In
college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor. I
did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I
read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the
mind and reality. American and British schools neglected the study of
Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union
promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history.
Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel
from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to
Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).
Today
we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with
Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave
Dialectic. Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of
psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the
following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx). This
will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.
THE LIFE OF HEGEL
As
I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution,
and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great
anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of
reason and rationality. Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre
tried to install. Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more
cynical and conservative in time. Many scholars have argued that this
dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of
history and philosophy. By the time Hegel wrote his major work the
Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who
embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a
transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and
Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and
liberties. As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from
believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the
established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous
change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.
Hegel
began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German
philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister.
Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen
(where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a
cunning theology. I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between
Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle
ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and
German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis. Hegel
does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of
humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of
the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to
the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time). Marx
took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking
Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of
God but the material science of politics being established according to
the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and
making it materialistic atheism.
As
a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of
good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin. After watching the
collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and
freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see
understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway
in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and
Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and
forth to achieve greater truth.
In
1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his
academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena. At the time, Kant
was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in
dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time. Hegel particularly
took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional
forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including
philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two
forces.
HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM
Hegel
has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers.
The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel
argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve
through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they
evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not
simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation
with other things by which they become what they are. After Hegel,
Marx, Darwin, and Freud were major thinkers who overturned old theories
of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of
the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at
the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there
was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy
formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how
this questions our human-centered understanding of reality.
Hegel’s
second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is
dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for
and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Socrates and
Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge,
and Plato’s dialogues present Socrates arguing against others and
himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of
oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”,
like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing).
This is similar to Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal
but opposite force.
Hegel’s
dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and
synthesis. Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French
Revolution, and Napoleon. Consider the hometown conservative, the
college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after
taking both sides. Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive
(dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then
reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which
then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of
evolution. Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time
in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as
two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than
categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things
actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in
the mind and world.
In
the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy,
thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the
same time dividing everything up into their particular parts. It does
this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and
reason.
Understanding,
the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the
same and keeping conceptions separate. Reason, the motion and freedom
of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of
understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions
together as a whole. This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative
thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them
from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to
change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical
differences of the understanding with inter-relativity. While everyone
uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every
stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid
reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set
understandings.
For
Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics,
philosophy, science etc) understanding provides the stable ground for
the back and forth positions of reason. Philosophies, political
positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they
share the common understandings of the time and place. Theologians
fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the
name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy,
and scientists fight scientists in the name of science. For Hegel there
really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the
philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course
of things which is thought. Many have written a good deal about Hegel
and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted
and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx
themselves.
Remember
that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are
rare. Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most
get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of
dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare
individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides
and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon). My
own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving
us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for
Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also
supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth
and history. Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND
I
disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and
eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not
only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic
to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history. Like
the Logic, it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete
itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For
Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this
term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to
everyone who is not European. As archeology in Hegel’s time had
revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts
this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is
good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all
further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the
development is a course of Europe becoming different from others. The
Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives.
The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not
question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do
not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. It
is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this
next leap and become the second stage of history.
The
Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as
Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of
objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are
the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship
with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were
only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers
calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three
places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age). Just
as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the
negative, the temporary, subjective and perspective. Hegel sees this as
Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees
Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development.
However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being
off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s
static ideal forms.
It
is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity
of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity
and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of
thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in
a page, with no credit at all. The Europeans, are in the position to
realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as
the last negative and positive before his own system of unification.
Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time
with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary
state which balances collective objectivity with individual
subjectivity, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as
Locke argued it should. Rights and property are the unity of objective
and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual
understandings and perspectives.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
One
of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the
Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that
occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next
in history. It works equally on the level of idea, individual and
social movement. At first, the individual goes out into the world and
discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and
views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these
others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be
objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master,
and develops understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and
grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement. The
slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing
things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires,
and thus develops and triumphs over the master and becomes the next
master.
This
is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to
do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to
complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap
seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing.
Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and
the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out,
but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today.
The
Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers,
especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s
student Marx. Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off
the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist
revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists.
Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like
Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’. Post-Colonialists use the
master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did
in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did the Black Panther, activist and
professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going
to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in
Oakland during the 60s). Considering that class, race and gender are
the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite
influential.
HEGEL’S LOGIC
After
writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not
described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to
his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves
history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show
the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development,
he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages
as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks
and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and
Concept.
Remember
the dialectical process of the opposite yet complementary
forces/faculties of understanding and reason. Why is thought opposed to
itself? Where did this come from? Hegel writes that we need to start
with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of
the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important.
This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible
as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or
religious authority. When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided
world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and
tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today,
we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the
infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget
& Vygotsky). Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and
survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort
and the process of history. Hegel argued that work and labor are a
contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the
mental and the physical. Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and
both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of
another level of truth through history.
Hegel
calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered,
assumed, by the Understanding. However, these are inadequate. First,
they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each
other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out
how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big
One/All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content. A cow is a
cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the
categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the
similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater
understanding. In the Logic Hegel writes:
That
true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual
thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know,
or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being
conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old
metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of
which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying
categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites… However
reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must
not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly
confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic
gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of
consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us
may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.
Hegel
writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within
oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond
itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the
Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we
are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite
sides.
In
the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of
Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic
fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding
contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to
the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides
and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what
Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the
Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any
transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and non-being as
one like Heraclitus. It is recognizing this with the categories of our
understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) that is the hard part.
Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from
being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and
revolutions in thought are rare.
Once
thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their
non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other
things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every
thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand
the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant
becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are
particularly interrelated. ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent
truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular
beings or stages of history. For this, reason must push towards more
contradictions.
Thought
must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of
individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their
qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the
things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to
understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one
itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many
members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and
tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things.
Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our
abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through
thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not
explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its
being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me
much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in
context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the
qualities and quantities of the hand.
Because
thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities,
it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then
understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It either
puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the
stars), or inside of things as “nature”. It seeks the meaning of the
thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as
One’ or in singular things. The problem with this stage is that things
are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding
from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much
like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising). Hegel is very aware
that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding
new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms,
Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not
complete because they are not like the world in which everything fits
together as one. Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are
not gathered into a trunk of the All, still have contradictions in
themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
Through
further dialectic, the idea and the thing are realized as one in the
Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the
world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our
ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this
is Actuality, the final stage. Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum
Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes
that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the
final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond
itself to grasp. To see that no part of reality is absolutely
necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as
opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that
lets us see things as they are. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth
as true science and speculation, with a ground to continue to
investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by
which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea,
which is in extension with the world.
Marx
was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process
of opposites resolving in unity. Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by
nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the
middle and upper classes). Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were
trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped
in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from
that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo. Just as
Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus
remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle
and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and
contradictions of their position and labor. However, through a process
identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would
eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the
political arrangement of the communist international state. Not only
would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the
contradictions between warring nation-states.
Both
Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of
laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions. Hegel was aware
of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising
industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in
his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution
but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.
In
1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral
Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada
artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic
intensely to comprehend Marx. Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as
bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material. For
Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that
ideas exist by way of the historical and material.
Most
importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his
criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will
that binds everyone together in the general will and the social
contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that
determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and
classes. Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a
result of ages of understandings/classes developed through
reason/revolution. Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic
will with rationalistic reason. Nietzsche, who like Hegel was
influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against
reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally.
In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain
rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the
princes banding together. Marx wrote his major works in this period for
a German revolutionary audience. The failure of the German revolution
was the major cause of German pessimism, a turn from reason as the
force of history to will as the force of history. We will consider this
more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.
We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.
