ROUSSEAU’S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL.
1. Probably no other philosophical movement has ever focussed in
itself so much human nature as the post-Kantian Idealism. It has
fallen to the present writer to show elsewhere [1] how the “finding
of Greek art,” which it owed to Winckelmann, gave it unrivalled
insight into mind as embodied in objects of sense. Here we have to
deal with another source of its ideas. As we pointed out in the
first chapter, the ethical and political theory of Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel springs from the same _Evangel of Jean Jacques_ from which
the French Revolution drew its formulae. It would not be true to
say that it springs from this alone. Great philosophers know how
to fuse the materials they work in; and particularly the modern
abstraction of “freedom” was blended, for Hegel, with the idea of
concrete life through the tradition of the Greek city, with its
affinity for autonomy on the one hand and for beauty on the other.
Nevertheless, few lines of affiliation are better established in the
history of philosophy than that between Rousseau’s {236} declaration
that liberty is the quality of man and the philosophy of Right as it
developed from Kant to Hegel.
[1] _History of Aesthetic_ (Sonnenschein).
It has been suggested that the literary intercourse of France,
England, and Germany was far closer in the eighteenth century than
it is to-day, in spite of the immense mechanical development of
communication in the interval. National self-consciousness and the
divergent growth of national minds have, it is urged, raised a
barrier between peoples, which existed in the last century to a far
smaller degree. [1] This question of literary history lies beyond my
subject; but at least it seems probable that Rousseau had a power
in Germany which no French writer of to-day could possibly exercise
outside his own country. His educational influence [2] alone forms
a considerable chapter in the history of _Pädagogik_, and touches
closely on philosophy. Our psychologists of childhood are his
spiritual descendants, and indeed the question of the development of
the human being is closely akin to the question of liberty.
[1] See M. Lévy-Bruhl, “De l’Influence de Jean Jacques Rousseau en
Allemagne,” _Annales de l’École libre des Sciences Politiques_,
Juillet, 1897.
[2] Cf. _Kant et Fichte et la Problême de l’Education_, Duproix,
Alcan., 1897; and on Rousseau’s varied initiative, see Amiel,
_Journal Intime_ E. tr. I. 202, “J.J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all
things. It was he who founded travelling on foot before Töpffer,
reverie before René, literary botany before George Sand, the worship
of nature before Bernardin de St. Pierre, the democratic theory
before the Revolution of 1797, political discussion and theological
discussion before Mirabeau and Rénan, the science of teaching before
Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure.”
His literary influence, as the prophet of nature and feeling, and the
champion of sentimental {237} religion against the _Philosophes_,
carried everything before it. He struck into the path which had
been opened in Germany by the translation of Thomson’s _Seasons_
before 1750, and followed by the Swiss critics and the idyllic
poets, who were opponents of the dominant pseudo-classicism. [1]
Jacobi, who passed some years of his youth at Geneva, owed his
doctrine of feeling as the faculty of religious truth in part at
least to Rousseau. Klinger, whose drama, _Sturm und Drang_, gave its
name to the romantic and naturalist revolution, marked by Goethe’s
_Götz von Berlichingen_ (1773) and Schiller’s _Räuber_ (1781),
was responsible, we are told, in later years, for the surprising
judgment that Rousseau (in _Emile_) is the young man’s best guide
through life. [2] Even Schiller and Herder passed through a period of
enthusiastic admiration for Rousseau. It is exceedingly significant
that Schiller’s _Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity_
are addressed expressly to the problem of reconciling the claims of
Nature [3] and of the State upon individual man. For, when Schiller
suggests that the clue to the required reconciliation between Nature
and the State lies in the union of feeling and intelligence which is
found in Beauty, we have before us in a single focus three main types
of experience, from the fusion of which a new idealism was to emerge.
[1] See author’s _History of Aesthetic_, p. 214.
[2] Lévy-Bruhl, _Loc. cit_. p. 330. The citation appears to be from a
romance, and I have not seen the context.
[3] Letter 3 contains a profound criticism of the supposed actual
“state of nature,” and it might be said with truth that the whole
subject of the letters is the problem “how man is to be free without
ceasing to be sensuous.”
