Jacques
Maritain Center
1 Saint Thomas, Sum. theol., I, 29, 3.
1 This proposition, put in a perspective wholly opposed to Hegel's, signifies that God is Personality, Intelligence, and Love. For Hegel it signifies that the Absolute (Spirit) is Discourse through which it reveals itself (to itself and to Hegel). When he says, "Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well" (Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1931, London: Allen and Unwin, 1931, p. 80), he intends to affirm from the beginning the dialectic structure of Being: "The living substance [that is to say, neither static nor given] . . . is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realized and actual (wirklich) solely in the [dialectical] process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite" (ibid., p. 80; cf. above, ch. VII, p. 129, n. 5 sub fine). Here Hegel was directly attacking Schelling and his Absolute conceived only as Substance -- although one may be able to say that Schelling himself had prepared the way for him, when, under the inspiration of both Spinoza and Kant, but without suspecting anything of the absolutely new meaning which such a formula could take on for Hegel, he had written to him in 1795 that "God is nothing other than the absolute I" ("Gott ist nichts als das absolute Ich" in Briefe von und an Hegel, J. Hoffmeister ed., I, Hamburg, 1952, p. 22). Cf. the analysis of Hegel's position vis-à-vis Schelling (1794-1796) in Paul Asveld, La pensée religieuse du jeune Hegel, Paris-Louvain, 1953, pp. 75-99.
2 Philosophy of History, J. Sibree trans., New York: Collier, 1901, p. 317; f. p. 330.
3 Ibid., p. 317.
4 Ibid., p. 520. Hegel explains there that "the specific embodiment of Deity -- infinite subjectivity, that is true spirituality, Christ", whom "Christendom had formerly sought in an earthly sepulchre", was found by the Lutheran reform, thanks to "the time-honored and cherished sincerity of the German people", "in the deeper abyss of the Absolute Ideality of all that is sensuous and external" (ibid., pp. 518 f.). Elsewhere he speaks of subjectivity as "the Human Will as intrinsically universal" (ibid., p. 413).
1 Jenenser Realphilosophie, II, Die Vorlesungen von 1805/06, J. Hoffmeister ed. in Werke, Lasson ed., XX, pp. 180 f.
2 "It was through Christianity that this idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him"; and Hegel indicates immediately the philosophic or real meaning of these religious assertions: "i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom" (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Philosophy of Mind, # 482, W. Wallace trans., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894, p. 101). Cf. Phil. of Hist., p. 426: "Under Christianity Slavery is impossible; for man as man -- in the abstract essence of his nature -- is contemplated in God; each unit of mankind is an object of the grace of God and of the Divine purpose: 'God will have all men to be saved.' Utterly excluding all speciality, therefore, man, in and for himself -- in his simple quality of man -- has infinite value." In the Hegelian reconceptualization of Christianity, as later in Marxist humanism, it is the belonging to the human race, and to the human community, not the human person, which is considered in the individual.
1 "For Hegel there is no 'human nature': man is what he does; he creates himself by his action; the innate in him, his 'nature', is what he is as an animal." Alexandre Kojhve, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, pp. 89 f.
2 Phenomenology, Baillie trans., p. 349 (Phänomenologie des Geistes, chap. V, 3rd ed. by G. Lasson in Werke, II, p. 236: "Das wahre Sein des Menschen ist vielmehr seine Tat").
3 And value and dignity that are real, and not merely symbolic or represented by religion.
1 Cf. our remarks on masks and roles in Religion and Culture, London: Sheed and Ward, 1931 ("Theatrum mundi", pp. 63 if.).
Let us note in passing, to avoid any misunderstanding, that for Hegel it is not as individual but as incarnation of the Universal that "the great man is what he has done and one ought to say that he has willed what he has done just as he has done what he has willed" (cited by Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel, Paris: Aubier, 1946, p. 283). Insofar as he is an individual his ends remained enveloped in the Idea, of which he himself "had no consciousness", for he derived his ends and his vocation "from a concealed fount -- one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence -- from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question" (Phil. of Hist., pp. 76 f.). Cf. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, # 348, T. M. Knox trans., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942, p. 218.
1 Cf. what we wrote about the "temptation" of history (On the Philosophy of History, edited by J. W. Evans, New York: Scribners, 1957, p.59; London: Bles, 1959): "Those who make it their first principle to advance with history, or to make history advance and to march in step with it, thereby bind themselves to collaborate with all the agents of history; they find themselves in very mixed company.
"We are not co-operators with history; we are co-operators with God.
"No doubt, to absent oneself from history is to seek death. Spiritual activity, which is above time, does not vacate time, it holds it from on high. Our duty is to act on history to the limit of our power: yes, but God being first served. And we must neither complain nor feel guilty if history often works against us: it will not vanquish our God, and escape His purposes, either of mercy or of justice. The chief thing, from the point of view of existence in history, is not to succeed; success never endures. Rather, it is to have been there, to have been present, and that is ineffaceable."
2 Cf. Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 79.
3 Cf. our book Approaches to God, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954; London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, pp. 77-78.
4 Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 77.
5 Ibid., p. 77. Cf. Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Lasson's ed., I, p. 76, in Werke, VIII: "Und eben die weltgeschichtlichen individuen sind diejenigen . . . in deren Innerem sich geoffenbart hat, was an der Zeit, was notwendig ist."
6 "The world process was supposed to be the perversion of the good, because it took individuality for its principle. But this latter is the principle of actual reality, for it is just that mode of consciousness by which what is implicit and inherent is for an other as well. The world process transmutes and perverts the unchangeable, but does so in fact by transforming it out of the nothingness of abstraction into the being of reality." Phenomenology, Baillie trans., p. 409.
1 Phil. of Right, # 15, Knox trans., p. 27. Cf. Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 478, Wallace trans., pp. 98 f.
2 "Instead of being the will in its truth, arbitrariness is more like the will as contradiction. Since, then, arbitrariness has immanent in it only the formal element in willing, i.e. free self-determination, while the other element is something given to it, we may readily allow that, if it is arbitrariness which is supposed to be freedom, it may indeed be called an illusion" (Phil. of Right, # 15, pp. 27 f.). Free choice is not free will (cf. ibid., # 22, p. 30). Let us not forget that for Hegel "the point of view from which things seem pure accidents vanishes if we look at them in the light of the concept and philosophy, because philosophy knows accident for a show and sees in it its essence, necessity" (ibid., # 324, p. 209; cf. Gans' additions to # 15 of the same work, pp. 230 f.).
One sees very well in these texts from the Philosophy of Right that Hegel cannot grasp the reality of free choice because he conceives freedom in only one of the two forms which this notion admits of, in the form of freedom of independence or autonomy. It is in the light of the latter (libertas a coactione) that he seeks to understand freedom of choice (libertas a necessitate). Not having the idea of self-determination proper to free choice (by which the will, in virtue of its active or dominating indetermination, itself renders efficacious the motive which determines it), authentic motivation (inherent in the practico-practical [156] judgment) escapes him, and is replaced for him by impulses, instincts, and inclinations which derive from nature (and which therefore -- in non-Hegelian language -- depend upon the determinism of nature). On the other hand, the self-determination which he seeks and which is proper to freedom of independence or autonomy (and by which, according to him, a being acts in dependence upon itself alone -- but since this formula really applies only to divine freedom, let us say rather: by which a being acts without anything exterior preventing it from following its own law) -- this self-determination can exist only where the content of the will is given by the pressures of nature. Hegel can thus conceive of free choice only as the application of the abstract form of the freedom of autonomy to a content which derives from nature (that is to say -- in non-Hegelian terms -- which in reality remains in submission to the determinations of nature) and which in relation to the will itself is only contingent and arbitrary (in other words is not, as in "true" and "concrete" freedom, that which the will cannot not will -- for let us not forget that according to Hegel this "true" and "concrete" freedom is for the will to will itself).
1 As Jean Hyppolite remarks (op. cit., p. 147, note 1), abstraction, for Hegel, is not a mere operation of our minds, it belongs to being and characterizes certain phases of being. One must say the same of appearance or phenomenality. There are abstract existences and phenomenal or apparent existences (and in an idealist philosophy it is certainly possible to speak in this fashion). "Experience, as it surveys the wide range of inward and outward existence, has sense enough to distinguish the mere appearance, which is transient and meaningless, from what in itself really deserves the name of actuality," Hegel writes in the Encyclopaedia. In defending his famous formula: "What is reasonable is actual; and, What is actual is reasonable", he explains that "as regards the logical bearings of the question, that existence is in part mere appearance, and only in part actuality", and that "even our ordinary feelings are enough to forbid a casual (fortuitous) existence getting the emphatic name of an actual". And he adds: "As for the term Actuality, these critics would have done well to consider the sense in which I employ it. In a detailed Logic I had treated amongst other things of actuality, and accurately distinguished it not only from the fortuitous, which, after all, has existence, but even from the cognate categories of existence and the other modifications of being." The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Logic, # 6, W. Wallace trans., 2nd ed., Oxford: OUP., 1892, pp. 9 fi; cf. Phil. of Right, Introd., # 1.
Thus the contingent belongs to being but not to reality; it is a phenomenal or apparent existence. And the apparent which passes itself off as real, as in the case of free choice, is properly the illusory.
2 "The contradiction which the arbitrary will is comes into appearance as a dialectic of impulses and inclinations . . ." (Phil. of Right , # 17, Knox trans., p. 28). This contradiction ceases only at the moment in which the will has "universality, or itself qua infinite form, for its object, content, and aim"; then it is "free not only in itself but for itself also". This will which exists in itself and for itself "has for its object the will itself as such, and so the will in its sheer universality". In it are absorbed "the immediacy of instinctive desire and the particularity which is produced by reflection", in other words, the conditions to which free choice was still bound. "This process of absorption in or elevation to universality is what is called the activity of thought." Ibid., # 21, pp. 29 f.
1 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, ## 479, 480, p. 99.
2 "The self-consciousness which purifies its object, content, and aim, and raises them to this universality effects this as thinking getting its own way in the will. Here is the point at which it becomes clear that it is only as thinking intelligence that the will is genuinely a will and free." Phil. of Right, # 21, p. 30.
3 Phil. of Hist., p. 521.
4 J. Hyppolite, Preface to the French translation of Philosophie des rechts (Paris), 1940, p. 18.
5 "Freedom, shaped into the actuality of a world, receives the form of Necessity . . . ." Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 484, p. 103.
6 Phil. of Right, First Part.
1 Family, Civil Society, State.
2 Cf. Phil. of Right, Third Part, sub-section 2.
3 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 523, p. 122.
4 Cf. Phil. of Right, Second Part; Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, Section II, sub-section B; and the chapter on Conscience in the Phenomenology, Baillie trans., pp. 642-679.
5 J. Hyppolite, Preface to the French translation of Philosophie des rechts, p. 14.
6 Phil. of Right, # 132, p. 87.
7 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 508, p. 116.
1 Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 503, pp. 113 f.
2 Ibid., # 508, p. 116.
3 Is it because of the old Lutheran aversion for the Mosaic Law that a philosopher who takes as much pleasure as Hegel in invoking Holy Scripture and religious imagery does not say a word about the Decalogue when he treats morality of conscience? The only writing, to our knowledge, in which he alludes to the Decalogue is one of the products of his youth (translated into English under the title "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate" in G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, T. M. Knox trans., Chicago, 1948; Cambridge: CUP., 1949), and it is for the purpose of laying the blame on Judaism and on "the God of the Jews". (It is well known that the titles of these youthful fragments do not come from Hegel himself, but were proposed by their editor, H. Nohl, Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, Tubingen, 1907.)
1 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 507, p. 115.
2 "To have a conscience, if conscience is only formal subjectivity, is simply to be on the verge of slipping into evil; in independent self-certainty, with its independence of knowledge and decision, both morality and evil have their common root." Phil. of Right, # 139, p. 92.
Between holding that an order does not oblige me because it is contrary to the moral law and holding that it does not oblige me because it displeases me (because I am "the master of law and thing alike") no distinction is possible in the Hegelian perspective. Every rebellion against the will of the social super-individual is the deed of "beautiful souls" who believe they are above the law and take "the culminating form of this subjectivity" for the "final court of appeal", while considering themselves as "the arbiter and judge of truth, right, and duty". Ibid., # 140, pp. 102 f.
3 Cf. Encyclopaedia, ## 511, 512, pp. 117 f. "Wickedness is the same awareness that the single self possesses the decision, so far as the single self does not merely remain in this abstraction, but takes up the content of a subjective interest contrary to the good" (ibid., # 511, p. 118; italics ours). This view of Hegel's may serve to explain why, in existentialist literature after the second World War (whose morality remained precisely at the level of a wholly subjective Moralitat), the heroes of conscience were usually criminals.
1 It can happen that the conscience is in error, and if my conscience errs through my own fault, it is also wrong to commit the act, in itself bad, prescribed by it. But the absolute principle remains that it is always and in every case a fault to act against one's conscience (even in the case where I would be at fault unless I reformed the judgment of my conscience: either in following my culpably erroneous conscience, or in acting against it). Hegel fails completely to understand this absolute principle. And he also fails to understand the fact that the conscience can be objectively and with good reason certain of not being mistaken, if it enlightens and instructs itself, does not erect itself into a supreme judge of the truth when it affirms its certitude about a precept any more than the speculative reason does when it affirms its certitude about a self-evident axiom or about a demonstrated conclusion.
2 Phenomenology, Baillie trans., p. 450. The law by definition is no longer held to be just, it is henceforth defined only by the will of the State. "The law is . . . the pure and absolute will of all which takes the form of immediate existence. This will is, again, not a command which merely ought to be; it is and has validity; it is the universal ego of the category, ego which is immediately reality, and the world is only this reality." ibid., p. 451.
3 One of the reproaches which Hegel addresses to Catholicism is that "in the Catholic Church . . . it is nothing singular for the conscience to be found in opposition to the laws of the State". On the contrary, in the holy interiority of German Protestantism "the Rational no longer meets with contradiction on the part of the religious conscience; it is permitted to develop itself in its own sphere without disturbance, without being compelled to resort to force in defending itself against an adverse power". Phil. of Hist., p. 529.
1 "The Family may be reckoned as virtually a single person." The parents have "mutually surrendered their individual personality". Ibid., p. 90.
2 Phil. of Right, ## 258 and 279. "Hence it is the basic moment of personality, abstract at the start in immediate rights, which has matured itself through its various forms of subjectivity, and now -- at the stage of absolute rights, of the state, of the completely concrete objectivity of the will -- has become the personality of the state, its certainty of itself. This last reabsorbs all particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying 'I will' makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality" (# 279, p. 181). Hegel adds that the monarch is necessary for the full, concrete reality of the personality of the State.
3 Phil. of Right, # 258, Gans' addition from Hegel's oral teaching, Knox trans., p. 279. The German original reads: "Sein Grund ist die Gewalt der sich als Wille verwirklichenden Vernunft." Philosophie des Rechts, 3rd ed., in Werke, VI, p. 349.
1 Phil. of Right, # 260, p. 160.
2 Ibid., # 270, p. 166.
3 Ibid., p. 174.
4 Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 87.
5 Phil. of Right, # 272, Gans' addition, Knox trans., p. 285.
6 Ibid., # 258, Gans' addition, Knox trans., p.279. The German original reads: "Es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, dass der Staat ist" (Phil. des Rechts in Werke, VI, p. 349).
7 Phil. of Hist., # Introd., p. 87.
8 Phil. of Right, # 258, pp. 155 f.
9 "This is why Hegel says that the 'absolute' State which he has in view (the Napoleonic Empire) is the realization of the Christian kingdom of heaven." A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, p. 193. [The Napoleonic Empire at the time of the Phenomenology; the Germanic State at the time of the Philosophy of History.]
10 Kojève, op. cit., p. 505.
1 Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Lasson ed., I, p. 90 (Werke, VIII), (Sibree trans., p. 87).
2 Phil. of Right, # 258, p. 156. (Philosophie des Rechts, # 258, Lasson's 3rd ed., Werke, VI, p. 196: "Er [der Staat] hat aber em ganz anderes Verhältnis zum Individuum; indem er objektiver Geist ist, so hat das Individuum selbst mur Objektivität, Wahrheit und Sittlichkeit, als es em Glied desselben ist.")
For Hegel, as Jean Hyppolite has noted (Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel, p. 376), the general will is the "intrinsic self of individuals", their substance, which at first appears to them as alien, but which they must become through culture.
3 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 552, Wallace trans., p. 165.
1 "The laws of real Freedom demand the subjugation of the mere contingent Will." Phil. of Hist., p. 569. "Law, Morality, Government, and they alone", are "the positive reality and completion of Freedom" ("die positive Wirklichkeit und Befriedigung der Freiheit"). Ibid., p. 86 (Lasson ed., I, Werke, VIII, Leipzig, 1930, p. 90). Cf. Phil. of Right, ## 146-147, pp. 105 f.: "This ethical substance and its laws and powers are on the one hand an object over against the subject, and from his point of view they are -- 'are' in the highest sense of self-subsistent being. This is an absolute authority and power infinitely more firmly established than the being of nature . . . . On the other hand, they are not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, his spirit bears witness to them as to its own essence. . . .
3 Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 88.
4 The expressions "objective morality", "social morality", or "customary morality" which are sometimes used for the word Sittlichkeit are worthless, because they overlook the essential Hegelian connotation of interiority or subjective depth of the moral life.
5 Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 88. Cf. Phil. of Right, ## 151, 152, pp. 108 f.: "But when individuals are simply identified with the actual order, ethical life (das Sittliche) appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom (Sitte), while the habitual practice of ethical living appears as a second nature which [is] put in the place of the initial, purely natural will. . . . In this way the ethical substantial order has attained its right, and its right its validity. That is to say, the self-will of the individual has vanished together with his private conscience -- which had claimed independence and opposed itself to the ethical substance" (italics ours). Encyclopaedia, Phil of Mind, # 514, pp. 119 f.: "The consciously free substance, in which the absolute 'ought' is no less an 'is', has actuality as the spirit of a nation. . . . But the [166]
person, as an intelligent being, feels that underlying essence to be his own very being ceases when so minded to be a mere accident of it -- looks upon it as his absolute final aim. In its actuality he sees not less an achieved present, than somewhat he brings it about by his action -- yet somewhat which without all question is. Thus, without any selective reflection, the person performs its duty as his own and as something which is; and in this necessity he has himself and his actual freedom."
1 Taking into account the disposition or existential state in which it finds itself. Cf. Cajetan on Thomas Aquinas, in Sum. theol., I-II, q. 10, a. 2: "Aliud est dicere, Voluntas necessario movetur ab objecto ad exercitium actus; et dicere, Voluntas sic disposita necessario movetur ad exercitium actus. . . . Nullum objectum, ut sic, et quantum est ex sua efficacia, potest naturali necessitate compellere voluntatem ad exercitium actus. . . . Voluntas Deum dare visum necessario amat: est enim tunc in dispositione tali, quod ex natura sua actu provenit amor et delectatio talis objecti. . . . Quandocumque voluntas necessario movetur ad exercitium, necessitas illa nunquam est ab objecto, sed a natura et naturae Datore."
2 For Hegel the individual as a particular individual, or as a human atom, is a whole or a person only in a purely abstract and formal sense; but the individual renounces even this and then goes beyond it. In the family he exists "not as an independent person but as a member" (Phil. of Right, # 158, p. 110); it is the same, and for all the more reason, in the State.
1 Phänomenologie des Geistes, 3rd ed., in Werke, II, p. 472.
2 A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, p. 561.
3 Jenenser Realphilosophie, II, Die Vorlesungen von 1805/06 in Werke, XX, p. 225, n. 3. (Translation based on Kojève, op. cit., p. 563.)
4 Phenomenology, pp. 470 f. (Lasson ed., 1928, pp. 321 f.)
2 Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 62.
3 Phil. of Right, # 7, p. 23.
4 Ibid., p. 23.
5 Ibid., p. 24. Let us recall (cf. above, ch. VII, p. 144) that the finite, contingent, phenomenal self is entirely abstract and general and attains true individuality only while denying itself in order to reintegrate itself in the concrete universal. The true self is "liberation existing for itself", which owes its existence to thought thinking the necessary and which "consists in that which is actual having itself not as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity" (Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 159, p. 285). Cf. ibid., # 20, pp. 38 f.; and Phil. of Right, Gans' addition to # 7, Knox trans., pp. 228 f.
6 Thus it is that in order to liberate itself in the truth the subjective spirit "abnegates its particularity and comes to itself in realizing the truth of its being". Phil. of Hist., p. 521 (italics ours).
7 Phil. of Right, # 23, p. 30.
1 If it is true that "only that will which obeys law is free" (Phil. of Hist., Introd., p. 87), it is in virtue of the interiorization of the law thus effectuated by the individual conscience and reason which see that it is right to obey and decide accordingly. For Hegel, on the contrary, this will then "obeys itself -- it is independent and so free" (ibid., p. 87), because in reality it has its true independence in "the common interests of the members generally" (ibid., p. 91). "The Rational has necessary existence, as being the reality and substance of things, and we are free in recognizing it as law, and following it as the substance of our own being" (ibid., pp. 87 f.).
2 On the difference between the formal aspect of individuality and the formal aspect of personality in the human person, see our book The Person and the Common Good, New York: Scribners, 1947; London: Geoffrey Bles.
1 Phil. of Right, # 261, p. 162.
Whenever one has to do with a great error (great not only in gravity, but also in courage, significance, and logical consistency), one naturally finds subtle attenuators or extenuators, intelligent and erudite, who think that a simple declaration of fact is lacking in elegance, and exaggerates.
In his book Hegel et l'Etat (Paris: Vrin, 1950, p. 117), Eric Weil assures us that the Hegelian conception of the State is not totalitarian but liberal. To show this it suffices for him to neglect Hegel's actual philosophy and all its doctrinal apparatus and to take into consideration only the constitutional form which he in effect recommends. But to tell the truth, all that one can conclude from this is that Hegel's totalitarianism was too profound, and too consubstantial to his very notion of the State, to have any need of the appearances of absolutism.
Canon F. Grégoire, in a communication to the Académie Royale de Belgique ("Une semi-légende, la 'divinité de l'Etat chez Hegel," Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques, 5e serie, Tome XLI, 1955 -- VI, pp. 315 f.), assures us, for his part, that for Hegel in the pair State - individual "each of the two terms is an end for the other"; in such a way that "for one part -- a preponderant part, moreover -- the State is the ultimate end of the individuals, considered in their exterior advantages, and for one part -- a smaller part -- the individuals are the ultimate end of the State". In support of this interpretation Canon F. Grégoire refers us to "two capital passages" which he does not quote at all though he does provide references (Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Lasson ed., I, p. 91 in Werke, VI; Geschichte der Philosophie, II, in H. Glockner's Jubilee edition, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 18, Stuttgart, 1929-40, reprinted 1959, pp. 394-400). When one turns to the pages cited, one finds absolutely nothing to justify the interpretation in question.
Hegel considers as inferior stages, on the one hand (thesis), the Greek city and the Aristotelian theory of the city (in which the individual is subordinated to the whole, but without being "recognized" by it), because this whole itself remains abstract, and on the other hand (antithesis), the modern liberal State, in which the individual is enclosed within his natural singularity like a worker who makes only parts which others will assemble and who is ignorant of the whole (cf. Gesch. der Phil., II, Glockner ed., Vol. 18, p. 400). In his own conception, it is not only because of his immediate or natural singularity and in relation to the State taken as abstract whole that the individual is a part of the State; it is in spirit and in truth (as raised to the rational level) and in relation to the State as concrete universal that the individual, through his consciousness of this whole which is his real essence, wishes to become part of the State and at the same time equates itself with it, and receives from it, along with his true individuality and liberty, his unique value at last concretely realized. There is no trace of any higher recognition accorded to the individual in the lines which constitute, so far as one can judge, one of Canon F. Grégoire's "two capital passages", and in which, after having noted that the "bürgerliche Freiheit" -- "principle of isolation" -- is a "necessary moment" (on the way to a higher synthesis, the Hegelian state) "which the ancient States did not know", Hegel adds that neither did they know "diese vollkommene Selbstständigkeit der Punkte, und eben grössere Selbständigkeit des Ganzen, -- das höhere organische Leben. Nachdem der Staat diess Princip in sich empfangen, konnte höhere [172]
Freiheit hervorgehen". (Ibid., p. 400.) It is in and through the independence of the whole that each "point" possesses its own independence, the higher organic life being that in which each part is raised to the being of the whole through an active communion with it. The more so as that which this "higher freedom", higher than "civil freedom", makes us see is -- instead of simple "Naturspiele und Naturprodukte" or of "individual fantasy" "das innere Bestehen und die unzertörbare Allgemeinheit, die real, konsolidirt in ihren Theilen ist". (Ibid., pp. 400 f.; italics ours.)
As for the second "capital passage" to which Canon F. Grégoire refers us (Phil. der Weltgeschichte, Lasson ed., I, p. 91, in Werke, VI), we read: "Der Staat ist nicht um der Bürger willen da; man könnte sagen, er ist der Zweck, und sie sind seine Werkzeuge. Indes ist dies Verhältnis von Zweck und Mittel überhaupt hier nicht passend. Denn der Staat ist nicht das Abstrakte, das den Bürgern gegenübersteht; sondern sie sind Momente wie im organischen Leben, wo kein Glied Zweck, keines Mittel ist. Das Göttliche des Staats ist die Idee, wie sie auf Erden vorhanden ist." Hegel is explaining to us here that the State might be said to be the end and individuals its instruments, but that the relation of means to end is inappropriate in this context, because the State is not an abstract whole opposed to the individuals; the latter are moments as in organic life where all the members are for one another. This does not mean at all, as Canon F. Grégoire suggests, that the part is for the whole and the whole for the part, but that the parts exist for one another. As for the State, its divinity comes from the fact that it is the Idea manifested on earth; in other words, it is the concrete universal in which the individuals exist for one another and which is not an end separated from them because it is their unity itself and the substance of the rational in them. On the previous page (op. cit., p. 90) Hegel has taken care, moreover, to note that man has no rational existence except in the State, and that all that he is, all his worth, all his spiritual reality he owes to the State and only to the State. "Im Staat allein hat der Mensch vernünftige Existenz. . . . Alles, was der Mensch ist, verdankt er dem Staat; er hat nur darin sein Wesen. Allen Wert, den der Mensch hat, alle geistige Wirklichkeit, hat er allein durch den Staat." (Italics ours.)
Hegel reproaches the Greek city for not having sufficiently integrated the individual, and therefore for subjecting him to itself without at the same time freeing him. In the Hegelian State the individual is integrated in a manner so organically superior that his submission is his freedom and he derives all his worth from the State. It is an absolute and totalitarian spiritual-State-community. To say that for Hegel individuals have "distinct emergence, so to speak, outside this whole" which is the State (cf. the already cited communication to the Académie Royale de Belgique, p. 327), is one of those subtle paradoxes, one of those pleasant jokes of which certain cultivated and smiling ecclesiastics seem to be masters. For Hegel the absolute spirit and absolute science are certainly more divine than the State, and through them the sage, a member of the State, reflexively justifies the State and reveals it to itself, but even the sage has no "distinct emergence" outside the State, which is absolutely supreme throughout the whole practical or ethical order.
1 A few examples will make this distinction clearer. Take a manufacturer who makes his factory psychologically and technically attractive for the sole purpose of obtaining better production from the workers: the workers certainly benefit, and all is for the best, but it is only by accident that their dignity as persons is benefited at the same time. Now take an army which organizes for its soldiers, according to the best rules of hygiene, facilities for the use of prostitutes and the violation of the sixth commandment; or a State which crams its citizens with controlled culture in order to domesticate their ideas and their minds. In both these cases the individual finds himself in a certain way benefited, but his dignity as a person is disregarded and insulted.
