What we find in ‘Objectivity’, then, is Hegel’s attempt to provide the logical structure of a series of forms of increasingly complex thought, starting with thought about mechanical processes and leading through thought about more complex processes such as chemical ones, and finally to the thought of organisms. This will provide the logical infrastructure of what in the following ‘Real-Philosophy’ will be his Philosophy of Nature. Then, in Section Three, ‘The Idea’, he will attempt to sketch the logical structure to be realized in the Philosophy of Spirit.
3.4 HEGEL’S SYSTEMATIC REAL-PHILOSOPHY
3.4.1 Philosophy of Nature
Like the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia is itself divided into three parts: Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. Hegel’s philosophy of nature, tied as it is to a presentation of the state of the natural sciences in his time, is generally thought to have little more than historical interest; it is clearly the philosophy of spirit that has been the focus of most subsequent attention, and it is expansions on sections of the philosophy of spirit that form major texts within Hegel’s oeuvre. We cannot pass over the philosophy of nature, however, before addressing one common objection: the objection that Hegel attempts to ‘deduce’ the entirety of the natural world from logical considerations alone, and so pre-empt empirical science. This objection is summed up in a critique of Schelling’s early idealism made by the philosopher W. T. Krug in 1801. Hegel had responded in the following year and would return to his defence even after his break with Schelling. Krug had asserted that such an idealism must deduce, from the idea of ‘the Absolute’ alone, all contingent phenomena, including the actual pen with which he was writing his very critique. Krug’s criticism, Hegel responded, was made not from the point of view of philosophy but from ‘the common understanding’ that ‘posits the Absolute on exactly the same level with the finite, and extends the range of the requirements that are made in respect of the finite to the Absolute’.46 Krug did not understand ‘that the determinacies which cannot be comprehended within transcendental idealism, belong—so far as they are a proper topic of philosophical discussion at all—as Mr. Krug’s pen is not—to the philosophy of nature’.47 Hegel was to make a similar point in a remark added to the Philosophy of Nature:
It is the height of pointlessness to demand of the concept that it should explain, and as it is said, construe or deduce these contingent products of nature…Traces of conceptual determination will certainly survive in the most particularized product, although they will not exhaust its nature.48
Rather than ‘deducing’ the entire content of empirical reality, philosophy of nature takes as its subject matter the results of the natural sciences and tries to find within these results the sorts of categorial structures deduced in the logic. Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s intuition–concept dichotomy was not meant to imply that there is no place for the contingencies of the actual world that Kant had tied to the contribution of intuition.
3.4.2 Philosophy of Spirit
Hegel’s usual triadic pattern in the Philosophy of Spirit results in the philosophies of subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute spirit. The first of these constitutes what is closest in Hegel’s philosophy to a ‘philosophy of mind’ in the contemporary sense, while the philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which ‘spirit’ is objectified in patterns of human life. The last comprises his philosophies of art, religion, and philosophy itself. Other than the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of Right, the bulk of Hegel’s mature written legacy consists in reconstructions of various series of lectures given at the University of Berlin. These lectures had been reconstituted (sometimes, unreliably) on the basis of Hegel’s own notes and various surviving student transcriptions. Of these series, one on philosophy of history coincides with the final sections of the Encyclopedia section on ‘Objective Spirit’, while the philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy coincide with the contents of ‘Absolute Spirit’.
3.4.3 Subjective Spirit
From what we have seen of Hegel’s discussion of the polar oppositions of consciousness in the Phenomenology, as well as the fact that the Philosophy of Nature concludes in a consideration of the animal organism, we can confidently expect that the starting point for Hegel’s approach to the mind will be something closer to Aristotle’s conception of the soul than the modern conception of ‘consciousness’. Thus in ‘Anthropology’ Hegel is concerned with what he terms ‘Seele’, ‘soul’—which seems to translate more the ancient Greek term ‘psyche’: ‘If soul and body are absolutely opposed to one another as is maintained by the abstractive intellectual consciousness’, Hegel comments, ‘then there is no possibility of any community between them. The community was, however, recognized by ancient metaphysics as an undeniable fact’.49 Here spirit is ‘sunk’ in nature, and consciousness is limited to what now might be described as ‘phenomenal consciousness’ alone—‘the feeling soul’. Consciousness in the sense of the modern subject–object opposition only makes its appearance in the following second section labelled ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (which, reprising much of the earlier book of that name, raises a problem for how we are to understand the relation of ‘phenomenology’ and actual philosophy). ‘Subjective Spirit’ concludes with ‘Psychology’ which treats the expressly rational dimensions of the life of the mind, considered in terms that would now be described as ‘normative’ rather than naturalistic. This means that subjective spirit will ultimately only be understood in the context of objective spirit.
