HEGEL’S SUPRA-ETHICAL OPTIMISTIC WORLD-VIEW
Ethics in Hegel’s nature-philosophy, and in his philosophy of history
IN his speculative philosophy Fichte’s first and chief interest was
ethical. Hegel, deeper and more objective than he, aims at truth
before everything._(_47_)_ While using any helpful considerations
which are provided by facts, his aim is to discover the meaning of
Being. He therefore cannot join Fichte in the violent procedure,
suggested by his ethic, of giving the world the categorical imperative
for father and epistemological idealism for mother. Before going so
far as to write out a birth-certificate for the world, he undertakes
some material investigations. He studies the laws which govern events,
as they are revealed in history. He then lays these as the foundation
for the constructive operations which are to explain the origin of the
world out of the notion of Being. His philosophy, therefore, is a
philosophy of history become cosmic. The building, so far as one can
measure it externally, is solidly constructed. That is why it is still
convincing even where its lines lose themselves in infinity.
What, then, does Hegel discover to be the principle underlying the
course of events in history? He discovers that every process of
becoming advances with natural progress, and that this progress
realizes itself in the occurrence of a consecutive series of
contradictions which invariably issue in reconciliation! In thoughts
as in facts, [pg 142] every thesis evokes an antithesis. Then these
unite in a synthesis which preserves what is valuable in either of
them. Every synthesis that is reached becomes again a thesis for a new
antithesis. From these there results again a new synthesis, and so on
for ever.
With the aid of this scheme Hegel can expound the course of history.
From it he is also able to develop the basic principles of logic.
Hence he is sure that from it it must be possible to make intelligible
how the notional world which can be logically developed out of the
notion of Being passes over into being the world of reality. He
carries this fancy through to its conclusion in such magnificent
fashion, that even we, who are proof against its charm, can understand
how it was possible to become intoxicated with it.
While Fichte seeks to give an ethical meaning to the expansion of pure
Being into the world of reality, Hegel from the very outset takes his
stand upon the assertion that in its ultimate analysis the meaning of
the world can only be an intellectual one. The Absolute has no other
object in bringing a world into existence than to become conscious of
itself. It is infinitely creative spirit, but not, as in Fichte’s
thought, with the object of endlessly working, but with that of
returning into itself by the road of its own creations.
In nature the Absolute comprehends itself only very dimly. It is first
in man that it really experiences itself, and that in three ascending
stages. In the man who is concerned merely with himself and nature it
is still subjective spirit. In the communal spirit of men who
cooperate for the legal and ethical organization of human society, it
expands to objective spirit and at the same time, on a basis of
notions provided within this spirit, shows itself capable of being
creative. In art, in religion, and in philosophy it becomes conscious
of itself as absolute spirit, existing in and for itself and having
overcome the contradictions of subject and object, thought and Being.
In art it contemplates itself as such; in religious devotion [pg 143]
it presents itself as such; in philosophy, which is pure thought, it
comprehends itself as such. With the world represented as thought, the
Absolute experiences itself.
Before the destiny to which Spinoza submits with a smile, against
which Fichte and Schleiermacher rebel, Hegel bows in courageous
reverence for truth. His world-view is supra-ethical mysticism. The
ethical is to him only a phase in the development of intellectuality.
Civilization he conceives not as something ethical, but only as
something intellectual.
For proof that the ethical is nothing in itself but only a phenomenon
of the intellectual, Hegel appeals to French usage. “The moral,” he
says, “must be taken in the wider sense in which it signifies not the
morally good alone. ‘Le moral’ is in French opposed to the physical
and means the spiritual, the intellectual, or the non-material in
general.”_(_48_)_
The notion of the ethical with which Hegel works is extraordinarily
wide. It consists in “the will having for its objects not subjective,
_i.e._, selfish, interests, but a universal content.”_(_49_)_ It is
the business of thought to define this universal content in particular
instances.
If Hegel had fully explored the fact that the individual will comes to
assign itself universal objects, and had felt this fact to be the
mysterious one that it is, he could not have passed so lightly as he
does over the ethical problem. He would have had to admit to himself
that the spiritual element which manifests itself in it is unique in
character, and cannot be included in any higher one, or classified
under any other at all. The problem of the mutual relationship between
the spiritual and the moral would have been clearly posed.
