Hegel's Philosophy of Mind · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
SECTION II. MIND OBJECTIVE.
The unification of all concrete state-powers into one existence, as in the patriarchal society,—or, as in a democratic constitution, the participation of all in all affairs—impugns the principle of the division of powers, i.e. the developed liberty of the constituent factors of the Idea. But no whit less must the division (the working out of these factors each to a free totality) be reduced to “ideal” unity, i.e. to _subjectivity_. The mature differentiation or realisation of the Idea means, essentially, that this subjectivity should grow to be a _real_ “moment,” an _actual_ existence; and this actuality is not otherwise than as the individuality of the monarch—the subjectivity of abstract and final decision existent in _one_ person. All those forms of collective decreeing and willing,—a common will which shall be the sum and the resultant (on aristocratical or democratical principles) of the atomistic of single wills, have on them the mark of the unreality of an abstraction. Two points only are all-important, first to see the necessity of each of the notional factors, and secondly the form in which it is actualised. It is only the nature of the speculative notion which can really give light on the matter. That subjectivity—being the “moment” which emphasises the need of abstract deciding in general—partly leads on to the proviso that the name of the monarch appear as the bond and sanction under which everything is done in the government;—partly, being simple self-relation, has attached to it the characteristic of _immediacy_, and then of _nature_—whereby the destination of individuals for the dignity of the princely power is fixed by inheritance.
The division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, is still the most definite statement of their difference in relation to sovereignty. They must at the same time be regarded as necessary structures in the path of development,—in short, in the history of the State. Hence it is superficial and absurd to represent them as an object of _choice_. The pure forms—necessary to the process of evolution—are, in so far as they are finite and in course of change, conjoined both with forms of their degeneration,—such as ochlocracy, &c., and with earlier transition-forms. These two forms are not to be confused with those legitimate structures. Thus, it may be—if we look only to the fact that the will of one individual stands at the head of the state—oriental despotism is included under the vague name monarchy,—as also feudal monarchy, to which indeed even the favourite name of “constitutional monarchy” cannot be refused. The true difference of these forms from genuine monarchy depends on the true value of those principles of right which are in vogue and have their actuality and guarantee in the state-power. These principles are those expounded earlier, liberty of property, and above all personal liberty, civil society, with its industry and its communities, and the regulated efficiency of the particular bureaux in subordination to the laws.
The question which is most discussed is in what sense we are to understand the participation of private persons in state affairs. For it is as private persons that the members of bodies of estates are primarily to be taken, be they treated as mere individuals, or as representatives of a number of people or of the nation. The aggregate of private persons is often spoken of as the _nation_: but as such an aggregate it is _vulgus_, not _populus_: and in this direction, it is the one sole aim of the state that a nation should _not_ come to existence, to power and action, _as such an aggregate_. Such a condition of a nation is a condition of lawlessness, demoralisation, brutishness: in it the nation would only be a shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy, elemental sea, which however is not self-destructive, as the nation—a spiritual element—would be. Yet such a condition may be often heard described as that of true freedom. If there is to be any sense in embarking upon the question of the participation of private persons in public affairs, it is not a brutish mass, but an already organised nation—one in which a governmental power exists—which should be presupposed.
The desirability of such participation however is not to be put in the superiority of particular intelligence, which private persons are supposed to have over state officials—the contrary may be the case—nor in the superiority of their good will for the general best. The members of civil society as such are rather people who find their nearest duty in their private interest and (as especially in the feudal society) in the interest of their privileged corporation. Take the case of _England_ which, because private persons have a predominant share in public affairs, has been regarded as having the freest of all constitutions. Experience shows that that country—as compared with the other civilised states of Europe—is the most backward in civil and criminal legislation, in the law and liberty of property, in arrangements for art and science, and that objective freedom or rational right is rather _sacrificed_ to formal right and particular private interest; and that this happens even in the institutions and possessions supposed to be dedicated to religion. The desirability of private persons taking part in public affairs is partly to be put in their concrete, and therefore more urgent, sense of general wants.
