Though Hegel leaves him unnamed, it is the figure of Jesus that hovers over the conclusion of his thrilling, Romantic treatise on the human (and divine) “experience of consciousness”. For what the final sentence of The Phenomenology of Spirit tells us — and this is the book, remember, that conjures up all the spectres of Marx in 19th-century Europe, 20th-century Asia and beyond — is that the secret of human history, in all its melancholy glory, is Golgotha.

In Hegel’s mysterious vision of the end of history, history restlessly circles and progressively spirals upwards from (and towards) its spiritual core. That is the rock that the waves of Hegel’s great oceanic book break upon, again and again — “the Golgotha of absolute spirit”. Without its Golgotha, Hegel says, history “would be lifeless”. Which is also to say that, without Golgotha — whatever that is — global history would be lacking in “truth”.

How do we know this? In the original German, Hegel deploys the phrase “die Schädelstätte”, which Martin Luther, the 16th-century theological avant-gardist (and restorationist), used to Germanise a sinister Jerusalem place name, Golgotha, in his epoch-making translation of the New Testament. We read in the Gospel of Mark, for instance, that on the morning of his death, Roman conscripts brought Jesus “to the place called Golgotha, which means the place of a skull”. It is there that the Romans crucified him. And Luther’s rendering of that place — “the place of a skull” — is Schädelstätte. Three hundred years later, that is the name that Hegel bestows on the dark heart of global history. In Aramaic, it is Golgotha — and in Latin, Calvariae Locus. The place of a skull. The place where Jesus died.

If Karl Marx & Co. had remembered this, they might have known that fully liberated worldwide luxury communism was never on the cards. And if Francis Fukuyama & Bros. had remembered this, they might not have been taken in by the late-liberal fever dream of the end of history.

Whether or not we’re Hegelians, we can agree that Hegel saw better than most what was coming in his century — and is still coming in ours. Which is suffering and death, and the sublime question of what humans will do with them. What will become of us through suffering and death? What will become of us through our own Golgotha?

Hegel puts it differently, and more vividly, in a manuscript of his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. He writes that:

“Even as we look upon history as an altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask: to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrifices been made?”

This gloomy vision of world history can help us to decipher the last sentence of his Phenomenology. For what is history, here, but a vast zone in which “monstrous sacrifices” have been made (and are still being made, and will always be made)? And what is Hegel’s Golgotha, but the place par excellence where a “monstrous sacrifice” was made?

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Yet the question formulated in Hegel’s Lectures still hangs: What are we to make of the gruesome spectacle of human history?

One of the peculiarities of this question is that the spectacle of world history is not one that we can disinterestedly observe. It can never just be an object for our “brooding reflection”, for we are all immersed in the spectacle. And history irresistibly makes something of us, too — something which Hegel ultimately calls a sacrifice. His question therefore becomes: to whom or for what are we being sacrificed? A sacrifice is not senseless. It is not lacking in intentionality, or in structure.

Hegel believes that human suffering is not without intrinsic meaning. Because of this, he places himself in line with the incomparably brilliant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who advanced the earth and life sciences, formulated infinitesimal calculus, foreshadowed AI, promoted civilisational dialogue with China, and elaborated a radically modern, yet richly traditional metaphysics. Hegel tells us that his own philosophy can be read, like Leibniz’s, as “a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God”. He tells us, too, that he is “personally convinced” that the world is “governed by providence”. It is his “general notion of a divine world order” — burlesqued by Voltaire in his 1759 novella, Candide, or Optimism — that he shares with Leibniz.

“It is in world history,” writes Hegel, “that we encounter the sum total of concrete evil.” Needless to say, that sum is both incalculable and inexpressible. Hegel himself feels that world history presents “a most terrifying picture”. But he also concludes that the “concrete events” in history are “the ways of providence”. What he means by this is that “the history of the world is a rational process”. And what that means, for him, is that divine reason — and divine love — must obscurely be present “in everything, especially in the theatre of world history”.

How could divine love be present in the “monstrous sacrifices” that human reason rightly finds abhorrent? There is only one way, and it is what Hegel calls “the category of the negative”. The negative is, for him, precisely a category of sacrifice. “We cannot fail to notice”, he writes, “how all that is finest and noblest in the history of the world is immolated upon its altar”. The negative, then, is Hegel’s altar — his place of sacrifice. And he thinks that divine love can be present in global history, because the divine itself has been placed upon that altar. Hegel’s God is no stranger to the anguish and irrationality of the negative.