{238} 2. Returning to our immediate subject, the Philosophy of
Right, we will consider for a moment the specific relation of
Rousseau’s idea of Freedom to Kantian or post-Kantian thought. It is
permissible, perhaps, to embody the chief part of what has to be said
in extracts from works of great original value and not very generally
accessible. Not only the poets and sentimentalists of Germany, but
also the great philosophers, distinctly recognised the debt of the
German genius to the ideas of Rousseau. The conception of the “Social
Contract” has an importance which surprises the modern reader in the
political philosophy of Kant and more especially of Fichte, and it
is not till we come to Hegel that the literal interpretation of the
“Social Contract” is completely discriminated from the truth conveyed
by the doctrine of the General Will. Apart from all questions about
the literal meaning of the “Social Contract,” it is simple fact that
the whole political philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte is founded
on the idea of freedom as the essence of man, first announced--such
was Hegel’s distinct judgment--by Rousseau. I begin by citing the
crucial passage from Hegel’s _History of Philosophy_, which gives in
a few lines the basis of his own theory of Right, as well as his view
of Rousseau’s position. [1]
[1] Hegel’s _Geschichte der Philosophie_, iii. 477.
After explaining that Rousseau treated the right of Government as
on one side, in its historical aspect, resting [1] on force and
compulsion, Hegel {239} continues,
“But the principle of this justification (the absolute
justification of the State) Rousseau makes the free
will, and, disregarding the positive right (or law)
of States, he answers to the above question [2] (as
to the justification or basis of the State) that man
has free will, seeing that ‘Freedom is the distinctive
quality of man. [3] To renounce one’s freedom, means to
renounce one’s humanity. Not to be free is therefore a
renunciation of one’s human rights, and even of one’s
duties.’ The slave has neither rights nor duties.
Rousseau says, therefore, [4] The _fundamental problem_
[5] is to find a form of association which shall protect
and defend at once the person and the property of every
member with the whole common force, and in which each
individual, inasmuch as he attaches himself to this
association, _obeys only himself, and remains as free
as before_ [5] The solution is given by the _Social
Contract_; [5] it (Rousseau says) is this combination, to
which each belongs through his will."
These principles, thus set up in the abstract, we cannot
but take as correct; yet ambiguity begins at once. Man is
free; this is no doubt the substantive nature of man; and
in the State it is not only not abandoned, but in fact
it is therein first established. The freedom of nature,
the capacity of freedom, is not the actual freedom; {240}
for nothing short of the State is the actualisation of
freedom.
But the misunderstanding about the “_General Will_”
begins at the following point. The notion of Freedom must
not be taken in the sense of the casual free-will of each
individual, but in the sense of the reasonable will, the
will in and for itself. [6] The general will is not to be
regarded as compounded of the expressed individual wills,
[7] so that these remain absolute; else the proposition
would be true, “where the minority has to obey the
majority, there is no freedom.” Rather the general will
must be the rational will, even though people are not
aware of it; the State, therefore, is no such association
as is determined upon by individuals.
The false apprehension of these principles does not
matter to us. What matters to us is that by their means
it comes as a content into consciousness, that man has
in his mind Freedom as the downright absolute, that the
free will is the notion of man. It is just freedom that
is the self of thought; one who repudiates thought and
talks of freedom knows not what he is saying. The oneness
of thought with itself [8] is freedom, the free will.
Thought, only taken in the form of will, is the impulse
to break through [9] one’s mere subjectivity, is relation
to definite being, realisation of one’s {241} self,
inasmuch as I will to make myself as an existent adequate
to myself as thinking. The will is free only as that
which thinks.
The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau,
and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended
himself as infinite. This furnishes the transition to
the Kantian philosophy, which, from a theoretical point
of view, took this principle as its basis. Knowledge
[10] was thus directed upon its own freedom, and upon
a concrete content, [10] which it possesses in its
consciousness.”
[1] In the place referred to, _Contrat Social_, Bk. I. chs. iii.,
iv., Rousseau points out clearly that _force_ gives _no right_. So
when Hegel describes him as saying that the right of rule rested on
force, etc., _in its historical aspect_, this is incorrect unless it
means that, this “historical” aspect giving no explanation of right,
the term “right” is a mere name so far as it is concerned.
[2] _Cont. Social_, Bk. I., iv.
[3] I retain Hegel’s paraphrastic rendering of Rousseau’s words.
[4] _Cont. Social_, Bk. I., iv., cf. p. 89 above.