But the true motive is the right of the collective spirit to appear as an _externally universal_ will, acting with orderly and express efficacy for the public concerns. By this satisfaction of this right it gets its own life quickened, and at the same time breathes fresh life in the administrative officials; who thus have it brought home to them that not merely have they to enforce duties but also to have regard to rights. Private citizens are in the state the incomparably greater number, and form the multitude of such as are recognised as persons. Hence the will-reason exhibits its existence in them as a preponderating majority of freemen, or in its “reflectional” universality, which has its actuality vouchsafed it as a participation in the sovereignty. But it has already been noted as a “moment” of civil society (§§ 527, 534) that the individuals rise from external into substantial universality, and form a _particular_ kind,—the Estates: and it is not in the inorganic form of mere individuals as such (after the _democratic_ fashion of election), but as organic factors, as estates, that they enter upon that participation. In the state a power or agency must never appear and act as a formless, inorganic shape, i.e. basing itself on the principle of multeity and mere numbers.
Assemblies of Estates have been wrongly designated as the _legislative power_, so far as they form only one branch of that power,—a branch in which the special government-officials have an _ex officio_ share, while the sovereign power has the privilege of final decision. In a civilised state moreover legislation can only be a further modification of existing law, and so-called new laws can only deal with minutiae of detail and particularities (cf. § 529, note), the main drift of which has been already prepared or preliminarily settled by the practice of the law-courts. The so-called _financial law_, in so far as it requires the assent of the estates, is really a government affair: it is only improperly called a law, in the general sense of embracing a wide, indeed the whole, range of the external means of government. The finances deal with what in their nature are only particular needs, ever newly recurring, even if they touch on the sum total of such needs. If the main part of the requirement were—as it very likely is—regarded as permanent, the provision for it would have more the nature of a law: but to be a law, it would have to be made once for all, and not be made yearly, or every few years, afresh.
The part which varies according to time and circumstances concerns in reality the smallest part of the amount, and the provisions with regard to it have even less the character of a law: and yet it is and may be only this slight variable part which is matter of dispute, and can be subjected to a varying yearly estimate. It is this last then which falsely bears the high-sounding name of the “_Grant_” of the _Budget_, i.e. of the whole of the finances. A law for one year and made each year has even to the plain man something palpably absurd: for he distinguishes the essential and developed universal, as content of a true law, from the reflectional universality which only externally embraces what in its nature is many. To give the name of a law to the annual fixing of financial requirements only serves—with the presupposed separation of legislative from executive—to keep up the illusion of that separation having real existence, and to conceal the fact that the legislative power, when it makes a decree about finance, is really engaged with strict executive business.
But the importance attached to the power of from time to time granting “supply,” on the ground that the assembly of estates possesses in it a _check_ on the government, and thus a guarantee against injustice and violence,—this importance is in one way rather plausible than real. The financial measures necessary for the state’s subsistence cannot be made conditional on any other circumstances, nor can the state’s subsistence be put yearly in doubt. It would be a parallel absurdity if the government were e.g. to grant and arrange the judicial institutions always for a limited time merely; and thus, by the threat of suspending the activity of such an institution and the fear of a consequent state of brigandage, reserve for itself a means of coercing private individuals. Then again, the pictures of a condition of affairs, in which it might be useful and necessary to have in hand means of compulsion, are partly based on the false conception of a contract between rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the possibility of such a divergence in spirit between these two parties as would make constitution and government quite out of the question. If we suppose the empty possibility of getting _help_ by such compulsive means brought into existence, such help would rather be the derangement and dissolution of the state, in which there would no longer be a government, but only parties, and the violence and oppression of one party would only be helped away by the other. To fit together the several parts of the state into a constitution after the fashion of mere understanding—i.e. to adjust within it the machinery of a balance of powers external to each other—is to contravene the fundamental idea of what a state is.
Such _a priori_ history-writing has sometimes burst out in quarters where one would least have expected it, especially on the philological side, and in Germany more than in France and England, where the art of historical writing has gone through a process of purification to a firmer and maturer character. Fictions, like that of a primitive age and its primitive people, possessed from the first of the true knowledge of God and all the sciences,—of sacerdotal races,—and, when we come to minutiae, of a Roman epic, supposed to be the source of the legends which pass current for the history of ancient Rome, &c., have taken the place of the pragmatising which detected psychological motives and associations. There is a wide circle of persons who seem to consider it incumbent on a _learned_ and _ingenious_ historian drawing from the original sources to concoct such baseless fancies, and form bold combinations of them from a learned rubbish-heap of out-of-the-way and trivial facts, in defiance of the best-accredited history.
