Hegel (Bildung)

 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 -1831), whose metaphysics, offered a social political theory as part of his metaphysics. When you read about Karl Marx in the next section, you will see parallels with Hegel, though stripped of the metaphysical trappings.

Hegel believed that “the human is nothing other than the series of his acts.” But our acts, he said, are driven by desires. What is your deepest desire? According to Hegel, the deepest human desire is for universal recognition, and it alone provides true and lasting satisfaction. However, since this desire is the universal condition of the species, humans are in continuous “life and death fights” with each other, he reasoned. Each person wants to override, negate, and destroy all others. Do you disagree? For Hegel, if you do not enter into this fight, then you are not truly a human being. You could think of Hegel as basing human action on the idea from Heraclitus, that war is the father of all.

The victor in war, he said, is lord and master. What makes the master victorious is a willingness to go all the way in battle. He would rather die than submit and be dominated. The master is a fighter who demands to be recognized by others, namely, those whom he has defeated: his slaves. The master’s keenest pleasure consists in knowing that his slaves recognize his superiority—though he is not averse to the physical goods that his slaves produce for him.

However, there are limitations in being a lord and master. First is the frustration of not being recognized by equals but only by inferior slaves. Second is the master’s static, non-evolving status. The master cannot grow and will eventually be outstripped by the very slaves he now owns and exploits. Let us consider how this happens.

The slave, according to Hegel, begins in a subordinate position—because of his unwillingness to fight to the death for recognition. Facing the possibility of death and experiencing the dread of ultimate nothingness, the slave opted for subservience rather than annihilation. As a result, he works for the master’s ends and not his own. His life is in service to another. His master is free; he is not. He, the slave, is an object for the master’s use and pleasure.

Nevertheless, his suffering, alienation, and coerced work eventually provide the slave with an intuition of his ideal or free self—and an intuition, as well, of the means eventually to achieve it. Consider the issue closely: The master attained freedom and domination by overcoming the instinct to live. The slave gradually, through his work and the accompanying thoughts of self-regard that arise out of it, comes to an idea that he likewise can come to dominate Nature. But the slave’s form of domination is creative; it modifies and shapes Nature to thought and ideals, giving rise to a science of the natural world.

So the work and service of the slave lead to a transformation of Nature through science. Likewise, work and servitude transform and ultimately free the slave to a higher self. He gradually achieves self-regard based on his accomplishment of transforming Nature; to put it in Hegelian terminology, he becomes the incarnation or embodiment of the Absolute Idea and the realization of Absolute Knowledge. The ultimate result is that the slave has weapons not only to overcome the fear of death but also to escape the yoke of the master. Moreover, through this struggle, the slave provides the changes that determine the evolution of history. This fact provides he slave with an ultimate prestige as well as with freedom and autonomy. The slave is a slave no more but has risen above the master and Nature alike.

Now, this process that the slave undergoes to become free is a hard and enduring struggle. Furthermore, not all labor is freeing, Hegel believed. The all-important labor lies in Bildung, or self-building education. This shapes and humanizes the slave, bringing him ever closer to his own idea of selfhood. At the same time, it shapes and transforms the world, bringing it closer to its ideal realization. This dual process yields the “world historical individual,” one who shapes the course of history. For Hegel, history is determined by historical individuals who understand instinctively what must be done and have the drive to do it. Their work is the progress of the world.

The struggle between master and slave has many stages, according to Hegel. One important stage is Christian ideology, in which the slave ceases to struggle for freedom. Instead, he commits to absolute slavehood under an absolute master. He equates freedom and happiness with the Hereafter, which he thinks begins with death. Consequently, he finds no reason to fight for freedom, and self-denial is considered a virtue. For Hegel, this phase of history expresses the ultimate domination of the slave’s fear of death. He believed that freedom and self-realization occur only by surmounting this absolute enslavement to death.

The final stage of human development occurs in the demise of the master- slave dialectic. This happens when we accept our finitude and learn to live in this world as autonomous and free individuals. The key is to overcome fear of death. Through work and Bildung, as explained earlier, the individual is gradually formed and becomes self-conscious; he leaves the static, empty, boring stage of sheer being and becomes a particular, progressive, conscious realization of the Universal or Absolute Idea. This stage of human development represents for Hegel the actualization of the idea of the god-man. This god-man is immanent, present reality as Absolute Self-Consciousness. Here Hegel is following Spinoza’s equation of Nature and God (Natura sive deus). Hegel claimed that, after Spinoza, all philosophy would be Spinozism.

Hegel saw this final development of the human spirit in Napoleon, or, to put it more precisely, he saw it in the person of Napoleon as infused with Hegelian self-consciousness. The idea of a transcendental god having evolved into an immanent Universal existing in the world was, for Hegel, the Ideal State realized in history. Only in such a state can a person find ultimate satisfaction and total autonomy. Only in such a state can true individuality be achieved as a unique synthesis of Particularity and Universality. The evolution to this Ideal State involves not only human consciousness of the Absolute Idea but also its concrete realization in history.