[5] Hegel’s italics.
[6] Anything is “in and for itself” when it has become “_for
itself_,” _i.e._ consciously and explicitly what it is “_in itself_,”
_i.e._ in its latent or potential nature.
[7] Rousseau’s _Will of All_.
[8] _i.e._ Anything is free, in as far as it is able to be itself.
Thought, as the embodiment of the return upon oneself or being with
oneself, is for Hegel the strongest case of this.
[9] _i.e._ By going beyond it.
[10] _I.e._ Philosophy, by basing itself on the idea of freedom, is
led to scrutinise the life in which mind realises itself, before it
becomes, and on the way to becoming, reflectively philosophical;
and which is therefore “_its own_ freedom”--as one texture with
knowledge--and also a “concrete content,” _i.e._ an actual system
of living, as an object in which mind can find itself expressed--a
relation which = freedom.
Everyone is familiar, in general terms, with the part played by the
idea of freedom in Kant’s philosophy. It may, however, be of interest
to point out how definitely it comes to him in the form given it by
Rousseau. Omitting the whole subject of Kant’s educational interest,
[1] I will refer to two passages from Kant’s early notes [2] in
connection with the tract on the _Feelings of the Sublime and the
Beautiful_, and two from the _Philosophy of Right_, which first
appeared in the autumn of 1796.
[1] See Duproix, _Loc. cit_. [2] Between 1765 and 1775.
First, then, to establish the definite impulse communicated to Kant
in his earlier years by Rousseau in particular.
“I am myself,” he writes, [1] “a student by inclination.
I feel the whole thirst for knowledge, and the covetous
restlessness that demands to advance in it, and again the
satisfaction of every {242} step of progress. There was a
time when I believed that all this might constitute the
honour of humanity, and I despised the crowd that knows
nothing. It was Rousseau who set me right. That dazzling
privilege disappeared; and I should think myself far less
useful than common artisans if I did not believe that my
line of study might impart value to all others in the way
of establishing the rights of humanity.”
[1] Kant’s _Werke_ (Rosenkrantz), xi., p. 240. Cf. p. 218.
Kant seems, from the context, to be foreshadowing the idea of his
critical philosophy, as putting man in his place in the order of
creation.
“If there is any science,” he says just below, “which man
really needs, it is that which I teach, to fill properly
_that_ place which is assigned to man in creation; a
science from which he can learn what one must be in order
to be human.”
This throws light on the curious passage in the same set of notes,
[1] where, in a discussion of the idea of Providence, Kant first
refers to Newton’s discovery of order in the multiplicity of the
planetary motions, and then proceeds,
“Rousseau first discovered, beneath the multiplicity
of the forms assumed by man, the deeply latent nature
of humanity, and the hidden law, according to which
Providence is justified by his observations. Before that
the objection of Alphonsus and of Manes [2] held the
field. After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified, and
henceforwards Pope’s doctrine is true.”
[1] _Ib_, p. 248.
[2] The Manichean doctrine.
“Pope’s doctrine” is no doubt his Leibnitzian optimism, founded on a
supposed insight into man’s true place in creation. [1] Rousseau’s
{243} “discovery,” which Kant here connects with this doctrine, must
be his assertion of man’s natural goodness and freedom, which he
tends to forfeit by departing in civilisation from the place assigned
him by nature. It is clear that Rousseau’s impeachment of literature
and civilisation had at this time made a considerable impression upon
Kant. It is all the more interesting to see Kant retracing, on a very
different scale, the development which Rousseau had initiated, from
natural to social and ethical freedom.
[1] See passage cited from Kant, just above.
I subjoin two passages from the _Philosophy of Right_ (1796),
which exhibit this later development, still in its connection with
Rousseau’s phraseology.
“_The innate Right is one only_.--Freedom (independence
of the constraining will of another), in as far as it can
co-exist with the freedom of every other according to a
universal law, is this unique original right, belonging
to every human being by reason of his humanity.” [1]
[1] Kant’s _Werke_ (Rosenkrantz), ix. 42.
An indication of the embodiment of this freedom in the State may be
given as follows:
“All those three powers in the State (Sovereignty or
the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial), are
offices; and, as essential, and necessarily proceeding
from the idea of a State in general with reference to
the establishment (Constitution) of one, are offices
_of State_. They contain the relation of a universal
supreme Power (which, considered according to laws of
freedom, can be no other than the united people), to
the crowd of individuals which compose it _qua_ the
governed; that is, of the ruler (_imperans_) to the
{244} subject (_subditus_). The act whereby the people
constitutes itself into a State, _or strictly speaking
only the idea of that Act, according to which idea alone
the justice of the Act can be conceived_, [1] is _the
original contract_, [2] according to which all (_omnes et
singuli_) of the people surrender their external freedom,
in order at once to receive it back again as members of a
commonwealth, that is, of the people regarded as a State
(_universi_). And one cannot say, The State, or man in
the State, has sacrificed a part of its innate outward
freedom for a certain end; but rather, he has totally
abandoned his wild lawless freedom in order to find his
entire freedom again undiminished in a lawful dependence,
that is, in a condition of right or law; (undiminished),
because this dependence springs from his own legislative
will.” [3]
[1] The italics are mine.
[2] Kant’s italics.
[3] _Ib_., 160
It is remarkable, in face of these general views, that both Kant
and Fichte follow Rousseau, for reasons which Kant explains from
the political conditions of the time, in distrusting representative
government. [1]
[1] _Ib_., 166 (the deputies are practically dependent on the
Ministry). But cf. p. 193, which shows that in a true Republic
the representative system might, according to Kant, be a reality,
and then would be the ideal form. The whole discussion is full of
reference to Rousseau.
The passage just cited is of course a reproduction of Rousseau’s
view modified by interpretation very much in the sense in which we
interpreted it above.
3. When we pass to Fichte (whose earlier work upon _Natural Right_
was published actually before that of Kant), we observe the idea
of contract in the act of transmuting itself, though {245} by an
imperfect transition, into the idea of an organic whole. For Fichte,
the State is a necessary implication of the human self; for a self
involves a society of selves, and law or right is the relation
between selves in a bodily world. And the “contract” on which
citizenship rests, by the fact that it is general, [1] forges an
indiscernible unity of the social whole. In this connection, Fichte
makes the remarkable claim to be first to apply the simile of an
organism to the whole civic relation. I cite an important passage:
“As far as I know, the idea of the whole of the State
has so far only been established through the ideal
combination of individuals, and thereby the true insight
into the nature of this relation has been cut off.” [2]
[1] Fichte (_Werke_, iii. 203 ff.) says, “Indeterminate”; viz.
I undertake to aid in protecting whoever is injured. Now, I can
never know (he argues) who in particular is to be benefited by
this undertaking; many are invisibly benefited by it through the
suppression of the injurious will before it comes to be manifest.
Therefore the relation is really organic; every part strives to
conserve every part, because injury to any part may concern any part.
It is the general as indeterminate, really less of a unity than
Rousseau’s “moi commun”.
[2] Werke, iii. 207. The “ideal combination” = the imaginary contract.
You must, he urges, not merely have an idea of combination; you must
show a bond of union beyond the idea, or making the idea necessary.
“In our account this has been achieved. In the notion
of that which is to be protected, in accordance with
the necessary uncertainty _which_ individual will need
the visible protection, and still further, _which_ it
will have advantaged invisibly in the case of a wrongful
will suppressed by the law before its outbreak, all
individuals are forced into unity.
{246} “The most fitting simile to elucidate this notion
is that of an organised natural product, which has
often been employed in modern times to describe the
different branches of the public power as a unity, but
not, so far as I know, to throw light on the whole civic
relation. Just as, in the natural product, every part
can be what it is only in _this_ combination, and out
of this combination simply would not be this (indeed
outside all organic combination there would simply be
nothing ...): just so it is only in the combination of
the State that man attains a definite position in the
series of things, a point of rest in nature; and each
attains _this determinate_ position towards others, and
towards Nature, only through the fact that he is in
_this determinate_ combination. ... In the organic body
every part continually maintains the whole, and while it
maintains it, is itself maintained thereby; just such is
the citizen’s relation to the State.”
