On Hegel, the Subject, and Political Justification

On Hegel, the Subject, and Political Justification

On Hegel, the Subject, and Political Justification

Andrew Chitty

Res Publica 2:2, Autumn 1996, pp. 181-203

What are the foundations of political and legal philosophy? On what ultimate basis can particular political institutions be justified? An almost irresistible answer is that they can be justified only on the basis of the nature of the human beings to whom they have to apply. However this justification can take different forms. One major form of it in the Western tradition is the pragmatic one: that of Hobbes, Hume and utilitarianism. Here the justification of political institutions is that, given the desires, needs and behavioural tendencies that in our experience human beings have, under such institutions they will behave so as to satisfy those needs and desires to a greater extent than they would under alternative institutions. Another major form is an ‘ontological’ one, that dates back to Plato’s analogy between the just city and the well-ordered soul. Here the justification of political institutions is that they somehow reflect or express, or else allow the realisation of, the essential nature of the human subject, as it can be discovered through self-reflection. In both cases there is an appeal to ‘human nature’, but in a rather different sense in each case.

Contemporary liberalism and communitarianism both rely heavily on the ontological form of justification. Liberalism is centrally a view about what the content of political institutions should be, one that makes the protection of individual rights central. Yet to justify this view liberal theories also typically rely, whether explicitly or not, on an ontological form of justification, specifically one that appeals to the idea of the individual subject as essentially free. This is ‘ontological liberalism’. To take a central example, John Rawls’s initial justification of his principles of justice in A Theory of Justice is based on the idea of a contract made in an original position.[1] Yet in the course of the book it emerges that the central features of the original position itself, in particular its ‘veil of ignorance’, are chosen in such a way as to express a ‘Kantian’ conception of the person: as a subject that freely chooses its own life in such a way as not to prevent others from choosing theirs.[2] This conception of the person remains foundational in Rawls’s later presentation of his theory as ‘political not metaphysical’, although now the justification of the principles is based on the claim, not that this conception is metaphysically true, but that it is shared by all groups in the political societies to which we happen to belong.[3]

Communitarianism, too, can be defined in terms of the content of the political institutions it advocates. Roughly speaking, communitarians think that political institutions should embody the shared values of the community, and accordingly that they should further a ‘common good’ as defined by those values. Yet communitarianism also has a typical form of justification, and again this is of the ontological kind, for to justify such institutions it standardly appeals to the idea that the human subject is ‘socially constituted’, so that the shared values of its community are built into its nature. The communitarian argument is then that political institutions should express the nature of this subject, and that to do so they must embody the communally shared values that are partly constitutive of it. Such ‘ontological communitarianism’ has a parallel structure to ontological liberalism, although it has a different conception of the subject that forms the basis of justification.

Hegel’s political philosophy has sometimes been seen as a form of ontological liberalism, in which the ‘system of right’, the system of social, legal and political institutions of the Philosophy of Right, is justified as necessary for the maintenance of an individual free will described in the introduction to the book. It has also been seen as a form of ontological communitarianism, especially in the wake of Charles Taylor’s influential Hegel.[4] I shall argue however that neither of these characterisations is correct. Hegel’s form of justification is indeed ontological in my sense, but the subject he uses as the basis for it, the possessor of ‘free will’, is neither the subject of ontological liberalism nor that of ontological communitarianism, for although it is socially constituted, it is so not in the sense that the values of any particular community or culture are built into the content of its motivations. Rather it is so in that its possession of this free will arises from its participation in social relations as such, where social relations are understood as relations of mutual recognition. Furthermore, participation in such relations is itself necessitated by an even more fundamental feature of the human subject, its awareness of itself as a subject in contrast to an objective world outside it, or what Hegel calls ‘consciousness’.

I shall suggest, therefore, that Hegel takes the debate between ontological liberalism and ontological communitarianism several stages further. He takes it further with regard to his account of the subject, which begins at the most elementary level of our own subjective experience. He also takes it further with regard to his method of justification, which is to show that there is a basic contradiction in the subject at this level which can ultimately be resolved only by developing certain political institutions. Finally he takes it further with regard to his view of the content of justified institutions. For this contradiction in the subject requires it to become a subject with both individual and collective dimensions, and correspondingly the institutions needed to resolve the contradiction involve both the protection of individual rights and the advancing of various common goods.

This is not to say that Hegel’s picture of the subject is a satisfactory one, any more than is his view of the content of justified political institutions. However, by his example he does show that the ontological form of justification has possibilities that liberal-communitarian debate has scarcely begun to explore. For this alone, Hegel’s account of the subject, and the form of political justification associated with it, deserve reconstructing.

In this paper I shall attempt such a reconstruction, by retracing the steps through which Hegel derives ‘free will’ from ‘consciousness’ in his Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Mind, and in the lectures that accompany it.[5] By doing so I hope to make good some of the above claims.