Setting aside this subjective treatment of history, we find what is properly the opposite view forbidding us to import into history an _objective purpose_. This is after all synonymous with what _seems_ to be the still more legitimate demand that the historian should proceed with _impartiality_. This is a requirement often and especially made on the _history of philosophy_: where it is insisted there should be no prepossession in favour of an idea or opinion, just as a judge should have no special sympathy for one of the contending parties. In the case of the judge it is at the same time assumed that he would administer his office ill and foolishly, if he had not an interest, and an exclusive interest in justice, if he had not that for his aim and one sole aim, or if he declined to judge at all. This requirement which we may make upon the judge may be called _partiality_ for justice; and there is no difficulty here in distinguishing it from _subjective_ partiality. But in speaking of the impartiality required from the historian, this self-satisfied insipid chatter lets the distinction disappear, and rejects both kinds of interest. It demands that the historian shall bring with him no definite aim and view by which he may sort out, state and criticise events, but shall narrate them exactly in the casual mode he finds them, in their incoherent and unintelligent particularity. Now it is at least admitted that a history must have an object, e.g. Rome and its fortunes, or the Decline of the grandeur of the Roman empire. But little reflection is needed to discover that this is the presupposed end which lies at the basis of the events themselves, as of the critical examination into their comparative importance, i.e. their nearer or more remote relation to it. A history without such aim and such criticism would be only an imbecile mental divagation, not as good as a fairy tale, for even children expect a _motif_ in their stories, a purpose at least dimly surmiseable with which events and actions are put in relation.
In the existence of a _nation_ the substantial aim is to be a state and preserve itself as such. A nation with no state formation, (a _mere nation_), has strictly speaking no history,—like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery. What happens to a nation, and takes place within it, has its essential significance in relation to the state: whereas the mere particularities of individuals are at the greatest distance from the true object of history. It is true that the general spirit of an age leaves its imprint in the character of its celebrated individuals, and even their particularities are but the very distant and the dim media through which the collective light still plays in fainter colours. Ay, even such singularities as a petty occurrence, a word, express not a subjective particularity, but an age, a nation, a civilisation, in striking portraiture and brevity; and to select such trifles shows the hand of a historian of genius. But, on the other hand, the main mass of singularities is a futile and useless mass, by the painstaking accumulation of which the objects of real historical value are overwhelmed and obscured. The essential characteristic of the spirit and its age is always contained in the great events.
It was a correct instinct which sought to banish such portraiture of the particular and the gleaning of insignificant traits, into the _Novel_ (as in the celebrated romances of Walter Scott, &c.). Where the picture presents an unessential aspect of life it is certainly in good taste to conjoin it with an unessential material, such as the romance takes from private events and subjective passions. But to take the individual pettinesses of an age and of the persons in it, and, in the interest of so-called truth, weave them into the picture of general interests, is not only against taste and judgment, but violates the principles of objective truth. The only truth for mind is the substantial and underlying essence, and not the trivialities of external existence and contingency. It is therefore completely indifferent whether such insignificancies are duly vouched for by documents, or, as in the romance, invented to suit the character and ascribed to this or that name and circumstances. The point of interest of _Biography_—to say a word on that here—appears to run directly counter to any universal scope and aim. But biography too has for its background the historical world, with which the individual is intimately bound up: even purely personal originality, the freak of humour, &c. suggests by allusion that central reality and has its interest heightened by the suggestion. The mere play of sentiment, on the contrary, has another ground and interest than history.
The requirement of impartiality addressed to the history of philosophy (and also, we may add, to the history of religion, first in general, and secondly, to church history) generally implies an even more decided bar against presupposition of any objective aim. As the State was already called the point to which in political history criticism had to refer all events, so here the “_Truth_” must be the object to which the several deeds and events of the spirit would have to be referred. What is actually done is rather to make the contrary presupposition. Histories with such an object as religion or philosophy are understood to have only subjective aims for their theme, i.e. only opinions and mere ideas, not an essential and realised object like the truth. And that with the mere excuse that there is no truth. On this assumption the sympathy with truth appears as only a partiality of the usual sort, a partiality for opinion and mere ideas, which all alike have no stuff in them, and are all treated as indifferent. In that way historical truth means but correctness—an accurate report of externals, without critical treatment save as regards this correctness—admitting, in this case, only qualitative and quantitative judgments, no judgments of necessity or notion (cf. notes to §§ 172 and 175).
But, really, if Rome or the German empire, &c. are an actual and genuine object of political history, and the aim to which the phenomena are to be related and by which they are to be judged; then in universal history the genuine spirit, the consciousness of it and of its essence, is even in a higher degree a true and actual object and theme, and an aim to which all other phenomena are essentially and actually subservient. Only therefore through their relationship to it, i.e. through the judgment in which they are subsumed under it, while it inheres in them, have they their value and even their existence. It is the spirit which not merely broods _over_ history as over the waters, but lives in it and is alone its principle of movement: and in the path of that spirit, liberty, i.e. a development determined by the notion of spirit, is the guiding principle and only its notion its final aim, i.e. truth. For Spirit is consciousness. Such a doctrine—or in other words that Reason is in history—will be partly at least a plausible faith, partly it is a cognition of philosophy. § 550. This liberation of mind, in which it proceeds to come to itself and to realise its truth, and the business of so doing, is the supreme right, the absolute Law. The self-consciousness of a particular nation is a vehicle for the contemporary development of the collective spirit in its actual existence: it is the objective actuality in which that spirit for the time invests its will. Against this absolute will the other particular natural minds have no rights: _that_ nation dominates the world: but yet the universal will steps onward over its property for the time being, as over a special grade, and then delivers it over to its chance and doom.
The strictly technical aspects of the Mind’s elevation to God have been spoken of in the Introduction to the Logic (cf. especially § 51, note). As regards the starting-point of that elevation, Kant has on the whole adopted the most correct, when he treats belief in God as proceeding from the practical Reason. For that starting-point contains the material or content which constitutes the content of the notion of God. But the true concrete material is neither Being (as in the cosmological) nor mere action by design (as in the physico-theological proof) but the Mind, the absolute characteristic and function of which is effective reason, i.e. the self-determining and self-realising notion itself,—Liberty. That the elevation of subjective mind to God which these considerations give is by Kant again deposed to a _postulate_—a mere “ought”—is the peculiar perversity, formerly noticed, of calmly and simply reinstating as true and valid that very antithesis of finitude, the supersession of which into truth is the essence of that elevation.
As regards the “mediation” which, as it has been already shown (§ 192, cf. § 204 note), that elevation to God really involves, the point specially calling for note is the “moment” of negation through which the essential content of the starting-point is purged of its finitude so as to come forth free. This factor, abstract in the formal treatment of logic, now gets its most concrete interpretation. The finite, from which the start is now made, is the real ethical self-consciousness. The negation through which that consciousness raises its spirit to its truth, is the purification, _actually_ accomplished in the ethical world, whereby its conscience is purged of subjective opinion and its will freed from the selfishness of desire. Genuine religion and genuine religiosity only issue from the moral life: religion is that life rising to think, i.e. becoming aware of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only from the moral life and by the moral life is the Idea of God seen to be free spirit: outside the ethical spirit therefore it is vain to seek for true religion and religiosity. But—as is the case with all speculative process—this development of one thing out of another means that what appears as sequel and derivative is rather the absolute _prius_ of what it appears to be mediated by, and what is here in mind known as its truth.
Here then is the place to go more deeply into the reciprocal relations between the state and religion, and in doing so to elucidate the terminology which is familiar and current on the topic. It is evident and apparent from what has preceded that moral life is the state retracted into its inner heart and substance, while the state is the organisation and actualisation of moral life; and that religion is the very substance of the moral life itself and of the state. At this rate, the state rests on the ethical sentiment, and that on the religious. If religion then is the consciousness of “absolute”_ truth_, then whatever is to rank as right and justice, as law and duty, i.e. as _true_ in the world of free will, can be so esteemed only as it is participant in that truth, as it is subsumed under it and is its sequel. But if the truly moral life is to be a sequel of religion, then perforce religion must have the _genuine_ content; i.e. the idea of God it knows must be the true and real. The ethical life is the divine spirit as indwelling in self-consciousness, as it is actually present in a nation and its individual members.
This self-consciousness retiring upon itself out of its empirical actuality and bringing its truth to consciousness, has in its _faith_ and in its _conscience_ only what it has consciously secured in its spiritual actuality. The two are inseparable: there cannot be two kinds of conscience, one religious and another ethical, differing from the former in body and value of truth. But in point of form, i.e. for thought and knowledge—(and religion and ethical life belong to intelligence and are a thinking and knowing)—the body of religious truth, as the pure self-subsisting and therefore supreme truth, exercises a sanction over the moral life which lies in empirical actuality. Thus for self-consciousness religion is the “basis” of moral life and of the state. It has been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables as separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent. The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some force and power, religion was a later addition, something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in individuals:—or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life of the state, i.e. its reasonable law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.