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Ch.6. “THE FORMATION OF SPIRIT”
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We are entering the domain of Geist, which is later aka “objective spirit” {in the Encyclopedia?}. It concerns whole polities and cultures throughout history (and not mere ideas or outlooks). PhG has the form of a spiral, turning back onto itself on a deeper level.
In ancient Greece, the individual lived in harmony with the state, but this had to dialect since he was not a universal being.
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Subchap.1
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The beginning of the chapter, in which the city-state breaks down, is called by T beautiful and poetic!
Conflict arises b/c although the man is in harmony with the city which is a universal for him, his own particular universality comes to its own.
That conflict btw universals is seen as btw 2 laws: human and divine. Human law is the conscious ethic of the state; divine law is the truly universal, is concerned with the individual (not with any particularities of his existence, incl. his state), and finds its expression in the family and in the Shade (i.e. afterlife). Man and woman are respectively focused on these.
– The Shade: b/c of the monopoly of human law on this life, a truly universal existence can only be envisaged in a beyond.
– The Shade is ‘the repose of simple universality’ Phg321. H interprets death rites as an effort to raise death from something happening to man, to an expression of his universality.
– “The state preserves society, and hence the family; but the family forms the citizens of the state” p174 – i.e. the two laws are interdependent.
– For H the Greek tragic character was one who acted only dedicated to one of these laws, and violates the other.
– For this conflict to be overcome, men abandon their pure dedication to their society, thus causing the decline of the city which had depended on unity of citizen and ethical substance.
– – This leads to the stage of the universal empire, but which is a stage of new alienation since it cannot express the values and aspirations of all its people. How this actually happens is left vague in this area of writing.
Then H adds another derivation of the conflict: woman as upholders of divine/family law induce their men to exercise power for dynasty rather than public wealth; “corrupting the youth” (p177) etc.
Result: “ethical spirit goes under and gives way to an age of alienation” and the divine law (previously represented by the individual as shade) now comes out as the “I” of s.c. but of an individual who exists in a state that does not reflect him, but which is pure external power, and therefore his affirmation of universal s.c. can only be abstract (hence it retreats – Stoicism).
– This new universal state has broken with ethical substance, with the underlying sense of limit with which men were totally identified, and replaced it only with sheer power; thus the reign of the emperor is that of uncontrolled capricious will. (semiq p177).
Men must alienate themselves: Although they may have property rights, even those are entirely at the mercy of an arbitrary will, and thus, one lacks any dependable integrity, and thus one places their integrity in the hands of something external, i.e. to which he feels subordinate and aspires to, ie. a discipline of alienation (nb. setting the groundwork for a later recovery of a higher freedom).
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Subchap.2 (p178)
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Next section of chapter re. alienation-formation of period from Roman to present day, but H focuses on the culmination only.
Alienation is that men no longer define themselves as pure thought, but accept their identification with the state, but they feel that it is another to which they are obligated to conform. This can occur in relation to the state itself, its wealth/economics (or religion). This is a phase in parallel with the uhc.
– It is a tutelage: It is technically a falsehood, but it reflects a truth and thus prepares men for it, i.e. that their truth lies in their relation to the Absolute Geist.
– Men feel that their substance lies outside them, and hence they can only come to realize themselves by conforming to it.
Out of this alienation arise men who can see through the external realities, see them for what they are; the state and its riches are mere phenomena to be related to like any other (ie. destined to disappear, bound by law-like conditions, etc).
The Enlight. represents the beginning of the end of alienation; via scientific c.: external reality is objectified, deprived of spiritual significance, and open to scientific inquiry (aka debunked); sees the world as an assembly of purely material sensible things.
– Hence God is reduced to the empty notion of a supreme being.
– Hence the notion of utility: things have no intrinsic meaning but are given worth by their relation to man.
– – This leads to a bad infinity for H: a thing can be good from any perspective, with no end to the chain that can loop back on itself without leading to a final subject (e.g. good for the state, and the state must be good for its people).
– It is right that rational subjectivity is dominant, but is wrong when it restricts that to merely human subjectivity, which in fact only achieves total dominance qua vehicle of the supreme being (Geist).
