Hegel (Part III)

Phenomenology of Spirit (Part II)

The Historical Genesis of Modern Life

Hegel followed his long chapter on “Reason” with an even longer chapter on the history of spirit
(mindedness, “Geist”)

It began with the ancient Greek paradigm of a spontaneous “ethical harmony.”

The ancient Greece is where philosophical reflection on what it means to be a free, rational agent
began, but because the Greek “harmony” of ethical life offered a kind of baseline paradigm of how the
contingent give-and-take of social space might also be the realization of freedom (the guiding star of
post-Kantian philosophy).

Greeks simply kept faith with their received values, knowing that, in doing so, their actions would
spontaneously harmonize, with the resulting way of life therefore forming a beautiful whole.

The Greeks incorporate into their way of life a sense of being free that depended not on their fully being
laws unto themselves, but on their simply keeping faith with the already existent divine laws while
setting laws for their own political life.

Hegel took Greek tragedy – in particular, Sophocles’s Antigone – to be especially revelatory of what it
might mean for a way of life to be based not on fully “giving the law to oneself ” but on “keeping faith”
with basic ethical laws.

Antigone is the true heroine of the play because she alone truly understands the conflict, and she thus
understands that, although she must keep faith with the unconditional demand to give her brother the
proper burial rites, she is also guilty of violating the unconditional demands of the civil law; and, even at
the end of the play, she knows she is guilty while at the same time holding fast to her view that she did
the right thing. (Divine law of family comes into contradiction with human law of state)

The problem for Antigone is that she must choose between two conflicting, “unconditional” laws, even
though she herself (at least at first cannot see any “choice” in her actions at all, since she simply must do
what is demanded of her as a sister.

Antigone’s anger is that of someone who recognizes only herself as an authority on the issue at hand.
Antigone thus displays in herself how the normative demands of individuality acting according to
personal conscience are, as it were, struggling to emerge out of a situation where there is no conception
of conscience on which to base those actions.

Antigone’s plight is that of somebody experiencing an immediate identification with her social role (as
sister, as keeping faith with the divine law), while at the same time coming to experience that kind of
immediate identification as both impossible (and thus having already had that identification wither
within her own experience of herself) and inescapable, as something simply required of her. We
moderns can see her conscience at work; she can only experience the conflict and guilt.
The self-destruction of the ethical harmony of the ancient Greeks, and both the necessity for and the
impossibility of the emergence of individuality within that way of life, prepared the ground for the
Roman Empire to understand its own fragmented, “prosaic” way of life as the successor to the Greeks.

Roman legality, capable of holding a multi-ethnic, religiously pluralist Empire together by law (and,
where needed, by the deployment of crushing military force) seemed to be the realization of what had
really been going on in Greek life – or, to put it another way: from the Roman point of view, what was
really normatively in play in Greek life was power, and the Greeks had failed because they failed to play
the game of power effectively.

Roman power could, however, survive only as long as it maintained the will and the military power to
enforce itself; and, as both those very contingent features vanished from it, so did the Empire itself,
since there was no deeper sense of truth to hold it together.

The emergence of the aristocratic ideal out of the chaos surrounding the collapse of imperial Roman
power in Europe in turn seemed to be what was required of European humanity facing the breakdown
of Roman authority.

The military aristocrat and, even more so, the royal personage, for whom glory is the only motive worth
contemplating, puts on a mask of “culture” (Bildung) to show his superiority over those motivated by
more down-to-earth, self-seeking goals (exemplified by the tradesman and the wealthy bourgeois).

The king and the aristocrat are each, so it seems, laws unto themselves, but they can only maintain their
authority under the fiction that they are selfless, devoted to glory (or to the king), or to an abstract value
of “honor,” whereas the bourgeoisie are supposedly only self-interested and therefore unworthy to rule
for themselves.

As it became more and more clear that both noble and bourgeois were interested primarily in wealth,
not in glory, the fiction became more obvious, and the laws decreed by the nobility appeared as what
they were: the contingent expressions of interest and power by a group interested only in preserving its
advantages and privileges, not part of reasons that could be given to all.

The only remaining embodiment of being a “law unto himself ” was the monarch, exemplified by the
Sun King, Louis XIV, presiding over his court of crafty real-estate dealing aristocrats. The monarch, so it
was said, was the nation.

The French Revolution brought this to a close and completed, at least in principle, that line of
development. Faced with the collapse of all other forms of authority, the “people,” now describing
themselves and not the monarch as the “nation of France,” declared themselves “as the people” to be
the “law” and to be engaged therefore in attaining an unconditional freedom normatively unconstrained
by the past or the contingent features of human nature, but instead to be constrained only by what was
necessarily involved in that freedom’s being sought for its own sake, keeping faith with nothing outside
of its own changing dictates – in short, claiming to be “absolute” freedom.

However, without anything more definite to determine what counted as such self-determination, any
government of the “nation” could only be a faction, a particular group with its own agenda, renaming its
own interests as those of “the people” and characterizing those other factions opposed to it as a danger
to the nation.
The truth of “absolute freedom” was the Terror: giving the law to oneself, freed from any constraint by a
kind of rationality preceding such legislation, found its “truth” in the constant movement of the
guillotine’s blade.

To see it only in those terms, however, was one-sided and therefore misleading. The real truth of the
French Revolution, so Hegel argued, were the Kantian and Fichtean revolutions in philosophy, for only
they brought out what was really normatively in play in the demand for “absolute freedom” – not the
Terror, but the Kantian kingdom of ends was the “truth” of the demands of the Revolution.

The Terror was, as it were, the false conclusion that would be necessarily drawn from such a demand
without the mediating effects of social institutions that themselves embodied and realized the kingdom
of ends (The religion of both himself and Kant).

While the Terror emerged in France because of the way its institutional past as an absolute, centralized
monarchy made the claim of “the people” seem like the rational embodiment of the demand of
absolute freedom, in fragmented Germany, the “moral worldview” at first emerged out of
developments in religion, not politics.

For the “moral worldview,” as with the French Revolution, the primary object of concern was freedom,
but this was not taken in institutional terms (as a call to establish a government of “absolute freedom”)
but instead as a call on oneself as an individual, independently of all social conditions, to realize one’s
radical freedom in both giving oneself the law and holding oneself to it.

If the threat to freedom for the proponents of the Revolution was governmental or aristocratic
despotism, the threat to freedom for the “moral worldview” was nature (and especially one’s own
“human” nature of desires and inclinations).

To be free was to be able to give oneself the law independently of any constraint by nature (or social
custom), and this could be actualized for an individual only by holding fast to his self-legislated (although
universal) duties.

What ultimately mattered for the “moral worldview” were that one exercise a particular kind of power
(such as transcendental freedom) that is independent of nature, that one formulate one’s maxims so as
to meet the demands of universalizability, and that one act on the right motive (do duty for duty’s sake).

This is a problem for individuals, not for governments; no institution can make one transcendentally
free, nor can it prevent it; nor can an institution determine one’s motive, for only the individual himself
can do that.

The basic problem for the “moral worldview” had to do with reconciling its claim to (individual, moral)
freedom with the competing claims made on an individual by his own sensuous nature. In particular, it
has to ask what interest the embodied individual might have in being moral.

The truth of the “moral worldview” (what it finds itself committed to as it actualizes itself in practice) is,
however, a kind of dissemblance.

On the one hand, it claims that one should do one’s duty for duty’s sake; on the other hand, it claims
that we cannot practically divorce the claims of duty from the claims of nature, even if duty is always to
take normative priority.
One must strive to shape one’s character so that it is the motive of duty that prompts one to act and not
the prospect of enhancing one’s own happiness; yet, at the same time, one has a duty to try to bring it
about so that one is happy in proportion to one’s virtue (in proportion to how much happiness one
morally deserves, the key element in the “highest good”).

The “moral worldview,” so Hegel argues, thereby commits itself to constant dissembling, a pretense that
the only thing that matters is acting on the motive of duty for duty’s sake, while at the same time
claiming that, without attending to one’s happiness, one is engaged in a practically hopeless enterprise.

The basic mode of dissembling behind the “moral worldview” is the pretense that what is at stake is
wholly individual, having to do with the failure or success of individuals living up to the demands of the
moral law, and not some more complex story about the history of institutions and political life (although
that, as the French Revolution showed, also could not be the whole story).

Behind the “moral worldview” is a stress therefore on purity of motive and purity of self, of cleansing
the agent of all contaminants to his ability to be a law unto himself, and it is that commitment to purity
that plays the determinative normative role in the “moral worldview.

Although Hegel held it was a great achievement of modern life to have carved out a space for the claims
of conscience within itself, he also thought that the way that space had to be carved out necessarily
involved some false turns.

At first, the appeal to conscience seemed to be consistent only if it were taken in either of two ways:

1. Either the commitment to duty must be kept pure, which rules out any action that might
somehow soil that purity
2. Or keeping one’s purity intact required one to act simply out of the depths of one’s conviction,
committed to the belief that, whatever the outcome, the act was pure and therefore good if it
was done out of genuine, deep conviction

The “pure” individual appealing only to what his own conscience permits him is a “beautiful soul” 1. For
the “beautiful soul,” one avoids the “Kantian paradox” only by holding fast to one’s conscience, more or
less “expressing” individually the moral law that one personally “is.”

Hegel, of course, could barely conceal his contempt for this line of post-Kantian individualist self-
absorption, but he also saw it as one of the ways in which the “Kantian paradox” was working itself out
as it tried to realize the ideal of the morally pure will.

In their pursuit of purity in the face of the fragmented, modern world, such beautiful souls fragment
themselves into

1. Those who act out of conviction, knowing that they cannot know all the possible morally salient
features of a situation but remain convinced that the purity of their conviction carries over into
their acts.
2. And those who cannot tolerate being contaminated by any compromises with the real world
and thus refuse to play along, preserving their inner purity by inaction and condemning all those
who act as complicit with the evil of the world.

1
a term much in vogue in Hegel’s day and explicitly invoked in the moral context by Fries
Evil in that post-Kantian world is identified with subordinating the moral law to self-love and personal
advantage, each of these beautiful souls necessarily sees the other as evil, since each sees the other as
not really being pure but only substituting their own individual take on things for the real demands of
the moral law.

In the eyes of the other, the judgmental purist, who refuses to soil his hands with action that might
compromise what his “pure” conscience requires, is a hypocrite, pretending to be good but actually
concerned only with himself.

In the eyes of the judgmental purist, the agent who acts according to what the purity of his conscience
tells him is also a hypocrite, for the same reason.

Each claims to be a law unto himself, but, as constrained only by an abstract appeal to the purity of his
own conscience, each seems to the other only to be substituting his own personal outlook for the
demands of the universal “law.”

The beautiful soul is supposed to be “beautiful” in just that way: his own individuality and emotional life
supposedly line up almost perfectly with the demands of reason, such that his own conscientious action
is the best guide to what is really required by the moral law.

The charge of hypocrisy made by the beautiful souls against each other, however, only shows how the
Kantian conception of radical evil, when lined up with claims about “beauty of soul,” drive those agents
into mutual charges of evil and hypocrisy.

The solution to this, so Hegel argues, arises out of the same practice that produces the appeal to
conscience in the first place, namely, Christian culture.

It is the practice of forgiveness, the Christian recognition that we are all “sinners” in the eyes of God,
transmuted into a secular practice of forgiveness and reconciliation that brings out what is really
normatively in play in the appeal to conscience: an appeal not to “beautiful souls,” but to the
recognition that, in Hegel’s terms, our sociality fundamentally commits us to being the “masters” and
“slaves” to each other – we are authors of the law to ourselves only as others co-author the law for us.

The “ethical world” – the “I that is We, and the We that is I” – exists only in terms of each holding
ourselves to the law by holding others to the law, while at the same time they hold us to the law and
hold themselves to the law.

In all such cases, claims made on oneself by another agent (or, in more Hegelian terms, by “the other”)
radically alter one’s self-relation.

The freedom sought by “beautiful souls” is thus to be found not in a striving for independence (the
problem with all attempts at being a “master” who is the author of the law but never subject to a law
authored by anybody else), but in a recognition of our crucial mutual dependencies on each other.

Conclusion:

The “Kantian paradox” is not overcome, only sublated, aufgehoben, into a historical and social
conception of agency, where the appeal to reason turns out to involve, first, our participating in a
historical, social practice of giving and asking for reasons, not in an appeal to something outside of us
that sorts the world out for us prior to our deliberations, nor to any purely methodological procedure of
testing for universalizability; and, second, our understanding of freedom as itself involving a certain type
of self-relation that includes relations to others as being in a common sphere, not the exercise of some
transcendental, causal power.

Next: Religion and Absolute Knowing