3. Mind
The Phänomenologie des Geistes was written at Jena while the Grande Armée was approaching the city; it was published in 1807, when the merciless devastation of Prussia by the sons of the French Revolution seemed to prove that somewhere in that historic groping from monarchy through terror to monarchy the mind of man had lost the road to freedom. Hegel proposed to study the mind of man in its various phenomena as sensation, perception, feeling, consciousness, memory, imagination, desire, will, self-consciousness, and reason; perhaps at the end of that long road he would find the secret of liberty. Not frightened by that program, he would also study the human mind in communities and the state, in art and religion and philosophy. The product of his quest was his chef-d’oeuvre, eloquent and obscure, challenging and discouraging, and pregnant with influence upon Marx and Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre.
The difficulty begins with the word Geist, which spreads a cloud of ambiguities over ghost and mind and spirit and soul. We shall usually translate it as mind, but in some contexts it may be better rendered as spirit, as in Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age. Geist as mind is not a separate substance or entity behind psychological activities; it is those activities themselves. There are no separate “faculties”; there are only the actual operations by which experience is transformed into action or thought.
In one of his many definitions of Geist Hegel identified it with consciousness.38 Consciousness, of course, is the mystery of mysteries, for, as the organ for interpreting experience, it cannot interpret itself. Nevertheless, it is the most immediate, as well as the most remarkable, fact known to us. Matter, which may be the outside of mind, seems less mysterious, even though less directly known. Hegel agrees with Fichte that we know objects only insofar as they become part of us as subjects perceiving; but he never questions the existence of an external world. When the object perceived is another individual apparently endowed with mind, consciousness becomes self-consciousness by opposition; then the consciously personal Ego is born, and becomes uncomfortably aware that competition is the trade of life. Then, says our tough philosopher, “each man” (potentially, ultimately, and seldom consciously) “aims at the destruction and death of the other,”39 until one of the two accepts subordination,40 or is dead.
Meanwhile the Ego is feeding upon experience, as if aware that it must arm and strengthen itself for the trials of life. All that complex process by which the Ego transforms sensations into perceptions, stores these in memory, and turns them into ideas, is used to illuminate, color, and serve the desires that make up the will. The Ego is a focus, succession and combination of desires; percepts, ideas, memories, deliberation, like arms and legs, are tools of the self or Ego seeking survival, pleasure, or power. If the desire is a passion it is thereby reinforced, for good or ill; it must not be condemned indiscriminately, for “nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”41 It may lead to pain, but that does not matter if it contributes to the desired result. Life is made not for happiness but for accomplishment.42
Is the will (i.e., our desires) free? Yes, but not in the sense of freedom from causality or law; it is free in proportion as it agrees with the laws and logic of reality; a free will is one enlightened by understanding and guided by reason. The only real liberation, for the nation or the individual, is through the growth of intelligence; and intelligence is knowledge coordinated and used. The highest freedom is in the knowledge of the categories and their operation in the basic processes of nature, and their union and harmony in the Absolute Idea, which is God.
There are three ways in which man can approach this summit of understanding and freedom: through art, religion, and philosophy. Briefly in the Phänomenologie, more fully in his posthumous V orlesungen über Aesthetik, Hegel tried to bring the nature and history of art under the triadic formulas of his system. Incidentally he revealed a surprising knowledge of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, and a detailed acquaintance with the art collections of Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Paris, and the Netherlands. Art, he felt, was an attempt of the mind—by intuition (i.e., direct, intense, persistent perception) rather than by reason—to represent spiritual significance through a sensory medium. He distinguished three major epochs of art: (1) the Oriental, in which architecture sought to support the spiritual life and mystical vision through massive temples, as in Egypt and India; (2) the Greco-Roman Classical, conveying the ideals of reason, balance, and harmony through perfect sculptural forms; and (3) the Christian Romantic, which has sought, through painting, music, and poetry, to express the emotions and longings of the modern soul. In this third stage Hegel found some seeds of degeneration, and suggested that the greatest period of art was coming to an end.
Religion troubled and puzzled him in his declining years, for he recognized its historic function in molding character and supporting social order, but he was too fond of reason to care for the gropings of theology, the ecstasies and sufferings of saints, the fear and worship of a personal God.43 He struggled to reconcile the Christian creed with the Hegelian dialectic, but his heart was not in the effort,44 and his most influential followers interpreted his God as the impersonal law or Reason of the universe, and immortality as the lingering—perhaps endless—effects of every soul’s moment on the earth.
Toward the end of the Phänomenologie he revealed his true love—philosophy. His ideal was not the saint but the sage. In his enthusiasm he recognized no limit to the future extension of human understanding. “The nature of the universe has no power which can permanently resist the courageous effort of the intelligence; it must at last open itself up; it must reveal all its depth and riches to the spirit.”45 But long before that culmination philosophy will have perceived that the real world is not the world that we touch or see, but the relationships and regularities that give them order and nobility, the unwritten laws that move the sun and the stars, and constitute the impersonal mind of the world. To that Absolute Idea or cosmic Reason the philosopher will pledge his loyalty; in it he will find his worship, his freedom, and a quiet content.
4. Morality, Law, and the State
In 1821 Hegel sent forth another major work—Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Outlines of the Philosophy of Right). Recht—right—is a majestic word in Germany, covering both morality and law as kindred supports of the family, the state, and civilization. Hegel dealt with all of these in a magisterial volume which had lasting influence upon his people.
The philosopher was now entering his sixth decade. He had become accustomed to stability and comfort; he was aspiring to some governmental post;46 he yielded readily to the natural conservatism of age. Moreover, the political situation had drastically changed since he feted France and admired Napoleon: Prussia had risen in arms and fury against Napoleon fleeing from Russia, had fought under Blücher and had overthrown the usurper; and now Prussia had reestablished itself on a Frederician basis of victorious army and feudal monarchy as stanchions of stability amid a people reduced by the costs of victory to desperate poverty, social disorder, and hopes and fears of revolution.
In 1816 Jakob Fries, then holding the chair of philosophy at the University of Jena, published a treatise, Von Deutschem Bund und Deutscher Staatsverfassung (On the German Confederation and the Political Constitution of Germany), in which he outlined a program of reform that frightened the German governments into the harsh decrees of the Karlsbad Congress (1819). Fries was dismissed from his professorship, and was declared an outlaw by the police.47
Hegel gave half the preface of his book to denouncing Fries as a dangerous simpleton, and condemning as “the quintessence of shallow thinking” Fries’s view that “in a people ruled by a genuine communal spirit, life for the discharge of all public business would come from below, from the people itself.” “According to a view of this kind,” Hegel protested, “the world of ethics should be given over to the subjective accident of opinion and caprice. By the simple family remedy of ascribing to feeling the labor… of reason and in
tellect, all the trouble of rational insight, and of knowledge directed by speculative thinking, is of course saved.”48 The angry professor vented his scorn upon street-corner philosophers who construct perfect states any evening out of the rosy dreams of immaturity.49 Against such wishful thinking he proclaimed, as the realistic basis of his philosophy (political as well as metaphysical), the principle that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”50 (It is what the logic of events made it be; what, under the circumstances, it had to be.) The liberals of Germany denounced the author as a time-serving place-seeker, the “Philosopher Laureate” of a reactionary government. He went on.
Civilization needs both morality and law, since it means living like a citizen (civis), and therefore in a community; and a community cannot survive unless it limits liberty in order to provide protection. Morality must be a common bond, not an individual preference. Freedom under law is a constructive force; freedom from law is impossible in nature and destructive in society, as in some phases of the French Revolution. The restrictions laid upon individual liberty by custom morality—the ethical judgments developed in the evolution of a community—are the oldest and broadest, the most lasting and far-reaching measures taken by it for its continuance and growth. Since such regulations are transmitted chiefly by the family, the school, and the church, these institutions are basic to a society, and constitute its vital organs.
Therefore it is foolish to let a family be founded by a love marriage. Sexual desire has its biological wisdom for continuing the species and the community; but it contains no social wisdom for supporting a lifetime partnership in the management of property and children.51 Marriage should be monogamous, and divorce should be difficult. The property of the family should be held in common, but be managed by the husband.52 “Woman has her substantive destiny in the family, and to be imbued with family devotion is her ethical frame of mind.”53
Education should not [as in Pestalozzi and Fichte] make fetishes of freedom and play; discipline is the backbone of character. “The punishment of children does not aim at justice as such; the aim is to deter them from exercising a freedom still in the toils of nature, and to raise the universal into their consciousness and will.”54
Nor should we make a fetish of equality. We are equal only in the sense that each of us is a soul, and should not be a tool for another person; but we are obviously unequal in physical or mental ability. The best economic system is one in which superior ability is stimulated to develop itself, and is left relatively free to transmute new ideas into productive realities. Property should be the private possession of the family, for without that distinguishing reward superior ability would not train or exert itself.
For the purpose of civilization—of turning savages into citizens—religion is an ideal instrument, for it relates the individual to the whole.
Since religion is an integrating factor in the state, implanting a sense of unity in the depth of men’s minds, the state should even require all its citizens to belong to a church. A church is all that can be said, because—since the content of a man’s faith depends upon his private ideas—the state cannot interfere with it.55
The churches should be separate from the state, but should look upon the state as “a consummate worship,” in which the religious goal of the unification of the individual with the totality is as nearly effected as is possible on earth.56
The state, then, is man’s highest achievement. It is the organ of the community for the protection and development of the people. It has the difficult task of reconciling social order with the natural individualism of men and the jealous conflicts of internal groups. Law is the freedom of civilized man, for it frees him from many injustices and perils in return for his agreement not to inflict them upon other citizens. “The state is the actuality of concrete freedom.”57 To so transform chaos into orderly liberty, the state must have authority and, sometimes, must use force; police will be necessary, and, in crisis, conscription too; but if the state is well managed it can be called the organization of reason. In this sense we may say of the state, as of the universe, that “the rational is real, and the real is rational.” It is not utopic, but utopia is unreal.
Was this an idealization of the Prussian state of 1820? Not quite. Unlike that regime, it assumed the full success of Stein’s and Hardenberg’s reforms. It called for a limited monarchy, constitutional government, freedom of worship, and the emancipation of the Jews. It condemned despotism, which it defined as “any state of affairs where law has disappeared, and when the particular will as such, whether of a monarch or a mob (ochlocracy), counts as law or takes the place of law; while it is precisely in legal, constitutional government that sovereignty is to be found as the moment of ideality.”58 Hegel rejected democracy outright: the ordinary citizen is ill-equipped to choose competent rulers, or to determine national policy. The philosopher accepted the French revolutionary Constitution of 1791, which called for a constitutional monarchy, in which the people voted for a national assembly, but not for a ruler. An elective monarchy “is the worst of all institutions.”59 So Hegel recommended a government composed of a bicameral legislature elected by property owners; an executive and administrative cabinet of ministers; and an hereditary monarch having “the will with the power of ultimate decision.”60 “The development of the state to constitutional monarchy is the achievement of the modern world.”61
It would be unfair to call this philosophy reactionary. It was quite in line with the reasoned conservatism of Montaigne and Voltaire, Burke and Macaulay, Benjamin Constant advising Napoleon, and Tocqueville after studying the French and American governments. It left some room for individual freedom of thought, and for religious toleration. We must view it in its context in place and time: we must imagine ourselves in the maelstrom of post-Napoleonic Europe—with its bankruptcy and depression, and its reactionary governments trying to restore the Ancien Régime—to understand the reaction of a thinker too advanced in years to be adventurous in thought, too comfortably established to relish the ecstasy of revolution, or risk the replacement of an old government with inexperienced theorists or mob rule. It was the hasty preface, not the carefully organized and considered book, that was unworthy of a philosopher. The old man was frightened by Fries’s eloquence and its excited reception; he called for the police; and he was not sorry “that governments have at last directed their attention to this kind of philosophy.”62 It is not for age to venture but to preserve.
5. History
Hegel’s students must have loved him, for after his death they pored over his notes, added their own records of his lectures, arranged the result in some reasonable order, and issued it over his name. So appeared four posthumous books: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of History, and History of Philosophy. They are the most intelligible of his works, perhaps because least obscured by the complexity of his thought and style.
“The only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history is the simple concept of Reason: that Reason [the logic and law of events] is the Sovereign of the World; that therefore the history of the world presents us a rational process.”63 Here too the actual was rational—it was the only logical and necessary result of its antecedents. Hegel often speaks of his Sovereign Reason in religious terms, but he defines it by mating Spinoza and Newton: “Reason is the substance of the universe, viz., that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence”; and on the other hand it is “the Infinite Energy of the Universe”; i.e., the categories of the Logik are the basic means of understanding the operative relations which constitute “the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.”64
If the operations of history are an expression of Reason—of the laws inherent in the nature of things—there must be some method in the apparent whimsy of events. Hegel sees method in both the process and the result. The process of reason in history, as in logic, is dialectical: each stage or condition (thesis) contains c
ontradictions (antithesis) which struggle to compose a synthesis. So despotism tried to suppress the human hunger for freedom; the hunger broke out in revolt; their synthesis was constitutional monarchy. Is there, then, a general or total design behind the course of history? No, if this means a conscious supreme power guiding all causes and effects to a determined goal; yes, insofar as the widening stream of events, as a civilization advances, is moved by the total of Geist or Mind to bring man closer and closer to his absorbing goal, which is freedom through reason. Not freedom from law—though that conceivably might come if intelligence should reach its full growth—but freedom through law; so the evolution of the state can be a boon to liberty. This progress toward freedom is not continuous, for in the dialectic of history there are contradictions to be resolved, oppositions to be transformed into fusion, centrifugal diversities to be drawn toward a unifying center by the character of the age or the work of exceptional men.
These two forces—the time and the genius—are the engineers of history, and when they work together they are irresistible. Hegel—inspiring Carlyle —believed in heroes and hero worship. Geniuses are not necessarily virtuous, though it is a mistake to think that they are selfish individualists; Napoleon was no mere conqueror for the sake of conquest; he was, consciously or not, the agent of Europe’s greater need for unity and consistent laws. But the genius is helpless unless, consciously or not, he embodies and serves the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Times. “Such individuals had insight into the requirements of the time—what was ripe for development. This was the very truth for their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time.”65 If the genius is borne on such a tide (like Galileo, Franklin, or James Watt) he will be a force for growth, even if he brings misery for an entire generation. The genius is not meant to peddle happiness. “The history of the world is not the theater of happiness. Periods of happiness are the blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony, when the antithesis is in abeyance,”66 and history sleeps.