The main stages of Hegel’s derivation of free will are as follows: consciousness, self-consciousness, mastery and servitude (one-sided recognition), universal self-consciousness (mutual recognition), intelligence, will, and finally free will. Most of these have sub-stages within them. Each main stage is what I shall call a ‘form of subjectivity’. It is a fundamental way in which a subject conceives itself and the components of its world, which constitutes it as a certain kind of subject. Each form of subjectivity in the sequence ‘incorporates’ the previous ones. That is, they appear within it as subordinate aspects, in the same way that when one shifts from conceiving something as circular to conceiving it as a sphere one’s original way of conceiving it does not disappear but is reduced to a subordinate aspect of the way one now sees it.

Each form of subjectivity ‘necessitates’ the next one in the sequence, in the sense that each form involves an internal contradiction which can be resolved only by abandoning that form in favour of the one that follows it. Furthermore, the contradictions that affect the different forms of subjectivity are in the end simply developed versions of the contradiction that affects the first of them: consciousness. Hegel’s view is that a conscious subject must eventually become aware of the contradiction internal to consciousness, and must respond to that awareness by adopting the following form of subjectivity. In turn it must become aware of and respond to the contradiction in that form, and so on. So his exposition of the forms of subjectivity and the necessary transitions between them becomes a narrative of the journey that the conscious subject must, and does, make through these forms, successively reconstituting itself until it becomes the possessor of free will.

In the course of this progress the forms of subjectivity become at first practical, in that they essentially involve ways not only of conceiving but also of acting, and then collective, in that they essentially involve ways in which a number of different subjects conceive and act towards each other. Furthermore the development does not stop with the free will, but continues into the institutions of the system of right, which are themselves simply practical and collective forms of subjectivity. So Hegel’s exposition is an account of the nature of the subject as it must become in order to resolve the contradiction of consciousness, which develops seamlessly into a justification of a set of political institutions as necessary to resolve that same contradiction.

1. Consciousness

To begin with, then, it is important to understand just what Hegel means by consciousness and how he thinks it is internally contradictory. In Hegel’s narrative consciousness emerges out of a series of more elementary forms of awareness which he collectively calls ‘soul’, and it is best understood by contrasting it with one of them, the form of soul called ‘feeling of self’ (Selbstgefühl). Feeling of self is the most basic form of self-awareness. It consists just in having sensations, and in experiencing those sensations as mine. For Hegel, to experience one’s sensations in this way, which he calls ‘idealising’ them, is to establish a distinction between oneself and one’s sensations of the same fundamental kind that is made in a subject-predicate proposition, or what Hegel calls a ‘judgment’, and making this distinction constitutes one as a subject:

The feeling totality is, as individuality, essentially the tendency to divide itself within itself, and to awaken to the judgment within itself, by virtue of which it has particular feelings and is a subject in relation to these its determinations. The subject as such posits these as its feelings within itself. (E3 §407, 323-5)[6]

However, in this initial form of self-awareness the subject relates only to ‘particular’ sensations, and accordingly it forms a conception of itself only as the possessor of particular sensations:

It is sunken in this particularity of sensations, and at the same time it unites with itself therein as a subjective one [Eins] through the ideality of the particular. In this way it is feeling of self - and at the same time it is this only in the particular feeling. (ibid.)

The subject here is implicitly ‘universal’ in the sense that it has a plurality of ‘particular’ sensation, but it does not conceive itself as universal in contrast to the elements of its experience as singular things. The feeling soul ‘has a content which has not yet developed to the separation of universal and singular, subjective and objective’ (E3 §402A). In consciousness, by contrast, the subject stands back and conceives itself as the possessor of the content of its experience in general, and therefore as something universal, separated off from the singularity of the elements of its experience.[7] Thereby it constitutes itself as what Hegel calls an ‘I’:

[The] being-for-itself of free universality is the higher awakening of the soul to the I, abstract universality in so far as it is for abstract universality. (E3 §412, 425)

By conceiving itself in this universal way, the subject frees itself from its entanglement with particular sensation, and gains an independence from it, in that it no longer identifies itself just as the possessor of such sensation. At the same time this means for Hegel that it conceives the content of its experience as independent of it, and so outside it. Thereby it constitutes that content as an ‘object’. Consciousness is just this joint conceiving of oneself as an ‘I’ and of the content of one’s experience as an ‘object’, dividing the world into subjective and objective, inner and outer:

[T]he immediate identity of the natural soul is raised to this pure ideal identity with itself, while what is the content of the former is object [g.][8] for this reflection that is for itself. Pure abstract freedom for itself lets its determinacy, the natural life of the soul, go out from it as equally free, as independent object, and it is of this latter as something outside it that I is initially aware, and as such is consciousness. (E3 §413, 427)

Just as the subject of consciousness, the ‘I’, conceives its objects as what are external to it, so it also now conceives itself by contrast with its objects, as that which stands opposite them and has them as its objects. In Hegel’s terms, it is ‘reflected into itself’ in its objects (E3 §412, 425).

For Hegel, then, consciousness is more than mere awareness, or even mere self-awareness. It is awareness of oneself as a subject counterposed to an objective world outside oneself. So characterised, consciousness immediately involves a fundamental contradiction, a contradiction simultaneously in the way that the object and the I are conceived in it.

