom, so that the developmebt of constitutional liberalism, instantiating human freedom politically in the state, is the highest development of spirit and in a sense the onject of history, its telos.
"This isn't a moral claim or ethical defence concerning the structure of government."
Isn't it?
"It is a metaphysical claim about the nature of history and society."
That too.
"That identification of State with Spirit is the link or what connects Hegel and Heidegger"
Gaak, again. There is nothing in Heidegger that corresponds to Hegel's notion of Spirit. Nor, either, that corresponds to Hegel's love of freedom. Or to Hegel's highly developed political philosophy. Look, Heidegger was a phenomenologist and classical philologist who, nauseated by modernism, opted for the Nazis without providing any articulated defense of Nazism of the sort that was actually provided, for example, by Carl Schmitt, the only first rate intellectual to attempt this horrible project. I don't think that Heidegger in fact cared for the Nazi _state_, what he spoke of was `the inner greatness of our movement.'
"..one supported a constitutional monarchy and the other enjoyed academic privileges in an industrial slaughter house."
Seems to me that is also a relevant difference.
You quoute Hegel: "`The highest aim that the state can attain is that art and science are cultivated in it and come to a height corresponding to the spirit of the people. That is the principal end of the state--but an end that it must not bring about as an external work but that must arise from itself"
Then Cassirer:
The true power of the state is, therefore, always its spiritual power. In the system of Hegel there can be no separation between the concepts of Machtstaat and Kulturstaat; the concepts are correlative to each other and coincide with each other."
You gotta problem with that? And in what way is this like Heidegger?
--jks