A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (27 page)

Master and slave each possess a half of freedom: one the scope to exercise it, the other the self-image to see its value. But neither has the whole, and in this toing and froing of power between them each is restless and unfulfilled. The ‘dialectic’ of their relation awaits its resolution, and its resolution occurs only when each treats the other not as means, but as end: which is to say, when each renounces the life and death struggle that had enslaved him, and respects the reality of the other’s will. In doing so they accept the categorical imperative of justice— to treat others as ends and not as means. They are forced then to see themselves as they see others. Each man sees himself as an object to be respected, standing outside nature, bound to a community by reciprocal demands upheld by a common moral law. This law is, in Kant’s words, the law of freedom. And at this ‘moment’ the self has acquired a conception of its agency; it is autonomous yet law-governed, partaking of a common nature and enacting universal values. Self-consciousness has become
universal
self-consciousness.

But the progress of our undifferentiated subject is not complete. Hegel explores the development, from the primitive conception of right so far established, to the religious world-view (the ‘unhappy consciousness’) in which the exercise of self-discovery oversteps the limit of personal autonomy. The unhappy (or alienated) consciousness endows the objective world with the power that belongs to itself alone, and so becomes forlorn, guilt-ridden and anxious for redemption. Hegel describes the overcoming of this religious consciousness, and the growth of the ethical life (or
Sittlichkeit),
the ultimate end of which is the development of the free citizen in the protective state. Some of these later developments will be discussed in chapter 14. They contain important psychological insights and amazing leaps of imagination. But it would be too great a labour to express their full philosophical significance. I shall conclude this discussion of the
Phenomenology
by saying something about its methods and the status of its results.

First of all what are we to make of the story-like form which the
Phenomenology
takes? Although Hegel expressly says that the
Logic
simply lays out the general principles of the
Phenomenology,
it is fairly clear that a temporal interpretation is, in the latter case, far more plausible and could be attempted by someone for whom the method of the ‘dialectic’ was strictly nonsense. It is interesting to note that there are
two
temporal interpretations of the ‘moments’ of consciousness. The
Phenomenology
contains a parable of the subject, launched with its infantile ‘I want’ into a world that it gradually reduces into possession, so giving both itself and the world objective form. It also contains a covert history of the human race. Such was the astonishing intellectual effrontery of Hegel, that he made no efforts to deny that mankind
as a whole
must evolve in accordance with the pattern of the
Phenomenology.
We have already shown the episodes corresponding to the pre-historical state of nature, to the undifferentiated ‘species’ being of the animal, to the episode of primitive combat among tribes, to the Roman
imperium,
with its need for slavery and autocratic rule. (We are also led to understand, furthermore, that the states of mind described in the passage referring to the master and slave are those of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and of his intellectual master, the stoic slave Epictetus.) Not surprisingly we find that the later stages of the evolution of consciousness fall one by one into the successive periods of history, and by a miracle of predestination, self-consciousness reaches its apogee in that free, protestant, Germanic
Wissenschaft
of which Hegel was both prophet and exegete.

But these historical interpretations are both fanciful and misleading. There is a deeper, logical point that emerges from the argument. To discover it we need to interpret the ‘moment’ of consciousness not as a stage on the way to self-consciousness, but rather as a state contained within self-consciousness. In saying that the religious consciousness is somehow higher than the primitive recognition of a moral law, Hegel could be taken to refer not to a temporal but rather to a conceptual priority. But this conceptual priority in fact reverses the ‘temporal’ ordering, in the following way.

Just as Kant had argued that my knowledge of myself as subject presupposes knowledge of an objective world, so Hegel seems to argue that the ‘earlier’ moments of consciousness presuppose at least the possibility of the latter. The immediate knowledge of self (the Cartesian premise) presupposes the activity that constitutes the self, and this presupposes desire, and hence the knowledge of objects. This in turn presupposes the struggle with the other and the reciprocal dealing which stems from that. Eventually we are driven to the conclusion that the ‘self’ or ‘subject’ is not possible except in the context of the political organism which ‘realises’ it.

The process of ‘self-realisation’ may admit of degrees, but these degrees do not mark ‘stages on the way’. However fragmentary my selfconsciousness, it exists only because I participate in that collective self-transcending activity which constitutes the full elaboration of the human mind. I may participate in it only waywardly or spasmodically; to that extent will my self-understanding and freedom be shattered or impaired. But if I am even to
exist
as a subjectivity (as a being that knows itself immediately) I must acknowledge and participate in the claims of the objective arrangements which transcend me.

Construed in this way, as an analytic rather than a genetic theory of rational self-consciousness, the thesis of the
Phenomenology
can be seen as an extension of the Transcendental Deduction. Hegel tries to show that knowledge of self as subject presupposes not just knowledge of objects, but knowledge of a public social world, in which there is moral order and civic trust. Moreover he tries to show from whence arises the
a priori
claim of that most contentful and contentious of the Kantian imperatives—the imperative to treat rational beings as ends and not as means. Whether the argument is valid is not in point: what we should notice is the extent to which it transcends in ambition anything envisaged by Kant. For it aims to defeat epistemological and moral scepticism simultaneously. It also abolishes the distinction between practical and theoretical reason (since the constraint on the subject to acknowledge the existence of the other stems always from the exercise of activity and will). It thus gives cogency to that peculiar logic, the workings of which we have already discussed, which treats reasoning in dynamic terms.

Having offered that interpretation of the
Phenomenology,
however, I must now express a hesitation. For the self-realisation described in the
Phenomenology
is not, despite what I have implied, a realisation of the individual. The individual ‘I’ is, for Hegel, only a metaphor. No philosophical argument can proceed from the cognisance of an individual, for in that very act of cognisance the individual becomes universal. Every thought is the subsumption under a concept. It is for this reason that Hegel put forward, in the
Logic,
the view that the true subject matter of thought is the concept itself. I may think, in my own case, that I am directly acquainted with some individual thing, but, just as soon as I begin to utter this thought to myself, I must designate that thing—I must employ the concept ‘I’. And ‘I’, like any concept, is a universal. Hence Hegel feels quite justified in abstracting so far from the first-person viewpoint of Descartes and the empiricists as no longer to regard their puzzles as intelligible. The real subject matter of the
Phenomenology
is not the concrete, sceptical, solipsistic self, but the universal, affirmative spirit
(Geist),
whose progress towards realisation in an objective world is something in which you or I may participate, but which transcends every merely local manifestation of its implacable movement.

Much of Hegel’s metaphysics thus develops independently of any epistemological basis. He avoids the first-person standpoint of Descartes not through any rival theory of knowledge, but by a process of abstraction which, because it abolishes the individual, leaves no evident room for the theory of knowledge at all. This makes Hegel’s metaphysics so vulnerable to sceptical attack that it is often thought to have little to bequeath to us but its poetry.

The dialectic of reason advances from pure, immediate being, through all the determinations of being which in sum constitute reality, so as to consummate itself in the absolute idea. As I have said, this absolute idea is the whole of reality, the truth of the world, and God Himself. Nothing exists in actuality that is not some determinant of pure being, and whose existence is not derived from the dialectical working out of that concept. Reason, because it generates everything, comprehends everything; hence, in a famous phrase, ‘the real is rational and the rational is real’. Everything which exists, exists of necessity; but it exists not in virtue of some eternal essence, but in virtue of the struggle of reason to constrain its successive concepts to give birth to their ever more detailed progeny. Hegel calls this struggle the ‘labour of the negative’. And the world thus generated, being the product of reason, shows ‘the cunning of reason’— it reveals itself to reason, so that the apparently contingent can be seen to be really necessary, and the arbitrary and diffuse as directed and whole.

For Kant, the thing-in-itself was an ‘infinite resistance principle’—it stood proxy for the idea that our knowledge has a limit. For Hegel, the thing-in-itself is actual and knowable, being nothing but the absolute idea and its successive revelations. There cannot be more than one such transcendent thing: but nor can there be less than one. The absolute idea is the single immortal substance of Spinoza. It has, in Hegel’s view, only one nature, and that nature is revealed to us in consciousness. In our advance towards it, we ‘posit’ the world of nature (seeing the idea as ‘force’ and hence as ‘matter’, the locus of force) and the world of ‘spirit’. These are modes of realisation, which the absolute undergoes in us, but in which it does not exhaust itself. How, then, do we know the absolute? Hegel’s nearest approach to an answer to this lies in his theory of the concrete universal, according to which the world as
given
is both known (because it is universal) and also sensuously known (because it is concrete). Hence, in moments of pure observation we see it as it eternally is, while seeing it transfixed in time, beleaguered by all its determinations, clothed in attributes, specified to a comprehensible point of being. Philosophy shows the world thus, but philosophy is a lingering occupation: art shows it more immediately, since art is the sensuous
shining
of the idea.

From the obscure but tantalising theory of ‘the concrete universal’ (a theory which, announcing itself in blatant contradiction, drew a prolonged breath of admiration from the intellectual world) grew the idealist philosophies of art, of history and of the state. All these have been profoundly influential, and their outline is sufficiently known. The poetic appeal of the doctrine that the real is rational and the rational real, combined as it was with a theory of history that represented events as proceeding with whatever inevitability had seemed proper to the proofs of logic (history being nothing more than the ‘march of reason in the world’), has had consequences so disastrous in politics, in history and in the criticism of art, that it is not surprising if Hegel has recently been execrated as the greatest intellectual disaster in the history of mankind. Rightly understood, however, he was the true philosopher of the modern consciousness, and those who, like Russell, see only the pretentious exterior of his thinking, show themselves to be blind to the profound spiritual crisis that Hegel was striving to describe—the crisis of a civilisation that has discovered the God upon whom it depended to be also its own creation.

Hegelian idealism so dominated philosophical thought in early nineteenth-century Germany, and in the states which depended upon German literature for their intellectual life, that the local reactions against it were not at first taken seriously. The so-called ‘Young Hegelians’, who had given to Hegelian philosophy its varied popular colourings, constituted an intellectual movement of almost unprecedented power, in which the most abstruse and difficult of philosophies was made the foundation not only for vigorous moral, religious and aesthetic doctrines, but also for imaginative literature and organised political life. The movement, which culminated in the historical materialism of Marx, was so influential that the history of ideas must accord to it an important place in nineteenth-century thought. The history of philosophy, however, can afford to pass it by with a glance or two, and turn its attention to the far more impressive thinkers that the Hegelian flurry of self-advertisement concealed from their contemporaries. The first of these, increasingly recognised over the last hundred years as one of the great philosophers of his time, was Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Schopenhauer was a younger contemporary of Hegel who, partly out of bitterness at the latter’s capacity to eclipse him, and partly out of a genuine distaste towards the intellectual self-indulgence of the Hegelian system, dismissed Hegel as a ‘stupid and clumsy charlatan’.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy takes the transcendental idealism of Kant as its starting-point. Like most of his contemporaries Schopenhauer construed this theory in what I have called the ‘subjective’ version (
see p. 141
). He held that Kant had proved that the world we experience through the senses is a construction out of appearances (or ‘representations’, as he called them), and, while ostensibly repudiating the Kantian idea of a category, he nevertheless saw these ‘representations’ as the creative embodiment of the intellect, which orders the world of knowledge in accordance with concepts of space, time and causality. It was this simplified Transcendental Idealism that Schopenhauer opposed to the elaborate system of Kant. As the title of his principal work
—The World as Will and Representation
(1818)—implies, he thought that there is more to the world than the system of appearance. The world contains not only representations and their systematic relationships, but also will; and it is on account of his philosophy of will that Schopenhauer is now principally studied. This philosophy bears a relation to that of Fichte. It is, however, extraordinarily ambitious, deriving from the single dichotomy between will and representation the whole of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and the philosophy of mind, and providing both new answers to old problems, and a new consciousness of the problems themselves.