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It is only through suffering — or “the labour of the negative”, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology’s opening pages — that a divine love could prove its “seriousness”. And where then, for him, is the place where divine love has revealed its seriousness — by actually convulsing, and dying, and “decaying” in history?

At Golgotha, at the Schädelstätte.

For Hegel, the place where Jesus died thus symbolises the essence of history — both past and future — because it is the place where we can contemplate human suffering in all its glistening horror, where it is the divine itself that is being sacrificed, and the divine itself that is dying. Only after his baptism of blood, in Hegel’s reading of the gospels, is Jesus finally transformed into the bearer (or figure) of a new and higher life.

Hegel cannot consider the rationality of history without the suffering of God. At the same time, he cannot consider the realisation of meaning in history without our suffering — which is perhaps to say, without our participation in the suffering of God. Without our Golgotha.

But Hegel’s stress on the necessity and radical meaning of human suffering does not make him — like his younger contemporary, Schopenhauer — a pessimist. It is Schopenhauer who systematises pessimism as a new style of philosophy, in conscious opposition to Hegel — generating a fierce and largely forgotten “Pessimism Controversy” (Pessimismusstreit) in 19th-century Germany. For Schopenhauer (as for Voltaire, before him), optimism is a term of abuse. In his words, the world is nothing but a blood-land of “tormented and anxious beings who survive only by devouring one another”. Where Leibniz had reasoned that ours must be “the best of all possible worlds”, Schopenhauer counters that it is certainly “the worst of all possible worlds”.

Schopenhauer is blistering in his criticisms of both Leibniz and Hegel. And yet, on the last page of his huge opus, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer points us — much like Hegel, on the last page of his Phenomenology — to the sacred narratives of Jesus’ death. Schopenhauer tells us here, whatever we make of it, that his own theory of ethics is “in complete agreement with Christian ethics”. Furthermore, he tells us, it is the figure of “the crucified Saviour” — or perhaps, he adds, one of the outlaws crucified with Jesus — who has revealed “the inner essence of the world”.

For Hegel, the essence of history is divine reason, which must be revered. For Schopenhauer, it is an effect of demoniac will, which must be negated. The contrast is not only stark, but self-conscious. And yet, in the last pages of both their iconic 19th-century works, we find that if love is to be the secret of history (Hegel) and compassion the basis of ethics (Schopenhauer), then “the place of a skull” — the place where Jesus died — is world history’s symbolic centre. All the chaos, anguish, and destructiveness of recent months invite us to remember that.

Living on the Jersey Shore, in a vacation spot that emptied out after Labor Day, my partners in petty crime and I would break into summer homes, and go for the fridge, the beer, the hard liquor. But unlike my ruffian peers, who weren’t Italian, I was intrigued by the mobster life of The Godfather. In parts of North Jersey, say Jersey City or Hoboken, it would have been different, but my attraction to what they referred to as “the life” was more or less solitary in my pretty Anglo working-class neighbourhood.

Upwardly mobile and eager to anglicise, my father hated the Mob and the rep it gave to first generation Italians. I had the build and the inclination for boxing, but because of the well-known connection between the sport and the mafia, he would have preferred me to stick to baseball or football — even though my grandfather, born in Italy and raised in Brooklyn, was a boxing instructor and an infantryman in the Marines during the First World War.

But I loved the way the Mob guys carried themselves. To me they were like pirates, “born to hang”, unafraid of death or long prison terms. They didn’t take shit from anyone and made mounds of money, and I admired them for that, for both their balls and their ability to make tons of dough.

There’s a famous section in The Phenomenology of Spirit about a master and a slave, in which Hegel offers a creation myth. Two forms of primeval self-consciousnesses confront one another for the first time. The one who is willing to fight to the death, and overcomes their will to live, becomes the lord. The other, done in by fears, becomes the slave. Evidence of Hegel’s psychological point abounds. The films coming out of Hollywood and shows streaming on Netflix bear witness to our fascination with individuals who prefer to play the part of Hegel’s lord, by putting their lives at risk. There is something transcendent about what Nietzsche would call “the will to power” overcoming the terror of death. Yes, just about everyone longs to be the tough guy, the guy who bucks up their courage, stands up to the bully and knocks him or her out.

For me, becoming the Jersey Shore version of Tony Soprano wasn’t just an instinct. There was a lot of love in my home but also a lot of violence, fists and backhands flying. My attraction to the Mob was like my determination to box: both came from a desire to be invulnerable and express the rage I felt coming from a home that was routinely turned upside down by family fights. There were no gyms in our summer beach town, but I was so smitten with boxing that at 15 I began hitch hiking 70 miles each way to Philadelphia, where I took a bus uptown to what was then Dan Bucceroni’s School of Boxing, but would later be Joe Frazier’s Gym.

