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Active Reason
Hegel continues his analysis of how Reason tries to make itself 'at home in the world' in this section and the next (entitled 'The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness Through Its Own Activity' and 'Individuality Which Takes Itself To Be Real In And For Itself'). In considering these sections, it is important to take into account the introductory preamble to the first of them. Hegel makes clear here that the strategies he considers in the rest of this chapter are all ones that take as their starting point 'modern' assumptions about the individual and his place in the social world, and so should be contrasted with the less individualist outlook of pre-in the world'. Only once these 'modern' standpoints have been shown to be inadequate will consciousness 'turn back' to see how this premodern outlook came to be lost (in the chapter on Spirit). Hegel's characterization of the fundamental differences between the ancient and modern conceptions of the individual here is therefore vital to the rest of his discussion.
Ancients and moderns
For the Greeks, in Hegel's view, it was accepted as axiomatic that the only way in which an individual can come to find practical satisfaction within the world is inside the state or polis, so the question of satisfaction for the individual is immediately taken to be a social question: only if the individual lives within a properly constituted social framework can he ever find himself 'at home'. According to Hegel, the Greeks therefore held that reconciliation between the individual and the world could only be achieved by an individual who lived in accordance with the customs and traditions of a properly constituted community. Hegel outlines this view as follows:
In a free nation, therefore, Reason is in truth realized. It is a present living Spirit in which the individual not only finds its essential character, i.e. his universal and particular nature, expressed, and present to him in the form of thinghood, but is himself this essence, and also has realized that essential character. The wisest men of antiquity have therefore declared that wisdom and virtue consist in living in accordance with the customs of one's nation.
In adopting this position, the 'wisest men of antiquity' showed themselves to be thinking at a time before the individual had learnt to distinguish himself from his social role, and to regard himself as an independent source of moral assessment, and when the divisions between self and society had not been felt. Hegel presents a sketch of this premodern social life in the preceding paragraphs (one that he elaborates elsewhere):
This ethical Substance, taken in its abstract universality, is only law in the form of thought; but it is no less immediately actual self-consciousness, or it is custom. The single individual consciousness, conversely, is only this existent unit in so far as it is aware of the universal consciousness in its individuality as its own being, since what it does and is, is the universal custom . . . They are conscious of being these separate independent beings through the sacrifice of their particularity, and by having this universal Substance as their soul and essence, just as this universal again is their own doing as particular individuals, or is the work they have produced . . . The labour of the individual for his own needs is just as much a satisfaction of the needs of others as of his own, and the satisfaction of his own needs he obtains through the labour of others. As the individual in his individual work already unconsciously performs a universal work, so again he also performs the universal work as his conscious object; the whole becomes, as a whole, his own work, for which he sacrifices himself and precisely in so doing receives back from it his own self . . . This unity of being-for-another or making oneself a Thing, and of being-for-self, this universal Substance, speaks its universal language in the customs and laws of its nation. But this existent unchangeable essence is the expression of the very individuality which seems opposed to it; the laws proclaim what each individual is and does; the individual knows them not only as his universal objective thinghood, but equally knows himself in them, or knows them as particularized in his own individuality, and in each of his fellow citizens. In the universal Spirit, therefore, each has only the certainty of himself, of finding in the actual world nothing but himself; he is as certain of the others as he is of himself. I perceive in all of them the fact that they know themselves to be only these independent beings, just as I am. I perceive in them the free unity with others in such wise that, just as this unity exists through me, so it exists through the others too – I regard them as myself and myself as them.
As the conclusion here indicates, Hegel in many ways took it that the
Greek social world was one in which the individual could find himself
'at home', where 'each has only the certainty of himself, of finding in the actual world nothing but himself'. There is here no division of the individual from the customs of his society, of self-interest from the general interest, of individual moral convictions from the laws laid down by the polis: in this sense, Hegel (like many of his contemporaries) saw the life of the citizen in fifth-century Athens as a model for the sort of harmony and reconciliation he thought a proper understanding of the self and the world might provide. ('I do not underrate the advantages which the human race today, considered as a whole and weighed in the balance of intellect, can boast in the face of what is best in the ancient world. But it has to take up the challenge in serried ranks, and let whole measure itself against whole. What individual Modern could sally forth and engage, man against man, with an individual Athenian for the prize of humanity?' For a helpful background to Hegel's discussion here.)
However, Hegel makes clear at this point that Reason does not and cannot any longer take this Greek conception seriously in its way of making itself 'at home'; for Reason begins with a conception of the free individual that is not recognized by the Greeks, a conception that then leads to divisions not apparent in their social world, between the individual and the customs of society, between the individual and the general good, and between the individual and the laws of the state. Thus, from this modern perspective, custom and tradition appear as morally arbitrary; the individual no longer identifies himself with the interests of the group; and the laws enacted by the state clash with the moral authority of the individual. Consciousness can thus no longer find itself 'at home in the world' in a way that was available to the Greeks, but which is lost to Reason:
Reason must withdraw from this happy state; for the life of a free people is only in principle or immediately the reality of an ethical order. In other words, the ethical order exists merely as something given . . . The single, individual consciousness as it exists immediately in the real ethical order, or in the nation, is a solid unshaken trust in which Spirit has not, for the individual, resolved itself into its abstract moments, and therefore he is not aware of himself as being a pure individuality on his own account. But once he has arrived at this idea, as he must, then this immediate unity with Spirit, the [mere] being of himself in Spirit, his trust, is lost. Isolated and on his own, it is he who is now the essence, no longer universal Spirit . . . In thus establishing himself . . . the individual has thereby placed himself in opposition to the laws and customs. These are regarded as mere ideas having no absolute essentiality, an abstract theory without any reality, while he as this particular 'I' is his own living truth.
It is vital to recognize, therefore, that the strategies taken up by Reason in the next two sections, to show that practical consciousness can find satisfaction in the world, are ones adopted by consciousness after this modern notion of individuality has emerged; they are not strategies the Greeks would have understood, as they dealt with such issues against the background of a social conception that Reason has overturned.
Now, as we shall see, Hegel sets out to show that such individualist strategies are doomed to failure, and that some part of the Greek picture must be recovered if we are to find the kind of harmony between self and world that Reason takes to be possible. Nonetheless, here as elsewhere Hegel is at pains to stress that the individualistic turn taken by Reason is inevitable and progressive. For though the Greek citizen was 'at home in the world', this harmony remains unthinking and unreflective, based on an unquestioning acceptance of the social order and of the individual's place within it, until a proper conception of individuality has emerged. Hegel therefore hopes to show how we can learn from the social conception of the Greeks and how the failed individualistic strategies of Reason can be improved upon, without merely 'going back to the Greeks', something which modern individualism has made impossible. Thus, although the Greeks were able to be 'at home in the world' in a way that was satisfactory for their own time, it is not an answer that can be satisfactory in our own time, when a greater degree of individualism has emerged. On the other hand, Hegel sets out to show that modern answers to this question have not been able to succeed, because they have all been based on the division between self and society that this individualist turn has set in place; he thereby sets the context for his own attempt to resolve this question in a way that draws on both these traditions, a middle way that will become clearer once the onesidedness of individualistic Reason has been exposed.
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