Here we seem to be back with Plato and Aristotle. We are in fact
too near to Plato; for the distinction between maintenance of the
citizen’s determinate activity, and maintenance of the general
conditions of such activity, being destroyed by Fichte in his desire
to make State action positive and not negative, the conclusion
necessarily arises that the citizen must be secured and maintained in
his definite activity or occupation, and from this springs the notion
of the closed commercial State; “closed” against foreign trade in
order that the government may be able to determine prices and assign
occupations. In other words, the basis of the State is still the Ego
conceived as the individual self; it is not the social good operating
by its own {247} power on intelligent will. And, arising from this
individualism, the precautions which seem necessary to protect and
sustain the individual in his fixed relation to the whole, make
Fichte’s “Closed Commercial State” perhaps the earliest document of
a rigorous State Socialism. Freedom, as he himself recognises to be
_prima facie_ the case, is annihilated by the provisions for its
protection. [1] It is curious to see Rousseau’s phrase “forced to be
free,” [2] which refers in him to the supremacy of law, reappearing
as a defence of the enforcement of leisure time, [3] as though
freedom were not realised in labour and in loyalty. Here is Hegel’s
judgment of the transition we have just been considering.
“Kant began to found right on freedom, and Fichte too
in his _Natural Right_ made freedom his principle; but
it is, as in Rousseau, the freedom of the particular
individual. This is a great beginning; but in order to
get to particular results they were obliged to accept
presuppositions. The universal (for them) is not the
spirit, the substance of the whole, but the external
mechanical negative power against individuals. ... The
individuals remain always hard and negative against one
another; the prison-house, the bonds, become ever more
oppressive, instead of the State being apprehended as the
realisation of freedom.” [4]
[1] Fichte, _Nachgelassene Werke_, ii. 535.
[2] _Ibid_., 537.
[3] Of course such enforcement may have justification.
[4] Hegel, _Geschichte der Philosophie_, iii. 576. The idea of
organism was thus mechanically apprehended.
4. To apprehend the State as the realisation of freedom was the aim
of Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_, which has perhaps been more grossly
misrepresented {247} than any work of a great political philosopher,
excepting Plato’s _Republic_.
Popular criticism will tell us that Hegel found his ideal in the
Prussian bureaucracy, and will further hint that his doing so was
to his advantage. Such suggestions imply two misapprehensions,
for one of which Hegel’s tactlessness was responsible, while the
other depends on a genuine difficulty attending any philosophical
analysis of society. I will try to throw light on each of these
misapprehensions.
_(a)_ If Hegel had wished to have a partisan tendency attributed to
his book, he could not have timed it better nor written a preface
more certain to mislead. In 1820, when the book was published, the
minds both of governments and of peoples were full of irritation.
The anti-constitutional reaction had recently declared itself. [1]
The demonstration at the Wartburg, celebrating the anniversary
of the Reformation, and of the Battle of Leipzig, took place in
October, 1817. The unaccountable change in the ideas of the Czar from
Liberalism to reaction took place, we are assured, [2] in June, 1818.
The murder of Kotzebue, a Russian agent, reactionary journalist, and
decayed dramatist, took place in March, 1819. Kotzebue seems to have
been popularly credited with perverting the views of the Czar. His
assassination had an effect in no way related to his real importance.
Hardenberg, the Prussian minister, exclaimed on hearing of it that
a Prussian constitution had now become impossible. Innocent persons
{249} were arrested in Prussia at Metternich’s instigation, and
private papers were seized and published in a garbled form. The
publication of Hegel’s book with a preface attacking Fries for some
expressions used by him at the Wartburg festival, took place, as we
said, in 1820, and Hegel had moved from Heidelberg to Berlin, having
obtained the honour of a Berlin professorship, in 1818. Small wonder
that “it was pointed out that the new professor was a favourite of
the leading minister, that his influence was dominant in scholastic
appointments, and that occasional gratuities from the Crown proved
his acceptability,” or that Fries remarked that Hegel’s theory of the
State had grown, “not in the garden of science, but on the dunghill
of servility.” [3] Hegel himself “was aware that he had planted a
blow in the face of a shallow and pretentious sect, and that his book
had given great offence to the demagogic folk.” [4]
[1] See Fyffe’s _History of Modern Europe_, vol. II., ch. ii.
[2] Fyffe, _Loc. cit_.
[3] Wallace, _Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind_, p. clxxix.
[4] Wallace, _Loc. cit_.
And yet, so far as the essence of Hegel’s political philosophy is
concerned, there is nothing in all this. The first sketch of the
_Philosophy of Right_ was published in the _Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences_ in 1817, before Hegel left Heidelberg. His
political interest, in its gradual development, can be traced back
in unpublished writings to 1802. [1] He started from the conception
of the Greek State, on which his early sketch of the ethical system
(1802, unpublished in his lifetime) was founded. And his subsequent
development consisted in enlarging this conception by drawing out
its framework to include the more {250} accented freedom of modern
life, as he divined it from the attentive study both of English and
of German politics. His substantive political theory never changed,
except by development, in accordance with his general attitude
towards the differences between Greek and modern life.
[1] See Wallace, _Op. cit_., clxxx. and clxxxvii.
_(b)_ “But,” popular criticism will rejoin, “here we have Hegel’s
ideal State, depicted by his own hand, and it is pretty much the
Prussian State of his time, tempered by a few references to English
politics. Is not this a narrow horizon and a low ideal?” This
criticism is of value, because it leads up to an important feature of
true political theory.
To depict what most people call “an ideal State” is no more the
object of political philosophy than it is the object, say, of
Carpenter’s _Human Physiology_ to depict an “ideal” man or an angel.
The object of political philosophy is to understand what a State is,
and it is not necessary for this purpose that the State which is
analysed should be “ideal,” but only that it should be a State; just
as the nature of life is represented pretty nearly as well by one
living man as by another.
“Every State,” [1] Hegel says, “even if your principles
lead you to pronounce it bad, even if you detect this
or that deficiency in it, always has (especially if
it belongs to the more developed States of our time)
the essential moments of its existence in it. But
because it is easier to discover defects than to grasp
the affirmative, people easily fall into the error of
allowing particular aspects to lead them to forget the
inner organism {251} of the State. The State is no work
of art, it stands in the world, that is, in the sphere
of caprice, accident, and error; evil behaviour is able
to mar it in many respects. But the ugliest human being,
a criminal, a sick man, or a cripple, is all the same a
living human being; the affirmative, his life, persists
in spite of the defect, and this affirmative is what we
are concerned with here.”
[1] _Phil. d. Rechts_, p. 313.
Of course, no comparison is quite precise, and it may be urged that
the State is more artificial than a human body. However this may
be, [1] we shall at least understand Hegel’s attitude better, and,
as I venture to think, adopt by far the most fruitful standpoint
for ourselves, if we look at political philosophy like one who is
trying to ascertain what is the nature of human life as he observes
it in any or every human body. If the life is there, its essentials
are there, and his aim is to understand them. No doubt a door is
here opened to argument with regard to what logicians call a “pure
case.” In understanding life “as such,” you must, it would seem,
purge out its mere defects, in regard to which it is not “life,” and
the remainder, what you pledge yourself to as essential, must be _ex
hypothesi_ your “ideal” of life. And perhaps there is no reason to
reject this responsibility if confined to the emphasis of elements
and interconnection of facts. It cannot apply to more.
[1] The comment will probably betray the type of pessimism indicated
by Rousseau. See p. 95 above.
We cannot construct an ideal body by reducing life, nor an ideal
polity by reducing mind, to its pure case or essentials, since we
cannot construct {252} organisms [1] or history at all. And it is
because this is always being forgotten that the duty of understanding
rather than constructing has to be insisted upon. It is true that in
understanding, as in constructing, we imply essential relations, and
so incur responsibility, and are liable to betray a bias; but still,
life can be understood by help of any creature that is alive, and
therefore it is not the example with which the student works, but the
insight which he shows, that is the decisive point.
[1] “No human mind has ever conceived a new animal.” Ruskin, _Modern
Painters_, ii. 148.
4. We have to begin by realising what is involved in the fact that
we are about to treat the analysis of a Modern State as a chapter
in the _Philosophy of Mind_. For Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_
(or of _Law_), though published by him as an independent work, is
essentially an expansion of paragraphs which form one sub-division of
his _Philosophy of Mind_, itself the third and concluding portion of
the _Encyclopaedia of Philosophy_, of which the two earlier portions
are the _Logic_ and the _Philosophy of Nature_.
