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Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness
Having offered his ingeniously insightful account of the relative positions of the master and the slave, Hegel now moves on to a discussion of a position he identifies with Stoicism.
Stoicism
Broadly speaking, the transition to Stoicism seems to involve a transition from the one-sided practical attitude of desire and the master, to a new form of theoretical attitude brought about by the insights of the slave. This theoretical attitude is a kind of rationalism, for the Stoics believed that the universe was governed by logos or reason, and that man's rational soul is a fragment of that divine logos, and so we can achieve well-being by attuning ourselves to the cosmic scheme of things. ([Stoicism's] principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true and good only in so far as it thinks it to be such.') In bringing in Stoicism here, and in the subsequent transitions to Scepticism and then to the Unhappy Consciousness, it is notable that Hegel is referring to actual historical episodes (as he will do later, in referring to the French Revolution, for example). Indeed, as many commentators have pointed out, in mentioning that the Stoic aims at freedom 'whether on the throne or in chains', Hegel surely meant us to think of the late or 'Roman' Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, the former an Emperor, the latter a (liberated) slave. This then raises the question of how far the development of the Phenomenology more generally should be seen in historical terms, and how much it should be read as a form of speculative history, of the sort Hegel was later to present in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Attempts have been made to read the Phenomenology this way, but my own view is that the two enterprises should be distinguished, and that in this text historical episodes have the place they do because they relate to particular stages in the conceptual development that Hegel is tracing out for consciousness. I think it would therefore be wrong to try to build up Hegel's account of this (and other) historical episodes into a historicist reading of the Phenomenology as a whole. (For further discussion of this issue, see Hyppolite 1974: 27-50.) Nonetheless, it may seem tempting to treat the transition from the master/slave relation to Stoicism as primarily a historical transition, as Hegel seems to give it a purely socio-political rationale, with his suggestion that Stoicism arises as both the master and slave seek to escape from the unsatisfactoriness of their social world, as they abstract from the reality of their situation into a world of contemplative indifference to their surroundings:
This consciousness accordingly has a negative attitude towards the lord and bondsman relationship. As lord, it does not have its truth in the bondsman, nor as bondsman is its truth in the lord's will and in his service; on the contrary, whether on the throne or in chains, in the utter dependence of its individual existence, its aim is to be free, and to maintain that lifeless indifference which steadfastly withdraws from the bustle of existence, alike from being active as passive, into the simple essentiality of thought. Self-will is the freedom which entrenches itself in some particularity and is still in bondage, while Stoicism is the freedom which always comes directly out of bondage and returns into the pure universality of thought. As a universal form of the World-Spirit, Stoicism could only appear on the scene in a time of universal fear and bondage, but also a time of universal culture which had raised itself to the level of thought. It may seem from this, that Hegel intends us to treat the move from the master/slave relationship to Stoicism in quasi-materialist terms, as a form of consciousness that emerges in response to its socio-political predicament, in a (doomed) attempt to come to terms with it ( who speaks of Stoicism as an ideology of slavery). There are signs, however, that this is not the best way to take Hegel's procedure here. Rather, it could be argued that Hegel thinks that with Stoicism, consciousness is taking a new turn, and that the insights needed to make this turn possible are only available once consciousness has been through the master/slave dialectic. In his introductory remarks to this section as a whole, Hegel signals that when consciousness moves to the rationalism of the Stoics, it has arrived at a new attitude to the world; for the Stoics saw reality as permeated by reason, so that thought is seen as giving us access to the rational structure inherent in things, which are now no longer viewed as 'other' by the subject:
We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinitude of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness. For to think does not mean to be an abstract 'I', but an 'I' which has at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object] . . . In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity my being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself. The sense that 'in thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other' is very much what Hegel himself hopes he will give us as a result of his attempt to find rational satisfaction for the subject in the world; and to the extent that we have arrived at the idea that thought can help the subject find itself in the world, 'we are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape', one first represented by the rationalism of Stoicism. Consciousness was dominated by the assumption that thought contrasts to the world of concrete experience, while self-consciousness up to now has merely seen the world as an 'other' to be negated; but the Stoic adopts a rationalistic stance that offers a way out of the difficulties that these assumptions have caused, by treating thought as a vehicle through which the subject can find itself in the world, much as Hegel himself believed. (The signification thus attached to thought and its characteristic forms may be illustrated by the ancient saying that "nous governs the world", or by our own phrase that "Reason is in the world"; which means that Reason is the soul of the world it inhabits, its immanent principle, its most proper and inward nature, its universal.') Now if (as this suggests), Hegel saw in Stoicism not just a 'slave ideology', but the beginning of a new philosophical perspective that would ultimately culminate in something like his own outlook, the interesting question concerning this transition is what gives it its place in the dialectic in conceptual rather than socio-historical terms? How does the position of the slave (in particular) lead consciousness into this 'new shape'? The answer, I think, can be seen by recalling Hegel's characterization of the slave's position: for the slave found through working with things in the world, that the world co-operates as he attempts to bring his ideas to realization in his products, so that nature no longer seems alien to it (and thus as something to be 'negated'), or as somehow beyond thought, thereby making the kind of shift in outlook needed to lead us into Stoicism. As Taylor has put it: 'Through work, discipline and the fear of death, the slaves have come to a recognition of the universal, of the power of conceptual thought'. Thus, it is the slave's awareness of himself as achieving an insight into the workings of the world that moves the dialectic of consciousness onto a perspective Hegel identifies as Stoicism, which holds that thought enables us to be at one with the rational universe. However, as Hegel makes clear in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, while to some extent he saw Stoicism as heir to the rationalistic world-picture of Plato and Aristotle (to which his own speculative rationalism was deeply and consciously indebted), he nonetheless saw in Stoicism a form of rationalism that was much more abstract and formulaic than it had been in 'the bright Grecian world', making its 'recognition of the universal' inadequate. Though historically subsequent to the work of Plato and Aristotle, Hegel therefore portrays Stoicism as conceptually inferior and so (in philosophical terms) as an expression of rationalism in its crudest and most primitive form: 'The selfsame consciousness that repels itself from itself becomes aware of itself as the element of being-in-itself; but at first it knows itself to be this element only as a universal mode of being in general, not as it exists objectively in the development and process of its manifold being'. This is rather obscure: but Hegel makes his criticism clearer later in the section, where he claims that 'the abstract thinking of Stoicism . . . turns its back on individuality altogether', by adopting a rationalistic picture that is too cut off from the concrete world: 'This thinking consciousness . . . is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness'. By offering merely empty generalizations, the Stoics failed to relate their concept of reason to individual particulars; they could therefore only provide platitudes, not concrete advice or knowledge. As we saw in the Preface, Hegel takes rationalism that is overly abstract and formal in this way to be easily degraded, so that it can quickly become the victim of its anti-rationalist critics. In order to show how Stoicism falls victim to these critics, Hegel briefly refers to the central cruxes that faced Stoic thought, particularly the difficulties the Stoics had in identifying any criterion for truth in their epistemology, and in giving content to their vague claims in ethics that 'living in agreement' or 'in accordance with reason' constitutes the good life. 'But this self-identity of thought is again only the pure form in which nothing is determined. The True and the Good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content, they soon become tedious'. (As Harris points out, his biographer Karl Rosenkranz reports that in the conclusion to his unpublished early work the System of Ethical Life (1802 or 1803), Hegel characterized the Roman Peace as 'the boredom of the world': see SEL: 181.) Faced with these doctrinal difficulties, Hegel argues, the Stoics came to appear merely dogmatic in their optimistic claims regarding the rationality of the world and the happiness that could come from conforming ourselves to it in some abstract sense. Such dogmatism naturally gives rise to a form of more critical (and ultimately anti-rationalistic) Scepticism.
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