Positive Liberty

G. W. F. Hegel wrote famously daunting prose, but the ideas he advocates are surprisingly familiar. Once you know what Hegelian thinking looks like, you’ll see the stuff everywhere. Indeed, putting Hegel into plain language reveals a worldview that many people will recognize and claim that they had been holding all along, and if they are encouraged to read Hegel with a patient guide helping them out, they will find in him a confirmation of all sorts of beliefs that they already subscribe to.

Such are the risks we run. It is my own belief that Hegel represents nearly everything that libertarians have always fought against, and that they are right to do so. Ayn Rand thought Immanuel Kant was the most dangerous philosopher of all time, but I’d choose Hegel, myself: He stands nearly at the origin of modern collectivism, and his way of thinking seems more frequently encountered today than that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great anti-individualist of the Enlightenment.

Let’s start at the beginning, then, with the foundational concepts.

Hegel believed that history had a purpose, or a meaning, and that he had grasped this meaning, at least insofar as any one person could. History for Hegel proceeded as a series of inner conflicts, of conflicts within the spirits or minds of men, and as a series of successive resolutions to these conflicts. The progress of history was a march through a series of progressively more refined truths, more authentic modes of being, or more advanced states of civilization.

Truth, for Hegel, was not a set of propositions or of timeless ideas, but a lived experience, together with the self-awareness that comes with having had that experience. Thus it is inseparable from history, and attempting to make a representation of Truth is like trying to make a model of a gold ring: If you use real gold, what you get is not a representation, but the thing itself. Meanwhile, if you use fake gold, you don’t do justice to the original, and the model is flawed. As he wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit:

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. . . the words ‘the Divine,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘the Eternal,’ etc., do not express what is contained in them; and only such words, in fact, do express the intuition as something immediate. Whatever is more than such a word, even the transition to a mere proposition, contains a becoming-other that has to be taken back, or is a mediation. . . Reason is , therefore, misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the True, and is not grasped as a positive movement of the Absolute.

It is necessary to refer to the process of learning and of becoming, whenever we consider Truth, otherwise we have not given our subject its due. Yet we are still in the midst of ascertaining Truth — still in the throes of its history.

This whole process of unfolding or revealing Truth, considered as a totality, constituted for Hegel a Mind — the world-spirit, whose workings were the real (though seldom appreciated) subject of the study of history. Hegel believed that when we write history, we approach excellence insofar as we capture this drama of the world-spirit.

One might think that Hegel’s worldview would produce a dense, highly intellectualized history, one in which (conveniently) philosophers and theologians would play all the most important roles. This though was not where Hegel took things: For Hegel, mere ideas were also somewhat beside the point. For something to really count as the working of the world-spirit, it had to be actualized. It needed a concrete expression. And he found that concrete expression in the development of the nation-state. As he wrote in the Philosophy of Right, in the section that is the subject of this week’s blog seminar,

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge, and activity, while self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state, finds in the state, as its essence and the end-product of its activity, its substantive freedom.

The state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.

Just as we might say today that there is a big difference between the genetic code and the living organism, Hegel would see a similar difference between the interior or intellectualized life of the mind, and the practical realization of the Ideal. This realization of the Ideal, this expression of the spirit of history itself, was the state.

One might ask why other institutions are not realizations of the Ideal, or workings of the Mind, on potentially equal footing with the state. The answer is that the state for Hegel offered the realization of human freedom, and that in this light all other social organizations were at best second-order considerations. To will the existence of one’s church, or school, or family, one had to will into existence the state as well, otherwise the very idea of these other things itself was incomplete. Each implies another, and the other is the state. Your own negative rights are therefore limited by its limits, and your freedoms are only realized through it.

Hegel never did say that states could do no wrong, although he seems repeatedly to have been tempted in this direction, and he may just have believed it in his heart of hearts. He in fact wrote several things that were quite close to this, including, as we’ve seen above, that the state is unified in its purposes and universal in its aims, and endowed with a “supreme right” against individuals. This is because, in Hegel’s view, the workings of the universal mind are in fact what we all should want, rather than our own aims, if ever a conflict arises. (This being Hegel, conflicts certainly would arise.)