In parallel to Enligh. runs “faith”, viz. religious c. that reconciles spirit and reality but only in another (transcendent) world. It thus sees the Absolute via (metaphors of) *another* world of contingency, whereas it should be seeing it as the necessary structure of this world.
– However, it doesn’t see the essential role of human subjectivity and reason (since for it, the transcendent world is static and impenetrable to human reason).
Although complementary, E and F are in conflict.
– [Strange, bc religious c. is part of the alienation itself (i.e. to which the E is a response) – suggesting that this is a forced device by H to allow him to discuss a contemporary struggle, rather than a struggle btw future with its past. But this is not so T argues: this mode of F is also arguing against that particular mode of alienation described, plus the F discussed here by H is German Protestantism in particular (cf. Christianity in general)]. (p183 btw)
-To an extent, the E “enlightens” faith, as it forces it to make its spiritual objects even more transcendent, since it removes the spontaneous, in this world spirituality which they had in the prescientific age
– <H idea> Religion is always an expression of truth, veiled, which is why is it willingly adopted by people.
– Stuff about E showing the errors of R, e.g. that its magical holy objects are nothing but objects, and that its bibles just false stories. In doing so it reveals half a truth which F hadn’t seen – (for although the Absolute emanates from man it is also the case) that the Absolute is beyond man.
– – The result of this is a theology of Jacobi or Schleiermacher, finding God via sentiment/intuition
But then H is also claiming a sort of synthesis of E and F. But it is unclear (says T!) what the difference is.
So in any case:
we have a utilitarian c (that knows that there is no inherent meaning in things) that is also a universal rational c., and hence it wills to change the world accordingly: a perfect human society; heaven on earth.
– There is however a contradiction inherent in this, waiting to reveal itself: it fails to see any reality outside man.
“The universal knowing subject who sees the whole world spread out as neutral objects whose workings it thoroughly understands, cannot but be seized by the ambition to transform this world according to universal reason. This is the idea of absolute freedom, freedom untrammelled by any obstacle, not even that of other wills, for the wi.U in question is a universal will, hence that of all men in so far as they are free. ‘The world is [for this consciousness] simply its will, and this will is universal ‘ (4 1 5).” p185 – he is referring to Rousseau’s ‘general will’.
This fails because it doesn’t recognize an external reality to itself and is thus doomed to self-destruction.
A working state requires different functions for people (and H says, estates too). Hence people must be different, and some of the institutions of the society cannot be the expression of their own particular will. That negates the idea of absolute freedom, which would have every man will what the state had done.
“The Rousseauian ideal returns in our day in the demand for radical participatory democracy, for ‘ unstructured discussion ‘, for spontaneous
mass action.” p186
Nb. “The need of the human political community as a general will to be embodied in a differentiated state structure, is a fundamental ontological necessity for man as a vehicle of Geist.” p186
This leads to the Terror.
– Something to do with the fact that this reign can have no positive realization and hence can only act by destroying. Destroying first the old institutions, and then any opposition between itself qua universal will and particular individuals who do not align with it.
“And even when there is no overt opposition, the theory of the general will requires that all will the actions of the state. It thus becomes a crime even to be alienated from the
republic in one’s heart. But this alienation can be hidden, so the regime is driven to proceed against people even without overt opposition, but just on suspicion. (Hence Hegel tries to derive the famous loi des suspects.) Hegel’s study of the Terror also touches a question that has relevance beyond his time. The Stalinist terror had some of the same properties as those which Hegel singled out in the Jacobin one: liquidation become banal, the fastening on intentions and other subjective deviations, the self-feeding destructiveness.” p187
“The step beyond this contradiction which Hegel now takes is the interiorization of this drama. The new form of consciousness accepts that the universal will can only come to be by the suppression of the punctual individual will, and it now proceeds to bring this about inwardly, by resolving to live according to universal reason and hence renouncing its individual particularity.
[…]
From the political morality of the Contrat Social, we go to the morality of pure will of the Critique of Practical Reason.” p187
– cf. also the transformation from the master/slave (and internalization of death) to stoicism.
Now H moves to Germany.
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Subsec.3
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“The third part of the chapter on Geist takes us to Germany and to the movement of thought which started from Kant and developed through Fichte into German Romanticism.” p188
Here we are at the threshold of Religion, when the individual, and individual societies (which he later calls ‘objective spirit’) are realizations of Absolute Spirit.