3.4.4 Objective Spirit
Philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which ‘spirit’ is objectified in history, and here we are in the realm of ‘normative’ and ‘institutional’ facts rather than ‘brute’ ones. Objective spirit starts from the conception of a single agent who grasps itself as the bearer of ‘abstract right’, but not from any commitment to the ontological primacy of individuals. Just as the initial simple categories of the Science of Logic develop in a way meant to demonstrate that what had at the start been conceived as simple can in fact only be made determinate in virtue of being part of some larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and ultimately historical, structure or process. As is explicit in the expanded section of Philosophy of Right, contractual exchange (the minimal social interaction for contract theorists) is treated as a form of recognition50—the approach introduced in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology. A contractual exchange of commodities between two individuals itself involves an implicit act of recognition in as much as each, in giving something to the other in exchange for what they want, is thereby recognizing that other as a proprietor of that thing, or, more properly, of its value. By contrast, such proprietorship would be denied rather than recognized in fraud or theft—forms of ‘wrong’ (Unrecht) in which right is negated rather than acknowledged or posited. In the exchange relation we can see what it means for Hegel for individual subjects to share a ‘common will’—an idea which will have important implications with respect to the difference of Hegel’s conception of the state from that of Rousseau.
Hegel passes from the abstract individualism of ‘Abstract Right’ to the social determinacies of ‘Sittlichkeit’ or ‘Ethical Life’ via considerations first of ‘wrong’ (the negation of right) and its punishment (the negation of wrong, and hence the ‘negation of the negation’ of the original right), and then of ‘morality’, conceived more or less as an internalization of the external legal relations. The corresponding paragraphs on morality Philosophy of Right (§§129–41) contain passages well-known in the context of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s morality of the categorical imperative. Just as Hegel had accused Kant’s deduction of the categories of relying on ‘external’ consid
erations, here Hegel argues that the doctrine of the categorical imperative is unable to account for actual concrete duties and must presuppose them. Kant’s account of morality can only be understood against the background of concrete normative forms of life: Sittlichkeit within which the modern reflective moral subject will play a real but limited role.
One of the distinctive features of modern Sittlichkeit is the way in which it distinguishes the sphere of ‘civil society’ from that of the state proper, situating this economically based sphere as dependent upon and in contrastive opposition to the more immediate sphere of the family. While civil society is structured by the abstract recognitive forms we have seen in contract, the family is a form of sociality mediated by a quasi-natural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and feeling. In the family the particularity of each individual tends to be absorbed into the particular social unit, giving this manifestation of Sittlichkeit a one-sidedness that is the inverse of that found in market relations in which participants grasp themselves in the first instance as separate singular individuals who then enter into relationships that are external to them.
These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of the modern state are articulated and understood. Part of the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of these two principles mediates the other, each thereby mitigating the one-sidedness of the other. All these spheres are meant as modelled on different ‘syllogistic’ configurations from the logic, and we might see Hegel’s ‘logical’ schematization of the modern ‘rational’ state as a way of displaying the structure of just those sorts of institutions that a state must provide if it is to answer Rousseau’s question of the form of association needed for the formation and expression of the ‘general will’.
Perhaps one of the most influential parts of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right concerns the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy reflecting the unmediated operations of civil society. While it is true that ‘subjective selfishness’ turns into a ‘contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else’,51 this does not entail that this ‘general plenty’ would thereby trickle down through the rest of society for the benefit of all. In fact, the unfettered operation of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Starting from this ‘dialectical’ analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of Hegel’s ‘civil society’ and socialize the means of production, but Hegel had not drawn this conclusion. The distortions of the economy were to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist state intervention.
The final five paragraphs of this section on objective spirit—and hence the point of transition to absolute spirit—concern world history (die Weltgeschichte). We have seen the relevance of historical issues for Hegel in the context of the Phenomenology, such that a series of different forms of objective spirit can be grasped in terms of the degree to which they enable the development of a universalizable self-consciousness capable of rationality and freedom. Hegel was to expand on these ideas in a lecture series given five times during his Berlin period, and it was via the text assembled on the basis of these lectures by his son Karl that many readers would be introduced to Hegel’s ideas after his death.