But Hegel is so anxious to find some sort of shelter for his
speculative optimistic world-view that he estimates the birth of the
ethical in man not by and for itself, but simply [pg 144] as a
phenomenon of the rise of the supra-individual spirit. Instead of
directing his thought to the question of how the individual spirit in
each several person can be at the same time supra-individual and
conscious of its oneness with the Absolute, Hegel sets out to make
intelligible the higher experience of the individual by means of the
mutual relations between it and the universal spirit of the collective
body to which it belongs. He says it is presumption for the individual
spirit as such to seek, as it does in Indian thought, to comprehend
its relation to the Absolute. Becoming one with the Absolute is an
experience of the universal spirit of collective humanity when it has
reached its loftiest height. Only when it stands in connection with
this, as a river with the waters of a lake through which it had
flowed, can the individual spirit obtain experience of the Absolute.
This is the fatal turning towards the general and supra-personal at
which the Hegelian philosophy makes itself superficial.
Ethics, then, for Hegel have at bottom only the significance that they
make possible the growth of a society in the collective spirit of
which the absolute spirit can come to a consciousness of itself. Man
becomes moral by submitting voluntarily to the demands which society
recognizes as expedient with a view to the creation of the higher
spirituality.
Hegel has no ethic for the individual. The deep problems of ethical
self-perfecting and of the relations between man and man do not
concern him. When he does come to talk about ethics his subject is the
family, society, and the State.
With Bentham ethics complete law. Hegel works the two in together. It
is significant that he wrote no treatise on ethics. All that he does
publish about ethics is to be found in his philosophy of law.
His first concern is to show that the State, correctly conceived, is
not merely a legal, but a legal-ethical body. Fichte had made it the
ethical educator of the individual. For Hegel it is the essential
element in all moral happenings, [pg 145] “the self-conscious moral
substance,” as he expresses it. What is most valuable in the moral
comes to actuality in it and through it. This overvaluing of the State
is a natural consequence of his low valuation of the spiritual
significance of individuality as such.
Hegel’s supra-ethical world-view. His belief in progress
With Fichte’s idea, which he found it impossible to work out
completely, of giving ethics a cosmic foundation in such a way that
its content might be the bringing of the world under the sovereignty
of reason, Hegel can have nothing to do. His feeling for the real
debars him from anything so fantastic. But that he altogether gives up
the cosmic notion of ethics is fatal. Instead of allowing ethics and
nature-philosophy to come to an understanding together in his
speculative thought, he makes a sacrifice of ethics from the start. He
refuses them the liberty (which they enjoyed with Spinoza, Fichte, and
Schleiermacher), of trying to get themselves conceived as the relation
of the individual to the universe. They are forbidden, further, to try
(as they can do with the Chinese monists), to get accepted as a
relation which forms part of the meaning of the universe. They are
restricted to being a standard for the regulation of the relations
between individuals and society. They may not be active as a formative
idea in the creation of a world-view upon a foundation of
nature-philosophy. They are simply built into the edifice as an
already shaped and dressed stone.
In consequence of Hegel’s allowing ethics no significance beyond that
of a preparatory motive to realizing the spiritual meaning of the
world, his teaching becomes remarkably analogous to the Brahmanic.
Hegel and the Brahmans are akin because, as consistent thinkers, they
venture to admit that thought about the world and the Absolute which
lies behind it can reach only an intellectual, never an ethical
meaning in the union of the finite spirit [pg 146] with the infinite,
and therefore value ethics only as a preparatory motive thereto. With
the Brahmans ethics prepare the individual for the intellectual act in
which he experiences the Absolute in himself and himself dies in it.
With Hegel they help in the formation of society, in the communal
spirit of which the Absolute first becomes capable of experiencing
itself.
It is only a relative difference between Hegel and the Brahmans that
the latter make their intellectualist mysticism individualist and
world- and life-denying, while Hegel carries his through as world- and
life-affirming, and makes the intellectual act take place only when a
society has produced the requisite spirituality. The inner similarity
in character of the two world-views is not affected thereby. One is
the complement of the other. Both give value to ethics only as a phase
of intellectuality.
With Hegel, as with the Brahmans, ethics are indeed given a shelter,
but they are not shown to be necessary. For the production of the
consciousness of oneness with the Absolute the decisive element for
the Brahmans is, in the last resort, only a sufficient advance in
world- and life-denial, and depth of meditation. With Hegel, society,
which has to produce the spirituality in which the absolute spirit
experiences itself in the finite, could come into existence just as
well by means of law alone, as by means of ethics and law together.
His ethic is, in truth, only a species of law.
With the Brahmans ethics are a colouring which their world- and
life-denial takes on for a certain distance; with Hegel they are a
similar mode of self-manifestation of his world- and life-affirmation.
Hegel’s world-view is in and by itself supra-ethical mysticism with
world- and life-affirmation, just as that of the Brahmans is
supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-denial.
That his world-view is this and nothing else Hegel admits in the fit
of brutal frankness under the influence of which he wrote on June
25th, 1820, the famous Preface to his _Philosophy of Law_. Our task
(he there explains,) is not to [pg 147] re-fashion reality in
accordance with ideals which have arisen in our spirit, but we have to
listen to the way in which the real world affirms itself, and us
within itself, in its own immanent impulse to progress. “What is
rational is real, and what is real is rational.” The eternal which is
present under the form of the temporal and transient and is developing
within this, it is worth our while to recognize and thereby to become
reconciled with reality. It is not for philosophy to set up ideas
about what is to be. Her task is to understand what is. She does not
produce any new age, but is only “her own age comprehended in
thought.” She always arrives too late to be an instructor as to what
the world ought to be, and she begins to speak only when reality has
completed its process of construction. “Minerva’s owl does not begin
her flight till darkness is closing in.” Beneficent peace will be
brought us by the sincere recognition of reality.
Rationalism is an ethical belief in progress combined with an ethical
will-to-progress. It was as such that Kant and Fichte had undertaken
to deepen it. After passing through Hegel’s mind it is only a belief
in progress . . . belief in a progress which is immanent in things. It
is this alone that this powerful speculative thinker believes himself
able to place upon a cosmic foundation, and in this he is in contact
with Schleiermacher. On the whole, and reduced to the simplest
possible expression, his world-view and Schleiermacher’s lie not very
far apart. The secret feud in which the two thinkers lived with one
another had in reality no objective justification.
The extent of the strategical retreat on which Hegel enters remains
hidden from his contemporaries. They rejoice unreservedly at the
magnificent energy which his system displays, and with the less
reservation because he himself only once, viz. in the Preface to his
_Philosophy of Law_, expresses himself freely about the final results
of his thinking. The fact that with him the moon of ethics is obscured
does not evoke the excitement that might [pg 148] normally have been
expected, because, in compensation, he allows the sun of the
cosmically founded belief in progress to shine all the brighter. Being
still under the influences of rationalism, the men of that time are so
accustomed to regard ethics and belief in progress as organically
connected that they look on the strengthening of optimism effected by
Hegel as being also a strengthening of ethics.
Hegel’s formal assumption that progress comes about through a
succession of antitheses which are always finally reconciled in
valuable syntheses has kept optimism alive through most critical times
right on to the present day. Hegel is the creator of that confident
feeling for reality with which Europe staggered into the second half
of the nineteenth century without becoming aware that ethics have at
some point or other been left behind. And that being so, he is able to
hold his optimistic philosophy of history out of which his world-view
grows, only because he lives in a period when a general temper which
works with ethical energies of extraordinary strength is carrying
Humanity forward in an extraordinary way. Whence the progress comes,
which he experiences all around him, the great philosophic historian
does not recognize. He explains as produced through natural forces
what has originated from ethical ones.
In Hegel’s world-view the connexion between ethics and belief in
progress, in which the spiritual energy of modern times has always
rested, is broken, and with the separation both are ruined. Ethics
languish, and the belief in progress, now left to itself, becomes
spiritless and powerless because it is now only a belief in immanent
progress, and no longer a belief in progress of all kinds which is
produced by enthusiasm. With Hegel there rises the spirit which
borrows its ideals empirically from reality and believes in the
progress of Humanity more than it labours to promote it. Hegel stands
on the bridge of an ocean liner and explains to the passengers the
wonders of the machinery in the vessel that is carrying them, and the
mysteries of the [pg 149] calculation of its course. But he gives no
thought to the necessary maintenance as before of the fires under the
boilers. Hence the speed gradually diminishes until the vessel comes
at last to a standstill. It no longer obeys the helm, and becomes a
plaything of storms.
[pg 150]