– cf. a citizen is a vehicle for their society, and societies are vehicles for Absolute Spirit but through the imperfect veil of religion.
H breaks w/ Kant and Fichte for whom (there is a primacy of practical reason, and hence) morality was autonomous, i.e. was produced by reason without the need for speculative reason. (In fact, it achieved truths the latter could not, e.g. re god etc). H dislikes this because it makes no aspiration to unity with nature. He also dislikes the unGreek dichotomy of happiness and virtue (e.g. K says that they should be in parallel, but this requires an afterlife where it may occur). For K, moral autonomy must be separated from nature, and yet harmonious via the actions of god. There is an additional dichotomy; desire vs moral will, and the latter must strive (but never complete) to overcome the former. This compromise refers to an indefinite future, the ‘dark distance of infinity’. If it were fulfilled, it would be abolished.
– Cf. the greek warrior was happy to virtuously die for his city, while the modern soldier commits to death as a necessary unhappiness which can only be balanced in an afterlife.
– The division of happiness/virtue in K is antithetical to the expressionist.
– nb. the division between morality and nature (since the latter does not parallel the former, e.g. evil prospering)
– nb. the division between my own nature and morality, since my moral will can be opposed by my desires/inclinations, which I can only work to overcome but never do so completely.
– nb. the complete fulfilment of moral will would mean its destruction.
A second contradiction (which does not strictly apply to Kant) is that it is impossible to apply the moral duty of universal duty, because it could apply to anything in principle. The only thing which could actually imbue an act with duty would be a deus ex machina.
“After a devastating ten-page passage (434-44) in which he works systematically through the contradictions of the moral world-outlook, and the shifts (Verstellungen) it goes through to avoid seeing them, Hegel goes on to a Romantic theory of conscience which grew in part out of Kant. […] The Romantics abandoned the austere Kantian division between inclination and morality, and came to a vision of a spontaneous moral intuition in which the law of the heart and the ethical law are one.” p193
– nb. this is not the same as the subjective morality described in Reason. Here the subject is aware of their intuition as being in touch with a universal, with god; the Romantic c. is a religious one.
– – H, of course, cannot accept this ineffable immediate unity with the universal/god. Only Reason could effect such a unity, “which can bear negation and separation within the unity”.
– “Hegel’s critique of this theory starts from its individual inspirational character, which allows conscience to have any content at all provided someone feels the corresponding inspiration.” p193
– But in fact, the actions that flow from these inspirations clash. The same actions may have a different value (altruistic and selfish) depending on viewpoint.
– Since action leads to this contradiction, there is a dialectical shift, and the paradigm expression of conscience shifts to speech – the expression of the self but posed in objectivity (H explains).
– Thence pure conscience uses literature to express its convictions without fear of losing its purity. This is the form of the ‘beautiful soul’ (cf. Novalis H may be thinking of). But this is a form of retreat.
“The price of existence is thus particularization. To attempt to hold the universal free of the particular in order to maintain its purity, as the beautiful soul does, is to condemn it to non-existence.” p194
H presents this “reciprocal necessity for sacrifice of universal and particular” (p194) in a sort of dialogue called “evil and its pardon” (p195).
– Evil, because particularity cuts men off from the universal (this is Hegel’s take on original sin).
– The universal actor says the other betrays it, for everything it does it does (in some sense) hypocritically.
– – The other replies that without embodying itself it fails nature and its service to morality.
– – Solution: both need each other.
“We are on the verge of passing over into absolute knowledge; for we have a particular subject ready to give up and live beyond his particularity, and a universal which is now seen not as being totally beyond but as needing the particular.” p195
Next chapter will be religion, because “The self-knowledge of the absolute has developed in the religious evolution of mankind. Hence the last chapter before the conclusion will be on religion; and in keeping with the practice of the whole work we will start from the bottom, from the beginning, with the religion of nature.” p196
Fin Ch.VI
[I] “Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FRSC FBA (born 1931) is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. This work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize. For further details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(philosopher)“. For further details about his writing on Hegel, see https://www.bookdepository.com/Hegel-Charles-Taylor/9780521291996.