World history is made up of the histories of particular peoples within which spirit assumes some ‘particular principle on the lines of which it must run through a development of its consciousness and its actuality’.52 Just the same dialectic that we have first seen operative within shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology is to be observed here. An historical community acts on the principle that informs its social life, the experience of this action bringing about a conscious awareness of this principle, breaking the immediacy of its operation. This brings about the decline of that community but gives rise to the principle of a new community:
in rendering itself objective and making this its being an object of thought, [spirit] on the one hand destroys the determinate form of its being, and on the other hand gains a comprehension of the universal element which it involves, and thereby gives a new form to its inherent principle…[which] has risen into another, and in fact a higher principle.53
This dialectic, which, however, only passes through some communities, is ‘the path of liberation for the spiritual substance, the deed by which the absolute final aim of the world is realized in it, and the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness and self-consciousness’.54
‘The analysis of the successive grades [of universal history] in their abstract form belongs to logic’,55 but once more, it must be stressed that, as with philosophy of nature, philosophy of history is not meant to somehow deduce actual empirical historical phenomena like Krug’s pen; rather, it takes the results of actual empirical history as its material and attempts to find exemplified within this material the sorts of categorial progressions of the logic.56 The actual is full of contingencies from which empirical historians will have already abstracted in constructing their narratives, for example, when writing from particular national perspectives. To grasp history philosophically, however, will be to grasp it from the stance of world history itself, and this provides the transition to absolute spirit, as world history will be understood in terms of the manifestation of what from a religious perspective is called ‘God’, or from a philosophical perspective, ‘reason’. Hegel clearly thinks that there is a method of cognitively relating to history in a way that goes beyond the standpoint of ‘consciousness’ and the understanding—the standpoint of what we now think of as informing scientific history. From the perspective of consciousness history is something that stands over against me qua something known, but from the standpoint of self-consciousness I grasp this history as the history of that which contributes to me, qua free and rational being.
3.4.5 Absolute Spirit
The subject matter of the final 25 paragraphs of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, ‘Absolute Spirit’, came to be expanded massively into the contents of three different lecture series on philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and history of philosophy that were to appear after Hegel’s death, and with which Hegel was to become perhaps the most significant synoptic theorist of these cultural phenomena. As any attempt to capture the richness of his thought here in a few paragraphs would be futile, I will simply sketch how his approach draws on the conceptual resources noted so far.
For Kant, aesthetic experience had been conceived largely in relation to the experience of the beauty of nature, but for Hegel aesthetics is primarily about art, and the art of historical peoples is understood in terms of the attempt to bring before consciousness the totality of what is: it is as art that ‘consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape’.57 In the 1790s, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel had historicized aesthetics, distinguishing the forms of ancient and modern art, and Hegel adopts Schlegel’s terminology to distinguish the ‘classical’ art that thrived in the Greek and Roman worlds from the ‘romantic’ art of post-classical times. Again, the romantic or modern here will be characterized by the depth of a form of subjective consciousness that is largely missing in antiquity. But those in antiquity had lived with a comfortable felt unity between spirit and body, and so modern subjectivity is purchased at the expense of a sense of alienation from the actual world. Hegel, influenced by the work of a former colleague, the Heidelberg philologist Friedrich Creuzer,58 adds to this categorization of art forms a further one characterizing the material cultures of ancient Eastern civilizations such as Persia, India, and Egypt: ‘symbolic’ art.
The symbolic art of pantheistic religions of the East used natural elements to symbolize the gods of such cultures: Zoroastrianism had taken light, for example, to symbolize the divine,59 and animal worship was found among the Egyptians.60 But such actual things had to be distinguished from what was meant to be symbolized by
them, so violence had to be done to such natural forms in attempts to represent the absolute—such cultural products thus becoming ‘bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless’,61 This, however, undermined their initial function, and a dialectical solution to this contradiction would be found with the art of the Greeks, which gave expression to ‘the Absolute’ or ‘the Idea’ by taking as its material the specifically human form, but only on condition of its being rendered ‘exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous and from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world’. But even as idealized in Greek sculpture, say, the represented Greek god is still an object of ‘naïve intuition and sensuous imagination’,62 and as such the classical gods contained the germ of their own decline as they could not evade ‘the finitudes incidental to anthropomorphism [which] pervert the gods into the reverse of what constitutes the essence of the substantial and Divine’.63 A new form of art will be needed to resolve these contradictions: romantic art. But the material for this form will not come from within art itself.
Romantic art still represents the Absolute in the form of a man, but now one ‘not merely imagined but factual’. This man is Jesus, understood as the son of God.64 That is, the transition from classical art to the religious art of Christianity also liberates religion from the grip of the sensuous, and Christianity avoids the type of reliance on the beautiful productions of art that characterized classical religions. The switch from classical to romantic art, then, represents a broader movement from a culture whose final authority is an aesthetic one to a culture in which this authority is religious, and thus represents a shift in the authoritativeness of different cognitive forms.
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