He added, significantly, that the state is “absolutely rational” inasmuch as it meets a totally imponderable test: “inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality.” I’d lay better than even odds that this is pure flim-flam, but I’m going to try to interpret it anyway: Whenever the state embodies the world spirit, it is absolutely rational.

Here’s why I say this. States exist in many different forms, as Hegel was well aware. They each had professed wills, too — they had declared goals, ideologies, and the like. But states also have a substantial will, a will of which they may not indeed be aware, but which it behooves the state to attempt to discover and self-consciously embody. This coincides with the moment of development of the world spirit in any particular age. Thus, when a state has grasped its substantial will, when it knows — as a particular entity — that its particular, chosen aims also coincide with the substantial will, it is absolutely rational.

This is at least the safer interpretation than a sheer “might makes right,” which might not be fully charitable to Hegel. He writes,

Further, world history is not the verdict of mere might, i.e. the abstract and non-rational inevitability of a blind destiny. On the contrary, since mind is implicitly and actually reason, and reason is explicit to itself in mind as knowledge, world history is the necessary development, out of the concept of mind’s freedom alone, of the moments of reason and so of the self-consciousness and freedom of mind. This development is the interpretation and actualisation of the universal mind.

Perhaps world history only looks like the verdict of mere might. But if this is the case, and if the universal mind really willed all of history, then the universal mind is a bit of a bastard, isn’t he? (I’m not just joking about this. The possibility of a cruelly indifferent or even a malevolent universal mind is one that we will revisit several times in the course of this seminar, beginning next week with Cordwainer Smith, and reaching a full Actualisation of the Ethical Ideal in Philip K. Dick.)

Theoretically, any states could claim the mantle of the universal mind, even two states locked in a fight to the death, and we would only be able to know the judgment of the universal mind by the outcome of the war. If it’s not precisely “might makes right,” then at the very least it’s quite hard to see how the conversation has been substantially advanced beyond it.

And, although it’s not clear that we, as individuals, are ever truly able to ask this question, we probably ought to anyway, if only for our own safety: How are we to know whether a given, real-world state meets this test of being the “actuality of the substantial will”? Hegel informs us that we must not look at the history of the state’s behavior, its institutional structure, or its ideological self-justifications:

But if we ask what is or has been the historical origin of the state in general, still more if we ask about the origin of any particular state, of its rights and institutions, or again if we inquire whether the state originally arose out of patriarchal conditions or out of fear or trust, or out of Corporations, &c., or finally if we ask in what light the basis of the state’s rights has been conceived and consciously established, whether this basis has been supposed to be positive divine right, or contract, custom, &c. — all these questions are no concern of the Idea of the state. We are here dealing exclusively with the philosophic science of the state, and from that point of view all these things are mere appearance and therefore matters for history. So far as the authority of any existing state has anything to do with reasons, these reasons are culled from the forms of the law authoritative within it.

One begins to wonder at what point might any individual, within the Hegelian framework, raise any criticism whatsoever of the state. As we’ve just seen, appeals to history foreclosed. So are ideologies based on individualism:

In considering freedom, the starting-point must be not individuality, the single self-consciousness, but only the essence of self-consciousness; for whether man knows it or not, this essence is externally realised as a self-subsistent power in which single individuals are only moments. The march of God in the world, that is what the state is. [Emphasis mine.] The basis of the state is the power of reason actualising itself as will. In considering the Idea of the state, we must not have our eyes on particular states or on particular institutions. Instead we must consider the Idea, this actual God, by itself. On some principle or other, any state may be shown to be bad, this or that defect may be found in it; and yet, at any rate if one of the mature states of our epoch is in question, it has in it the moments essential to the existence of the state. But since it is easier to find defects than to understand the affirmative, we may readily fall into the mistake of looking at isolated aspects of the state and so forgetting its inward organic life. The state is no ideal work of art; it stands on earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance, and error, and bad behaviour may disfigure it in many respects. But the ugliest of men, or a criminal, or an invalid, or a cripple, is still always a living man. The affirmative, life, subsists despite his defects, and it is this affirmative factor which is our theme here.

Only small thinkers, who think about trivialities, question the state. Those who are more profound will see the state for what it is — a manifestation of God. Elsewhere Hegel writes,

Immature minds delight in argumentation and fault-finding, because it is easy enough to find fault, though hard to see the good and its inner necessity. The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything. In religion, this or that is quickly dismissed as superstitious, but it is infinitely harder to apprehend the truth underlying the superstition. Hence men’s apparent sentiment towards the state is to be distinguished from what they really will; inwardly they really will the thing, but they cling to details and take delight in the vanity of pretending to know better.

This declaration is a bit astonishing, given the long development of the study of history. For whole millennia at a stretch, the historian’s sole task was to glorify the god-king or god-emperor. And now, in the nineteenth century of our era, after a short but enthusiastic burst of critical history, fraught with persecution of the historians in question, a thinker arrives and declares that the path of least resistance is the one that criticizes the state.

Writers during Hegel’s own lifetime were massacred for their criticisms of the state. Perhaps these criticisms take less learning than an attempt at systematizing the whole. Perhaps. But criticism certainly took more courage and moral rectitude, and these are qualities one admires in a philosopher as well. (No mention is made in Hegel of the systematizing thinker who envisions the state as a totality, apprehends its truth, and hates the whole thing from top to bottom. This is at least a logical possibility that it might have been amusing for him to consider. Critics need not be merely nitpickers.)

In any case, what is easy, as testified by chroniclers from ancient Egypt to the early modern era, is worshiping the state, because that’s where the privilege lies. And at the very historical moment when it had finally — finally — become possible for intellectuals to write critically of the state before a general audience, along comes Hegel, ready to set up the old idols again. Only small minds rebel. Great ones lick the boot.

But that’s not all. Because your own will is only a moment of the universal will — only a component, if a contradictory one, of a greater whole — Hegel also allows himself the privilege of declaring to Sidney, Voltaire, and Paine, among others, that what they really willed, what they desired above all else, and despite their protests to the contrary, was the success of the very thing they pretended to criticize: “[M]en’s apparent sentiment towards the state is to be distinguished from what they really will; inwardly they really will the thing, but they cling to details and take delight in the vanity of pretending to know better.”

We are reminded immediately of conservative resentment against those who criticize certain actions of the United States. “They hate America,” we are told, and they are small-minded because they criticize it. My own view, as I’ve expressed before, is that there is no idealized or perfect “America” to appeal to, no ur-state or universal mind struggling to be born. Yet this may be a minority view.

America — the state — is to me a bundle of different elements, and there is no necessary reason to think that this bundle should be either coherent, or self-aware, or the actualization of some deeper Idea. Perhaps it is; perhaps it isn’t, and this must be decided on a case-by-case basis for each of the state’s actions. It is on the terrain of individual institutions and practices that we must always evaluate the state, and not as an image of what we desire it to be.

States, however, only ride the crest of world history for so long. Eventually, they cease to be relevant to its continued march and find themselves playing catch-up:

The history of a single world-historical nation contains (a) the development of its principle from its latent embryonic stage until it blossoms into the self-conscious freedom of ethical life and presses in upon world history; and (b) the period of its decline and fall, since it is its decline and fall that signalises the emergence in it of a higher principle as the pure negative of its own. When this happens, mind passes over into the new principle and so marks out another nation for world-historical significance. After this period, the declining nation has lost the interest of the absolute; it may indeed absorb the higher principle positively and begin building its life on it, but the principle is only like an adopted child, not like a relative to whom its ties are immanently vital and vigorous. Perhaps it loses its autonomy, or it may still exist, or drag out its existence, as a particular state or a group of states and involve itself without rhyme or reason in manifold enterprises at home and battles abroad.

Anxieties about the decline of the West, the clash of civilizations, and the like all go back to Hegel, I think, although it’s not necessarily clear why one would want to live under the states embodying the ethical or spiritual principles that happen to lead in a given age: The twentieth century was the era of totalitarianism, beyond a doubt, yet I would not have wished to live under one. Likewise in the seventeenth century, the age of absolute monarchy, in which the peripheral states — Britain and the Dutch Republic — were generally far more agreeable places to live than Spain or France.

After twenty-nine pages of similarly turgid and toadying prose, we get to the payoff. The highest form of the state, the one in which the world-spirit had actualized itself to the greatest degree, was — you saw this coming a mile away, didn’t you? — the Prussian state, Hegel’s patron. The announcement of a new God is always initially arresting, and then come the sordid details. For Hegel, the history of states contains four stages:

[T]he world-historical realms are the following: (1) the Oriental, (2) the Greek, (3) the Roman, (4) the Germanic.

(1) The Oriental realm.

The world-view of this first realm is substantial, without inward division, and it arises in natural communities patriarchically governed. According to this view, the mundane form of government is theocratic, the ruler is also a high priest or God himself; constitution and legislation are at the same time religion, while religious and moral commands, or usages rather, are at the same time natural and positive law. In the magnificence of this regime as a whole, individual personality loses its rights and perishes; the external world of nature is either directly divine or else God’s ornament, and the history of the actual is poetry. Distinctions are developed in customs, government, and state on their many sides, and in default of laws and amidst the simplicity of manners, they become unwieldy, diffuse, and superstitious ceremonies, the accidents of personal power and arbitrary rule, and class differences become crystallised into hereditary castes. Hence in the Oriental state nothing is fixed, and what is stable is fossilised. . .

(2) The Greek realm.

This realm possesses this substantial unity of finite and infinite, but only as a mysterious background, suppressed in dim recesses of the memory, in caves and traditional imagery. This background, reborn out of the mind which differentiates itself to individual mentality, emerges into the daylight of knowing and is tempered and transfigured into beauty and a free and unruffled ethical life. Hence it is in a world of this character that the principle of personal individuality arises, though it is still not self-enclosed but kept in its ideal unity.. . .

(3) The Roman realm.

In this realm, differentiation is carried to its conclusion, and ethical life is sundered without end into the extremes of the private self-consciousness of persons on the one hand, and abstract universality on the other. This opposition begins in the clash between the substantial intuition of an aristocracy and the principle of free personality in democratic form. As the opposition grows, the first of these opponents develops into superstition and the maintenance of heartless self-seeking power, while the second becomes more and more corrupt until it sinks into a rabble. Finally, the whole is dissolved and the result is universal misfortune and the destruction of ethical life. . . .

(4) The Germanic realm.

Mind and its world are thus both alike lost and plunged in the infinite grief of that fate for which a people, the Jewish people, was held in readiness. Mind is here pressed back upon itself in the extreme of its absolute negativity. This is the absolute turning point; mind rises out of this situation and grasps the infinite positivity of this its inward character, i.e. it grasps the principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as the truth and freedom appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity, a reconciliation with the fulfillment of which the principle of the north, the principle of the Germanic peoples, has been entrusted.

This principle is first of all inward and abstract; it exists in feeling as faith, love, and hope, the reconciliation and resolution of all contradiction. It then discloses its content, raising it to become actuality and self-conscious rationality, to become a mundane realm proceeding from the heart, fidelity, and comradeship of free men. . . .

Leaving off the extraneous verbiage, I am reminded of a remarkably old way of thought, rather than a new one: the translatio imperii of medieval historiography (with nods to the four empires in the Book of Daniel):

Jacques Le Goff describes the “translatio imperii” concept as typical for the Middle Ages for several reasons: the idea of linearity of time and history was typical for the Middle Ages; the “translatio imperii” idea typically also neglected simultaneous developments in other parts of the world (of no importance to medieval Europeans); the “translatio imperii” idea didn’t separate divine history from the history of worldly power: medieval Europeans considered divine (supernatural) and material things as part of the same continuum, which was their “reality”. Also the causality of one reign necessarily leading to its successor was often detailed by the medieval chroniclers, and is seen as a typical medieval approach.

Not surprisingly, each medieval author described the “translatio imperii” as a succession leaving the supreme power in the hands of the monarch ruling the region of the author’s provenance.

Exactly as in Hegel, point for point. Throw in a little fuzziness, and you might even conjure up a decent translatio from the pre-Hellenistic empires, to Greece, to Rome, to Charlemagne, to medieval Christianity, to the United States as a Christian nation, while Europe today is decadent, secular, and a burned-out husk of what it once was. History marches on, pitilessly, and perhaps in cycles, but without any concern for individuality or individual rights — another theme that we will see repeatedly in the fiction of the seminar.

Tags: collectivism, hegel, history, science fiction

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