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When I was a little older, I also started taking the bus into the Big Apple. On one ride, I sat next to an ex-con who hinted that he was involved with the Mob. Whether true or false, I ate up his tales about hijacking trucks like a good dish of Rigatoni.

Despite my chequered behaviour record, I was a fairly successful student, and a standout in football. Miraculously, I was accepted at Columbia University. But this didn’t end my mafia fascination; in fact, ironically, one philosophy class actually spurred it. “Question everything” is a piety amongst the lovers of wisdom. And question we did. In a course on ethics, the professor presented the four major theories used to justify moral judgments. It was evident that each of them had fatal flaws, which my sophomoric mind interpreted as licence to go beyond good and evil, and eased my conscience about entering a life of crime.

It didn’t help that college didn’t suit me. My football days were done for by an injury, and I was intimidated by my fellow students, who not only knew how to sit still but also a foreign language or two. I retreated to the boxing gym. After sparring sessions, I’d invariably be left with two shiners, which I wore like badges of honour. I would walk back to my apartment through Times Square strutting like John Travolta in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever. There were stops at topless bars. One of them, like the Badda Bing in The Sopranos, was run by the Mob. The more I stopped there and talked boxing the more I got to be buddies with a bouncer from Bay Ridge. I spoke a little Italian so with that, my Abruzzi roots, and boxing, I was a mafia draft choice, though my recruitment remained implicit, just a job in a Mob joint that might become something more.

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At the time, the Hall of Fame fighter Jake LaMotta worked as a doorman at my favourite watering hole. He was soon leaving for Los Angeles to help with the filming of the LaMotta biopic Raging Bull, in which he’s played by Robert De Niro. On my friend’s recommendation, I took over Jake’s 6pm to 2am shift at the club. You would have thought I’d earned a Rhodes Scholarship, that’s how elated I was about being admitted to the club within the club. Story had it that six weeks earlier someone came in and slit the owner’s throat from one side to the other, but that the owner had returned to his backroom helm in no time: fearless.

The night I started I was informed that the week before a doorman who was a former number one heavyweight contender had been knocked cold by a sucker punch. While working, I tried acting the badass by throwing guys out when they made over-the-top overtures to our dancers. Many of our patrons were sure that they would end the night with one of our nubile pole dancers. Not a chance. The frustration frequently boiled over into violence.

One of the senior bouncers in the joint rightfully sensed I was too soft, a poseur. In his mind, I should have been bashing heads and sending a message rather than simply getting the riff raff into a wrist lock and throwing them headlong unto the sidewalk. Still, me and the shark-eyed 5’6” sharply-dressed soldier were able to work together, though not for long. One inglorious evening, I was off duty, got smashed, made out with one of the girls and jumped up on the bar. It was curtains closed. I was immediately and roughly shown the door I used to throw people out of.

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For a time, I was crushed, but later I realised my drunken leap of faith probably saved my life. If I hadn’t been fired then, I suspect that within a few months I would have been ordered to break someone’s legs, or worse. I didn’t have the stomach for that kind of violence, but might have been too cowardly to resist. Getting drunk that night saved me.

While I continued to be intrigued by Mob life, I learned more about the helpless people they fucked over. Oddly enough I had two close friends at Columbia, one Jewish and one Italian, whose fathers had been defence lawyers for made men. For reasons to which I was never privy, both of their dads ended up in prison and debarred. And no, the Mob didn’t take care of their families, à la Goodfellas, when they were upstate or afterwards. Some of my re-education came from my grandfather, who grew up in the mean streets of Brooklyn, where the Black Hand, the Ur-mafia group, blackmailed small business owners and kidnapped poor people for ransom in their own Italian hood. (My bald-headed Nonno with his fearsome left hook once ran down a Mob guy who insulted him and kicked his ass.) Getting married and fathering a child also helped bring me to my moral senses, but maybe not entirely.

I once told the story of my close shave with the Mob to Italian-American Gay Talese, author of Honor Thy Father. During the five years he was writing his meticulously detailed book, the ever-debonair Talese was embedded with the vicious Bonanno crime family. As I unravelled my tale, I laughingly confessed, “I thought they were cool.” Though no fan of the cosa nostra, Talese surprised me with the curt response: “They are cool.” Killers, but cool.