We saw in the second chapter of the present work that the mere
force of facts has driven modern sociologists to handle their
science in a more or less intimate connection with Psychology. The
differentia of society, we saw, has been stated in various formulae
of a psychological character. But it seemed to us that, owing to a
neglect of the logic of identity, the nature of mind was broken up
by such unreal distinctions as that between invention and imitation,
varied by the unreal {253} reduction of the one to the other, [1]
and also that an unexplained separation and parallelism survived as
between the individual and the social mind, bearing witness to the
vitality of the superstition which Rousseau’s insight picked out for
condemnation. [2] We do not deny that mind may be more than social;
but in as far as it is social it is still real mind, and that means
that it is not something other than what we know as individual lives,
[3] a pale and unreal reflection of them, but it is a characteristic
which belongs to their most intimate constitution. This was Plato’s
analysis of moral autonomy, and his work remains classically valid,
needing only expansion and interpretation in applying it to modern
free intelligence and social self-government.
[1] Prof. Baldwin, _Social and Ethical Interpretation_, p. 105, at
least suggests this unreal reduction.
[2] See p. 95 above.
[3] “Lives,” and not merely “consciousnesses,” as objective mind is
largely in the form of habit.
The position of the analysis of a State in the _Philosophy of Mind_
may be briefly indicated as follows. When we embark on the study of
ordinary Psychology, we take the individual human being as we find
him to-day. We accept him as a formed individual, distinguishing
himself from external things, and possessing what we call a will--a
capacity of seeking his own satisfaction, which he represents to
himself in general ideas by the help of language. We analyse the
self and will with their aspects of memory, attention, association,
impulse, and emotion. But all modern psychologists are aware that
this formed self and will has much history behind it, and presupposes
a long genesis connecting it with simpler forms of {254} soul-life.
Hegel, indeed, was among the first in modern times to see how far
back the story of mind must be taken. The human intelligence, as the
psychologist assumes it, is for him a middle phase in the romance of
which mind is the hero. Before it come the chapters of Anthropology,
which treat of the fixation of a soul in the disciplined powers and
habits of a human body, and then the account [1] of a consciousness
which gradually rises from a struggling perception of objects around
it to a moral and scientific certainty of being at home in the world.
[1] For this account, to which he has devoted perhaps the greatest
of his works, Hegel has coined the term “Phenomenology of the Mind.”
It is the history of the emergence of the free or modern spirit from
the undeveloped consciousness of the ancient world, to which, for
instance, slavery seemed a natural thing.
The story of mind, then, begins long before the free mind, the object
of Psychology to-day, has appeared on the scene. And as to this there
would be no great difference of opinion. The peculiarity of Hegel’s
treatment is that his romance of the intelligence not only begins
long before the phase of free mind is reached, but continues long
after. Investigation can no more stop at the individual of to-day
than it can begin with him. His “mind” is not a separable entity,
and throughout the story no such entity has appeared. It has been
convenient for Hegel to treat the earlier division of the _Philosophy
of Mind_, comprising the Anthropology, Phenomenology, [1] and
Psychology, as dealing _par excellence_ with Mind Subjective. This is
because its main purpose was to trace the growth of “subjectivity,”
the emergence of the man of full mental {255} stature, aware
of himself, of his ideas and purposes, and confident in his
“subjectivity” his self-hood against all comers.
[1] See previous note.
But the following division of the work, under the title of Mind
Objective, deals with a necessary implication which might have been
noted at any point of the entire history of consciousness, though at
any earlier point it could have been treated as referring to mind
only by anticipation.
Here, however, the problem can no longer be deferred. The “free
mind” does not explain itself and cannot stand alone. Its impulses
cannot be ordered, or, in other words, its purposes cannot be
made determinate, except in an actual system of selves. Except by
expressing itself in relation to an ordered life, which implies
others, it cannot exist. And, therefore, not something additional and
parallel to it, which might or might not exist, but a necessary form
of its own action as real and determinate, is the actual fabric in
which it utters itself as Society and the State. This is what Hegel
treats in the second division of the _Philosophy of Mind_ under the
name of Mind Objective. It is not for him ultimate. A particular
society stands in time, and is open to criticism and to destruction.
Beyond it lies the reality, continuous with mind as known in the
State, but eternal as the former is perishable, which as Absolute
Mind is open to human experience in Art, Religion, and Philosophy.
We will pursue in the following chapter Hegel’s analysis of the
modern State as Mind Objective, a magnified edition, so to speak,
of Plato’s _Republic_, bringing before the eye in full detail
distinctions and articulations which were there invisible.
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