1 Cf. Jean Hyppolite, Genièse et structure de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel, p. 343.
2 ". . . of the Spirit which has grasped itself in seiner Freiheit und in dem Reichthum seiner Wirklichkeit." Geschichte der Philosophie, K. L. Michelet ed., III, in Sämtliche Werke, XV, Berlin, 1936, p. 684.
3 Phenomenology, p. 86. Cf. Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 312. Further on (p. 574), after having cited the following lines from the Phenomenology (p. 793): "Herein it is established, at the same time, that the third moment, universality, or the essence, means for each of the two opposite factors merely knowledge. Finally they also cancel the empty opposition that still remains, and are the knowledge of Self as identical with Self: this individual self which is immediately pure knowledge or universal," the same author remarks: "The reconciliation of the finite and the infinite spirit which is expressed in this last text is absolute knowledge itself, a knowledge which is at the same time the knowledge which the Absolute has of itself and that of this finite spirit which is raised to the universal consciousness of self."
1 See the Preface to Phil. of Right, Knox trans., pp. 11 f. Cf. Geschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung, J. Hoffmeister ed., in Werke, XVa, p. 149: "Philosophy is identical with the Spirit of the epoch in which it appears; it is not above it, it is only the consciousness of what is substantial in its time or knowledge thinking of what is in time. An individual likewise does not dominate his time, rather is he its son; the substance of this time is his own essence; he merely manifests it under a particular form. An individual can no more get outside the substance of his time than he can get outside his skin. Thus from the substantial point of view philosophy cannot go beyond its time." (Italics ours.)
One will notice that for Hegel not only does philosophy inevitably bear the mark of its time, but it is entirely bound up in time; in his thought there is no region above time; he merely manifests the substance of his time. And philosophy itself is entirely bound up in time, there is nothing supra-temporal or non-temporal in it; it is only the consciousness of what is substantial in its time. None of the truths which it perceives dominates the ages; at each period in history they all have to be not only re-thought anew (which is true), but recast in a new doctrinal substance proper to the spirit of the time (until the arrival of absolute Knowledge at the end of history).
2 J. Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 48.
3 Geschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung, Hoffmeister ed., Werke, XVa, p. 84. In philosophy "we find ourselves by ourselves (bei uns) without depending on anything else," because in philosophy (in absolute knowledge) we are the Spirit thinking itself and hence we depend neither on an extra-notional reality nor on a Spirit which transcends us. "Philosophy having the general as its object is not liable to the variability of the subject. It is possible that someone may have ideas about essence, he may know this or that about truth; but thoughts or knowledge of this kind is not yet philosophy. . . ." (Ibid.)
1 A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, p. 324 (à propos of Phänomenologie, 4th ed., by J. Hoffmeister, in Werke, II, p. 556). "There where the Sage is," Kojève writes once more (ibid., p. 418), "there is no more Man properly speaking. There is only the Concept."
2 Glauben und Wissen (1802) in Werke, 1, pp. 303 f.
3 "Hegel knows and says it [that it is necessary to undergo this annihilation]. But he says also, in one of his letters, that this knowledge cost him dearly. He speaks of a period of total depression which he experienced between his 25th and 30th years: a 'hypochondria' whose effect extended 'bis zur Erlähmung aller Kräfte,' 'to the paralysis of all his strength' and which derived precisely from the fact that he could not accept the necessary abandonment of Individuality, that is to say in fact of humanity, which the idea of absolute Knowledge demands. But, finally, he overcame this 'Hypochondria'. . . ." Kojève, op. cit., p. 441.
1 It is in this sense, and thus modifying them considerably (by putting them into a perspective which sees Hegelian thought as anthropo-theist, certainly, but not atheist) that we subscribe to Kojève's remarks in his study on "The idea of death in the philosophy of Hegel" (op. cit., Appendix II). The conscious acceptance of death (as definitive) and the absolute liberation which it implies with regard to any idea of a transcendent God "satisfies", Kojève writes (p. 570), "the infinite pride of man, which constitutes the very basis of his human existence and which is the last irreducible motive of his act of self-creation". Yes, that is authentically Hegelian.