With regard to the object, the subject conceives this object as both outside out of it and independent of it, and yet also as its object, in the same way as in feeling of self it conceived of the contents of experience as belonging to it:

Consciousness is both: we have a world outside us, which is firmly for itself, and at the same time in that I am consciousness I am aware of this object [g.], it is posited as ideal, so it is not independent but superseded. These are what are the two contradictory [elements], the independence and the ideality of the objective side. Consciousness is just this contradiction, and the progression of consciousness is its resolution. (E3 §414G, 275)

With regard to the I, it conceives itself as independent or free of each of its objects, as related only to itself, and yet it still relies on its objects in general in order to form a conception of itself as that-which-possesses-these-objects. This means that it has to conceive itself as both ‘with itself’ (bei sich selbst), related only to itself, and ‘with another’, related to something alien to it:

[T]he certainty that mind has of itself at the standpoint of mere consciousness is still something untrue and self-contradictory, for here, along with the abstract certainty of being with itself, mind has the directly opposed certainty of being related to something essentially other to it. (E3 §416A, 15)

The contradiction of consciousness is fundamentally a contradiction between the mutual independence and separateness of the I and the object on the one hand, and their internal relatedness, thus in a sense their fundamental identity, on the other: ‘Consciousness is ... the contradiction between the independence of both sides, and their identity’ (E3 §414, 9).

2. Self-consciousness and desire

In consciousness as I have described it so far, the object is conceived as a singular independent entity, in complete opposition to the universality of the I. Hegel calls this elementary form of consciousness ‘sensuous consciousness’ (E3 §418, 19). In order to resolve the contradiction of consciousness, the I must reconceive the object in successively more universal, and so ‘I-like’, ways, thereby tending to eliminate its independence and ‘foreignness’ and thus both aspects of the contradiction. This leads initially to a new form of consciousness, ‘perception’, in which the object is endowed with some of the universality of the I by being conceived as a thing with universal properties (E3 §§419-421, 25-31). In turn this leads to another form, ‘understanding’, in which the object is further universalised by being conceived as a realm of laws which subordinate the particular appearances that present themselves to the I (E3 §422, 31-33). Finally the object is conceived as a whole which subordinates its own parts under it, in the same way that a law subordinates appearances under it: that is, as a living being (E3 §423A, 35; §423G, 311-3).

At this point the object has in part the same characteristics that the I uses in order to conceive itself, for in that it subordinates its parts it in a sense possesses them, just as the I conceives itself as possessing its objects in general. So in conceiving the object as a living being the I conceives it as an object which in part shares its own quality of ‘I-hood’. When the I conceives its object as characterised by subjectivity (where the term is now used to mean such I-hood) then conversely it looks back at itself from the perspective of this external subjectivity and conceives itself as an object. This dual conception of the object as subjective and of the I as an object constitutes a new form of subjectivity that Hegel calls ‘self-consciousness’:

There is consciousness of a certain object [g.], livingness, I relate myself to something living. I am now what thinks; and in that this relates itself to livingness thinkingly, subjectivity or livingness as such comes into being for it there ... In that I now has subjectivity as such, abstract subjectivity, as object [g.], it has itself as object [g.]. I is itself living, makes its livingness into an object, and so is self-consciousness. (E3 §424G, 315)

It might be said that if the I conceives its object as characterised by subjectivity (I-hood) then surely it must conceive it as another I, another conscious being. However in self-consciousness as it first appears the I has only one way of identifying itself, as ‘possessor of objects’. So it has no way of distinguishing between ‘I’ and ‘I-hood in general’. It cannot make the distinction between what is numerically identical to it (the very same thing as it) and what is only qualitatively identical to it (the same kind of thing as it), and so cannot formulate the idea of ‘another I’, something qualitatively identical to but numerically distinct from it. As a result, for it to conceive its object as ‘characterised by I-hood’ is just for it to conceive its object as ‘I’. Thus the I of self-consciousness literally conceives its object as itself: ‘As judging, the I has an object which is not distinct from it - itself - self-consciousness’ (E3 §423, 35). Hegel expresses this with the formula ‘I=I’, where the ‘=‘ sign stands for the relationship between a subject and its object.

Hegel calls self-consciousness in its initial form ‘abstract’ or ‘immediate’ self-consciousness. In it the contradiction of consciousness in its original form has been resolved, in that the object has been rendered identical with the subject. However the contradiction now reappears in a new form, as the contradiction of self-consciousness. Again Hegel describes the contradiction as two-fold, but now both aspects of it concern the self-conscious subject’s conception of itself, the first its self-conception as object and the second its self-conception as I.

With regard to its self-conception as object, it faces a ‘contradiction of abstraction’. For it is part of the idea of an object that it be different from the I. So the I is not after all a genuine object. It has ‘a lack of reality, of existence [Dasein]’ (E3 §425G, 317). It is ‘without reality, for since it is itself its own object [g.], it is not one, for there is no difference present between itself and what is its’ (E3 §424, 37). As Hegel explains: