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July 8, 2005
Hegel's central ethical/political concern is the classical one of how to make civic obligation converge with private interest and satisfaction.
It reworks the classic concept in the light of the individuality of modernity. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel sets up the antithesis of Plato and Rousseau with great clarity:
The lack of subjectivity is really the defect of the Greek ethical idea . . . Plato has not recognized knowledge, wishes, and resolutions of the individual, nor his self-reliance, and has not succeeded in combining them with his idea; but justice demands its rights for this just as much as it requires the higher elucidation of the same, and its harmony with the universal. The opposite to Plato's principle is the principle of the conscious free will of individuals which in later times was more especially by Rousseau raised to prominence: the necessity of the arbitrary choice of the individual, as individual, the outward expression of the individual. (LHPh, II, 114, 115)
In modernity the bourgeois male, the new creature of the free market, is dangerously thin on civic virtue; he has been shaped by the "mad jostle" of the marketplace such that he is nearly incapable of glimpsing the universal aspects of ethical life. In addition, there are even deeper problems rooted in the capitalist production process itself: while human beings indeed become increasingly woven together into the web of production and consumption, the tendency of the system to mechanize and routinize labor on the one hand, and to generalize and manufacture needs on the other hand, results in a new type of human being woefully fitted for anything but the most banal type of (inter) subjectivity — let alone for civic participation.
For this reason, the market must not be allowed to become the state’s guiding spirit.
What Hegel does is attempt to understand the state (ie., the political community) as the realization of human freedom as radical self-dependence. The state is any ethical community which is politically organised and sovereign, subject to a supreme public authority and independent from other such communities.
For Hegel acting ethically involves the transcendence of pure self-interest.He understands this, not in terms of Kant's categorical imperative that subordinates one's individuality to an abstract principle of selflessness or universality; but as involving individuals freely acting on shared communal values. This involves pursuing actions whose ends and means, whilst reflecting shared interestsand culture of a community, also reflect the self-conceived interests of individuals. Ethical life, then, involves a kind of harmony between what individuals consider worthwhile ends and acceptable means for pursuing them and those activities that sustain and reinforce the community as a whole.
Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit (Geist) as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Recognition is the core of Hegel's conception of ethical life. Not only do I have to be aware of myself as a desiring subject but I have to be recognized as such; and to be recognized as a person who expercises their free will.
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