The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Another term for Absolute Reason was Idea, or Spirit: for Hegel, they are all the same.10 Like Plato’s Ideas or Forms, Hegel’s are more real than the material world they direct or reflect.† For Plato Ideas exist prior to material reality. For Hegel they emerge as part of material reality over time, like an image painted on the spokes of a wheel that becomes visible only when the wheel is in motion. The painter in this case is God or Providence, who has decided to make human history “the unfolding of Spirit in time,” until Spirit, Nature, and History are One. Once man knows this, Hegel proclaimed, he will finally achieve his freedom.11

  That unfolding is not a simple linear progression by stages, as the Enlightenment had thought. For Hegel, history moves according to a three-step process. There is first the thesis, embodied in concrete events and persons. Then, comes the antithesis, the negation of the thesis arising from its own contradictions. Then finally, comes the synthesis, which reconciles the truths common to both, arriving at a new level of understanding—and a new stage in the advance of Absolute Spirit.

  The term for Hegel’s three-step logical development is the dialectic, after Plato’s method of arriving at truth. Later, some would say Hegel borrowed the concept from Kant, others from the German philosopher Johann Fichte.12 But we can see where it really came from: Plotinus and Neoplatonism, where the same three-step movement—procession, retrocession, and then merger with the One—leads the initiate up the Chain of Being to the World Spirit.‡

  Plotinus’s World Spirit, the final cause of everything, becomes Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Idea—which, Hegel insisted, requires the dimensions of time and space in order to realize its concrete perfection. For example, men have automobiles which allow them to travel where they want and enjoy a greater independence and mobility: the very embodiment of Freedom. Then, the influx of more and more automobiles causes traffic jams and gridlock in city streets: the antithesis of mobility and Freedom. So then come stop signs and traffic laws, the perfect synthesis allowing people to get where they are going but also preventing our desire to get where we want from degenerating into anarchy.

  In this sense, the stop sign, which at first glance places a limit on our freedom, actually (or objectively, in Hegel’s terms) protects our freedom, even extends it. In effect, this becomes Hegel’s account of modern history as well. The Middle Ages had been a period of moral clarity and spiritual uplift, but at the price of a narrow, cramped view of man and a tyrannical Church.13 The Renaissance broke the shackles of the first, the Reformation of the second. Out of both arose modern commercial society with its individual economic and political freedoms, from Venice and Florence to London and Paris.

  Thus far, Hegel’s history sounds a good deal like Adam Smith’s. It turns out, however, that Rousseau had it right all along. Instead of making human beings happier, commercial society only makes them feel alone and resentful—or to use a term Hegelians would make famous, alienated. We find ourselves in capitalist society like visitors at a banquet. We see the piles of food, magnificent wines, and exotic delicacies: we hardly know where to start. But just as we get close to the buffet table, other people cut in front of us. They already have plates, glasses, and cutlery. Where did they get them? we wonder.

  Then we see people sitting and gorging themselves while we are still waiting in line for our first scoop. When we do finally get to the table, we find all the best food is gone and the serving plates licked clean. “You arrived too late,” someone says; or, “It’s your own fault. You should have cut in line like the rest of us.” We go home hungry and resentful. When a friend asks us how we liked the banquet—or living in a capitalist society—we answer, “There’s got to be a better way.”

  There is, Hegel argued. What we need, he says, is someone who will make us feel welcome and show us where the plates and glasses are; who makes sure that the other diners respect our place in line and allow us to get our turn at the pasta salad, creamed salmon, and lobster thermidor; and, finally, who makes sure that we, too, have a place to sit to enjoy our share of the bounty.

  That someone, Hegel declared, is the State. Its development as an autonomous actor in history is in fact the next and final stage of freedom beyond commercial society. It smooths out all the problems of capitalism, with its “atomistic principle which insists upon the sway of individual wills” but ends up making men feel powerless.14 What Rousseau and Romantic nationalists had seen in the idea of the Nation, a community shaped by laws, customs, and traditions into “one single being,” or General Will, they can now achieve concretely through the actions of the State. Under its aegis, teams of bureaucrats become a virtual cadre of Philosopher Rulers who bring order and justice to a needy world. As in Plato’s Republic, justice is the source of freedom, not the other way around.15

  Hegel is the true godfather of the nanny state, or welfare state—with Plato standing beside him at the baptismal font. Unemployment insurance, health and safety regulations, minimum wage laws and aid to dependent children, the income tax and federal deposit insurance: All these become justified as the State acting to protect us from ourselves, because the State is our Better and Higher Self. As Hegel wrote, “The Government, regarded as an organic totality,” is the concrete embodiment of “the indwelling Spirit and the history of the Nation.” It is, he concluded, “the Spirit of the People itself.”16

  Once men realize this, they will realize that government, like the stop sign, exists to preserve freedom, not—as Locke and others feared—to restrict it. Modern liberty as the Enlightenment conceived it suddenly seems not so desirable after all. It seems a barren, rather empty place, like waiting endlessly in line at the banquet, compared with the comfort and security of the State’s constantly outstretched arms.

  “Society and the State are the very conditions in which Freedom is realized.”17 Indeed, in time humanity will discover that obeying the laws of the State is the only true freedom, since it is the only one that connects us to “the self-realization of Reason” and the larger process of history itself—and thus gives us final absolution from Diderot’s civil war in the cave.

  However, all this comes at a price.

  The dialectical movement of history is not smooth and seamless. It is a bumpy and choppy ride, with lots of turmoil—not to mention bloodshed. The conquests of Alexander, the fall of Rome, the Crusades, the Inquisition, are all for Hegel cruel but necessary steps on reason’s path to perfection. When Hegel’s theses and antitheses collide, they tend to collide on the battlefield, in bitter, violent street clashes, in torture chambers and prison cells, and in revolutions.

  Plato had made constant revolutions the dynamic of man’s life in society, and so does Hegel. Synthesis appears only after a crisis—another word Hegel made famous—and history on Hegel’s terms is a series of crises. Indeed, “periods of happiness in history” are, in Hegel’s words, “empty pages.” They contribute nothing to mankind’s advance. During peacetime, he wrote, “civil life becomes more extended, every sphere is hedged in … and at last all men stagnate.” Men are better off, Hegel decided, when they are forced to face danger and uncertainty, forced to rise to the occasion. “Let insecurity finally come in the form of Hussars with glistening sabers, and show its earnest activity!”18

  It may be easy to be philosophical about bloodshed, war, and death from behind a desk or in front of a blackboard. Still, the legend is that Hegel wrote The Phenomenology of Mind to the sound of gunfire from Napoleon’s victory at Jena, where Hegel was a professor. Hegel welcomed the advent of Napoleon—“this great soul, this extraordinary man”—as signaling the next great stage in history, the emergence of a World State, even though it meant the end of thousands of lives and the defeat of his own country, Prussia.§

  Hegel never lived to see the events of 1848, but Marx did. They shattered whatever remaining doubts he still had that Hegel’s nation-state was “the Spirit of the People.” Instead, he would strip Hegel’s Platonizing vision of history to its bare steel skeleton and recast
it as the specter of global apocalypse.

  On August 24, 1849, Karl Marx arrived in London after being expelled from Prussia for his activities in the revolution the previous year. He was thirty-one years old. Except for a couple of brief visits to the Continent, England would be his home and refuge for the rest of his life.

  For thirty-four years, he marched down almost daily to the British Museum to conduct research and gather material for his socialist writings. The weightiest, On Capital, or Das Kapital, remained unfinished at his death. During those thirty-four years, he never bothered to ask why in England, the land of Locke, Burke, and Adam Smith, he was left alone to work, while in Germany and on the Continent he was always subject to the threat of arrest. Instead, his entire focus was on how to “annihilate” (one of his favorite words) societies like Britain and how to use Hegel to do it.

  Even after he broke with his former master, Marx was convinced that Hegel’s dialectic was “the key to human understanding.” However, Hegel hadn’t gone far enough. The real scene of the action, he had concluded even before 1848, was not politics but the evolution of civil society described by Hume, Adam Smith, and their disciples. The course of history is made not by phantom Ideas or Absolute Reason, but by how men earn their material living (hence the Marxist term dialectical materialism) and how that, rather than some abstract dream of freedom, determined the character of their societies.

  Yes, the Middle Ages had been replaced by the Renaissance and Reformation. However, this was because the urban merchants of cities like Florence and Nuremberg had ripped apart the bonds of an agrarian feudalist economy in order to reap the full measure of their trading profits. And yes, traditional feudal monarchies had given way to constitutional government, from England in 1689 to France a century later—but only because the rising bourgeoisie had won over the workers and peasants from their feudal masters with fine phrases about liberty and the rights of man.

  Instead of being the voice of freedom, liberalism, like Hegel’s nationalism, was only the voice of a greedy bourgeoisie, “a few vulgar and self-educated upstarts transformed into eminent cotton spinners [and] sausage makers.” They disguised their greed for profit under a cloak of natural right, including the right to private property. This disguise was not deliberate, or at least not entirely so. It was the inevitable result of living in a world that could not confront its own contradictions; that must hide the material struggle for dominance and exploitation under a cloak of high ideals, hiding it even from the exploiters themselves. Marx’s term for this disguise was ideology. Friedrich Engels coined a phrase that sums it up better: false consciousness.19

  False consciousness is the Marxist version of the cave. It is that shadowy realm of falsehood and deceit by which the bourgeoisie maintain their power by pretending that it is founded in nature (as Aristotle would say) when in fact it is a rigged game. False consciousness comforts the ignorant and assuages the guilt of the guilty. It helps to keep reality at arm’s length.

  The Middle Ages had its version of false consciousness, namely Christianity: hence Marx’s famous aphorism that “religion is the opiate of the masses.”‖ Capitalism has its version, too. This is the supposedly scientific worldview of Locke and the Enlightenment, which pretends that the pursuit of self-interest was natural and inevitable. However, the reign of “ideology” will come to an end when the final victors of history, the proletariat, come to power.

  The powerless shall indeed inherit the earth, because, as Hegel taught, each stage of history produces its antithesis, and thus its ultimate doom. The ancient world had produced the slaves, Jews, and cultural outcasts who became the backbone of Christianity and thus destroyed the Roman Empire. The Middle Ages produced the bourgeois merchant class, on whose money kings and barons and the Church became totally dependent even though they treated it with contempt. Here—however briefly—Marx’s vision of history overlaps with William Robertson’s, and Adam Smith’s.

  Now in 1860, Europe’s industrial bourgeoisie were in turn breeding a viper in their nest, their workers. For without them, the machines wouldn’t run, the wheatfields wouldn’t be harvested, the cotton mills and coal mines would fall silent. When the proletariat realized their latent power (and the job of Marxist intellectuals is to make them aware of it), they will rise up in a revolt that will set the June Days in the quiet shade.

  It will be “the day of Judgement,” Marx wrote, “when the reflection of burning cities are seen in the heavens … to the accompaniment of thundering cannon … and inflamed masses scream … and self-interest is hanged on the lamppost.”20 The June Days were always Marx’s touchstone for understanding class relations and the historical role for the proletariat. He never doubted for a moment that communism meant revolution, and a violent one at that. “When our turn comes,” he told the Prussian assembly in 1849, “we will not disguise our terrorism”—and over time Marx’s followers, from Russia to North Korea, have generally adhered to his advice.21

  Still, the proletariat itself remained for Marx an abstraction, nothing more. He knew nothing about the working poor and never set foot in a factory. His entire picture of their lives was drawn from Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1844, even though much of its data was dated and even faked.22 Marx detested socialists who did come from working-class backgrounds, precisely because they tended to oppose violence and looked for a way for labor and capital to cooperate. He drove one, Wilhelm Weitling, out of the Communist International; another, Ferdinand Lasalle, he denounced as that “Jewish nigger” and did everything he could to cripple Lasalle’s efforts at creating an antirevolutionary socialist movement.23

  It is often said that Marx’s materialism turned Hegel upside down. Marx himself said it. In fact, both were fixated by the same abstraction, History: meaning that the future has a fixed and inevitable destiny. Marx’s concept of history comes straight out of Book VIII of the Republic. It is history as class struggle pure and simple, a ruthless cycle of “war and hatred” without end.

  Except that Marx’s class struggle does come to an end. “History is the judge,” Marx once said, “the proletariat is its executioner.” When the smoke clears and the rubble finally subsides, the proletariat will find itself in charge—freeing man for now and forever.

  Since economic production no longer requires exploitation of one class by another, the driving dialectic of history, class struggle, also comes to a halt. At a stroke all contradictions are finally resolved, just as the Romantics had always envisioned. Subject and Object; freedom and necessity; our natural self and social self; even (with the death of false consciousness) reality and appearance, become one.

  The State withers away—meaning Hegel’s nanny state—since it is no longer needed. Everyone finds an equal place at the banquet to which everyone has willingly contributed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. “Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization,” Engels wrote, “becomes at the same time the lord over nature, his own master—free.”24

  Human beings will finally become whole and complete. They will, in Marx’s phrase, “work in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and write poetry in the evening.” For all his rage, Marx the dialectical materialist turns out to be a man as obsessed with spiritual enlightenment as the poet Shelley or Saint Augustine. To Socrates, it was “this condition of the soul we call Wisdom.” Marx called it “the kingdom of freedom.” It will come, he once wrote, only when men are finally freed from their material limitations, or the kingdom of necessity. “The kingdom of freedom actually begins only where drudgery, enforced by hardship and by external purposes, ends.… It lies beyond the sphere of proper material production.”25

  By chance, at the same time that Marx was sitting in the British Museum dreaming his dream of man freed from material necessity, another man on the other side of London was pondering the same problem. He occupied a tidy office in India House in Kensington. Decades before, he had been England
’s most astonishing boy genius. Now fifty years old, slight of build and balding, he was the living heir to the assumptions of the Scottish Enlightenment. He would take up the question of human freedom from the opposite end of Marx’s perspective—one might say from the Aristotelian end.

  His name was John Stuart Mill.

  He had learned Greek at age three. When he was seven he was reading Plato’s dialogues in the original and poring over Hume and Gibbon. At eleven he was the master of Newton’s Principia and Aristotle’s logic.26 By the time John Stuart Mill was sixteen, he was writing his own textbook on economics.

  All this was due to his father, James Mill. When John was born in 1806 (the year Hegel was listening to Napoleon’s guns at Jena), the elder Mill decided to raise his son according to the Lockean behaviorist principles of his mentor, Jeremy Bentham. He was determined to turn this particular tabula rasa into the next generation’s spokesman for the philosophy he and Bentham had developed, called Utilitarianism.

  The logic of Mill’s Utilitarianism was Locke and Hume undiluted by any human sentiment. All human action flows from perceived self-interest, and all knowledge is derived from sensory experience, of which the most direct and important are pain and pleasure.27 Therefore, Jeremy Bentham concluded, logically the best way to get people to behave morally is to maximize the pain they suffer when doing bad and maximize the pleasure from doing good, especially the public good, which the Utilitarians defined as “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

  James Mill applied much the same calculus to homeschooling his son. The short-term pain a five-year-old might suffer from spending long hours studying Greek verbs and drawing diagrams of ellipses instead of playing with toys or friends would be outweighed by the long-term benefit of having a finely trained mind ready to work for the greater happiness of mankind. The plan succeeded beyond James Mill’s hopes. The more knowledge little John absorbed, the more his father piled on the books. When the boy had absorbed all he could, James Mill set him to work teaching his brothers and sisters (while sending him to bed without supper if they failed their lessons) and editing Bentham’s legal writings. By 1826, twenty-year-old John Stuart Mill had become a miniature clone of his father, including mirroring his political and philosophical beliefs.28