Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 49)

by Peter Singer

The legislature, in keeping with Hegel’s ideas of representation, has two houses of parliament, the upper consisting of the landed class and the lower of the business class. It is, however, ‘large-scale interests’ such as corporations and professional guilds that are represented in the lower house, not individual citizens as such.

century his preferences can only seem quaint, and his arguments for them have often – though not always – been shown by subsequent experience to be erroneous.

He is interested in freedom in a deeper, more metaphysical sense.

Hegel’s concern is with freedom in the sense in which we are free when we are able to choose without being coerced either by other human beings or by our natural desires, or by social circumstances.

If these choices are to bring us the satisfaction which is our due, the universal principles must be embodied in an organic community organized along rational lines. In such a community individual interests and the interests of the whole are in harmony. In choosing to do my duty I choose freely because I choose rationally, and I achieve my own fulfilment in serving the objective form of the universal, namely the state.

remedy for the second great defect in Kantian ethics – because the universal law is embodied in the concrete institutions of the state, it ceases to be abstract and empty.

A second difference is that there was no functioning parliament at all in Prussia;

Thirdly, Hegel was, if within very definite limits, a supporter of freedom of expression.

Fourthly, Hegel advocated trial by jury as a way of involving citizens in the legal process; but there was no right to trial by jury in Prussia at the time.

These differences are sufficient to acquit Hegel of the charge of having drawn up his philosophy entirely in order to please the Prussian monarchy.

do not, however, make Hegel any kind of liberal in the modern sense. His rejection of the right to vote and his restrictions on freed...

We are free only when our choice is based on reason. To make the entire direction of the state dependent on such arbitrary choices would, in his view, amount to handing over the destiny of the community to chance.

Does this mean that Hegel is indeed a defender of the totalitarian state? This is Karl Popper’s view, in his widely read The Open Society and Its Enemies,

The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth … We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth … The State is the march of God through the world … The State … exists for its own sake.

Hegel’s emphasis on rationality as the essential element in freedom lends further credence to this reading. For who is to decide what is rational?

For if his plans are rational, those who oppose them must be motivated not by reason but by selfish desires or irrational whims.

Popper’s case is not as strong as it seems.

come not from Hegel’s own writings, but from notes of his lectures taken by students and published only after his death, by an editor who explained in his preface that he had done a certain amount of rewriting.

Where Popper quotes ‘The State is the march of God through the world’, a more accurate translation would be: ‘It is the way of God with the world, that the State exists.’ This amounts to no more than the claim that the ...

referring to the community as a whole.

Fourth, these quotations need to be balanced by others,

‘the right of subjective freedom is the pivot and centre of the difference between antiquity and modern

To hang the laws so high that no citizen can read them, as Dionysius the Tyrant is said to have done, or to bury them in learned tomes no ordinary citizen can read, is injustice.

By a ‘rational State’ Hegel himself meant something quite objective and quite specific. It had to be a state that individuals really did choose to obey and support, because they genuinely agreed with its principles and truly found their individual satisfaction in being part of it.

For Hegel, no rational state could ever deal with its citizens as the Nazi and Stalinist states dealt with theirs.

in Hegel’s rational state the interests of the individual and of the collective are in harmony.

To all this a modern reader will probably react with a ‘Yes, but …’. ‘Yes’ to indicate that Hegel was not himself advocating totalitarianism; ‘but’ to suggest that on this interpretation Hegel was extraordinarily optimistic about the possibilities of harmony between humans, and even more extraordinarily at odds with reality if he believed that the harmony would exist in the kind of state he described.

The latter criticism I believe to be ...

the rational state he has in mind must be very different from any state that existed in his day (or has e...

but it may be fair to say that in order to avoid the wrath of the King of Prussia

His political philosophy is only a part of a much larger philosophical system, in which unity between individual human beings has a metaphysical basis.

is time to confess: I have been cheating. My account of Hegel’s philosophy so far has carefully omitted all mention of something that Hegel himself refers to repeatedly and regards as crucial: the idea of Geist.

Hegel refers to the state, for instance, as ‘objectified Geist’.

the cause of easing the reader gently into the strange and often obscure world of Hegel’s ideas.

It is the standard word used to mean ‘mind’, in the sense in which our mind is distinct from our body.

Yet as I began to get more deeply into the attempt to present Hegel in a form that would be understandable to readers who are not already Hegel scholars, I became convinced that to use ‘spirit’ is to prejudge, for the English-speaking reader, the whole question of what Geist really means for Hegel.

word ‘spirit’ has an inescapably religious or mystical flavour.

Philosophers in this tradition have always been much concerned with the nature of mind, or consciousness, and its relation to the physical world.

What, though, is this ‘I’? It is not my physical body – about that I could be deceived. The ‘I’ that I know with certainty is simply a thing that thinks: in other words, a mind. From

philosopher like Hegel should write about mind.

Accordingly in this book I return to the practice of an earlier generation of translators of Hegel and render Geist as ‘mind’.

Why is the history of the world nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom?