Irrationalism(s)

The perspective of the philosophy of history

Traduction anglaise du précédent

Hegel’s most famous line is probably: “What is real is rational, and what is rational is real.”

The difficulty with philosophy is that it often has to rely on ordinary words to express extraordinary ideas. If we take Hegel’s words in their everyday sense, they seem to justify everything that happens—good or bad—by claiming a perfect match between reality (what happens) and rationality (what follows a logical and objective necessity). But taken that way, the statement becomes so completely trivial that it borders on empty tautology, rather than offering any real insight into how the world unfolds.

So we can safely assume that this is not what Hegel meant. In fact, he uses the words “real” and “rational” in the precise sense they carry within his philosophical language, not in the broad, everyday sense they have in common usage.

I won’t drag you through the dizzying labyrinths of Hegelian philosophy, but will simply recall how Friedrich Engels interprets this proposition. Engels’s reading doesn’t exhaust its meaning, but it highlights the aspect that may help us understand the historical significance of the current situation in the Middle East.

What is “real,” in the Hegelian sense, Engels explains, is not everything that happens, but only what happens out of a kind of dialectical necessity—and is therefore rational in that specific sense. As a result, many things that do happen are, in fact, unreal—that is, they lack dialectical necessity and are therefore irrational.

If this isn’t entirely clear, it soon will be.

There is something almost theological in Hegel’s philosophy—and in that of Marx and Engels as well: a faith in progress, the idea that history unfolds as a kind of steady movement toward ever greater reality and rationality. In this process, what is real today is gradually undone by an emerging reality that ultimately condemns it to vanish from history. This condemnation reveals itself in the growing degree of irrationality and absurdity that this present reality increasingly takes on before our eyes.

Hegel’s political outlook was deeply shaped by the French Revolution, which broke out when he was just nineteen. He spoke of it throughout his life—right up to its twilight—in somewhat rhapsodic terms, despite the shock of the revolutionary excesses of the early 1790s (“the fury of destruction,” as he put it). For example, in his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in Berlin more than thirty years later, he described it as a “magnificent sunrise.” That’s because this event was, in a sense, the birthplace of his political thought, and it provided the first great illustration of this dialectic between the real and the rational.

Here is how Engels puts it: “The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal—that is, so devoid of any necessity, so irrational—that it was bound to be abolished by the great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. In this case, the monarchy was the unreal, and the Revolution the real. And so, in the course of development, everything that was previously real becomes unreal: it loses its necessity, its right to exist, its rational character. A new, viable reality takes the place of the dying one—peacefully, if the old order is reasonable enough to die without resistance; violently, if it resists this necessity. Thus Hegel’s proposition, through the workings of Hegelian dialectics itself, turns into its opposite: everything that is real within the sphere of human history becomes, in time, irrational, and is therefore irrational by its very destiny, already tainted with irrationality in advance. And everything that is rational in the minds of human beings is destined to become real, however much it may contradict the apparently existing reality.”

Replace “the French monarchy of 1789” with “American hegemony,” and “the Revolution” with “international legality,” and you’ll see what I mean.

Within the course of progress—which is not quite the inevitability or historical necessity that Hegel or Marx imagined—American hegemony appears as the dead weight of history, a form of reality gradually fading before our eyes. This decline shows itself in a growing irrationality, in the absurdity of something that has lost its necessity yet continues to exist amid the “sound and fury” of a history that no longer signifies anything, to borrow from Shakespeare.

Everything that is unreal is irrational, and everything that is irrational is unreal.

In this sense, Trump represents the ultimate expression of the absurdity—of the unreality and irrationality—of American hegemony. Having reached the point where it reveals itself to serve no real purpose, it collapses into the sheer, senseless exercise of the power it has accumulated to get there. Since it no longer serves any purpose, it can only assert itself through a kind of nihilism of force without right, driven by passions rather than interests: such as the hostility toward Iran that animates Netanyahu and a “Jewish state” driven to hysteria by its own dead ends (see, on this point, this interview); or the mental decline of old age, compounded by a greedy taste for lucre and enabled by a U.S. constitutional system in full disarray, embodied by Donald Trump.

In the realm of international relations, the horizon of progress lies in the realization of law—a realization that depends on all states, even those that some—like the Carneys and Merzes of this world (see below, the appendix on derived irrationality)—imagine to be without rights. This is evident in the fact that international law is nothing more than the formal resolution of negotiations among competing sovereign interests. Interest stands in opposition to passion, at least from the standpoint of basic pragmatic rationality—distinct from the higher, more “sublime” rationality of progress that Hegel has in mind. As for the Israeli-American war against Iran, while Iran and the Gulf states act within the bounds of pragmatic rationality, Israel and the United States have become agents of raw passion.

Neither Iran nor the Gulf states—aside, it seems, from the Saudis—wanted war, as they were well aware of its unbearable, and very likely global, dangers. They had no interest in destabilizing their region; as for the Gulf states, despite their antagonism toward Iran and their rapprochement with Israel, they likely preferred that the kind of balance resulting from the face-off between these two adversaries be maintained. For these modestly rational reasons—which are admittedly nothing glorious—they sought to avoid a wider conflagration. But reason, it seems, is no match for passion. The clearest illustration of this lies in the fact that Iran, in negotiating sovereign interests, made as many concessions as the Americans demanded, only to receive in return the mass decapitation of its leadership—a political crime (rather than an act of war, since no war had been declared) without known historical precedent, even in times considered the most barbaric—and a stark example of the nihilistic abuse of force mentioned earlier.

And the clearest proof of the absence of any pragmatic rationality on the side of the aggressors is that they have been unable—and remain to this day unable—to provide any coherent framework in which such excesses would make even the slightest sense. One might also note that analysts, professionally obliged to produce logically consistent accounts, carefully avoid addressing these aberrant aspects of what is happening—since they would only disrupt the neatness of their expertise.

Passion, incidentally, is not necessarily the enemy of reason; it can be its very flame. No real and profound change ever occurs without the burning fire of passion—so long as it has not turned into a “fury of destruction,” which can happen when too many forces try to extinguish it (the French Revolution became so frenzied only because Europe’s monarchies sought to suppress it; the Haitian Revolution grew so violent because French slaveholders tried to crush it). Passion is the fuel of history. But there is such a thing as creative passion and nihilistic passion—and the two can easily be confused (see the Sahel; see the MAGA movement).

Appendix:

To conclude, a brief word on the peculiar form of derivative irrationality affecting the Western vassals (Europeans and Anglo-Saxons) of the United States.

The reactions of Canada’s Mark Carney and Germany’s Friedrich Merz to the Israeli-American aggression have proved comparable to Putin’s rhetoric on Ukraine. According to Merz, Iran is the “center of international terrorism,” just as, according to Putin, Ukraine is a state riddled with “Nazism.”

The same Merz had explained that, by targeting Iran, Israel was “doing the dirty work” for the West—at a time when Israel was killing dozens of Palestinians in Gaza (no doubt “a detail of history,” from Merz’s point of view) while at the same time dropping bombs on Tehran. As for Canada’s Carney—the same man who delivered a widely applauded speech in the West on defending multilateralism against Trumpian brutalism—he was the first Western leader to praise the aggression against Iran, which is in fact a striking manifestation of that very Trumpian brutalism directed against multilateralism.

What makes these reactions irrational—in the ordinary sense of the word—is that they were knee-jerk. They were not grounded in any pragmatic consideration of the implications such a conflict would have for international law, multilateralism, the global economy, or geopolitics. They reflected something more visceral—irrational in the everyday sense of the term.

At present, Europeans—whose subordination to the United States stems from their fear of Russia—are discovering two things at once: that Russia is assisting Iran (which offends them more than the fact that the United States has attacked Iran), and that the United States is assisting Russia (by suspending sanctions on Russian oil sales in the name of continuing the war against Iran).

This is no longer a snake biting its own tail—it is swallowing itself whole.

More broadly, the West’s relationship with Iran is a deeply emotional one: the “threat” supposedly posed by the country is, in truth, less real than the lingering trauma caused by the fact that revolutionary Islam achieved its one and only geopolitical success there. If Iran rhetorically calls the United States the “Great Satan,” the West, in practice, treats Iran as one.

Only a dispassionate policy could resolve this largely self-created “problem.” But given the hysteria that dominates Western capitals on this issue, it would take a somewhat “unusual” leader to pursue such a course. Barack Obama was one such case, with the JCPOA agreement on Iran’s “nuclear program,” which he painstakingly set in motion in 2015—one of its key consequences being to reintegrate Iran into the broader circuit of the global economy.

In the long run, that outcome would have been fatal to the rigid and repressive theocratic system in which the Iranian regime entrenches itself whenever it comes under pressure from the West. But given the instability of U.S. politics and the predominance of highly reactive leadership—on the Iranian issue, closely tied to Israel, itself another source of intense emotion—within the American establishment, the agreement had little chance of lasting long enough to produce its effects. It was, in fact, short-lived—and the slide toward the present crisis began as early as the start of Trump’s first term, a course that the ineffectual Joe Biden did nothing to halt.

It has been observed, in this regard, that periods of détente with the West tend to strengthen the “moderates” within the Iranian leadership, whereas periods of confrontation empower the “radicals.” Unsurprisingly, the present moment has resulted in the rise to power of the highly radical Mojtaba Khamenei. This, in turn, gives even more reason for the “radicals” on the Western side (Trump, Carney, Merz—rather than Sánchez) to intensify their hostility.

In short, absurdity reigns—a morbid symptom of a chaotic decline. The problem is that, for now at least, we remain in the soot-darkened night of this decline of the American Empire—and the sunrise is slow in coming.