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28TheRomanWorld_SelfAlienatedSpiritCulture.mp3
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The Roman world
In the next subsection, entitled 'Legal Status', Hegel argues that the social world built up by the Roman empire was shaped by this 'shattering' of the polis, and as a result individuals now came to conceive of themselves as persons, rather than citizens ('The Positivity of the Christian Religion'). For Hegel, 'person' is a quintessentially modern social category, whereby individuals see themselves as occupying private spheres with their own interests, legally protected from the interference of others. In contrast to the 'thick' self-conception of Greek ethical life, in which the individual is seen as part of the universal ethical substance, the individual qua 'person' views himself in abstract terms, rather than identifying himself with any particular character or social station (hence, Hegel claims, the attraction of the kind of self-renunciation preached by Stoics in this period). Because personhood involves merely 'that One qua self-consciousness in general', the action persons undertake is to secure property for themselves, for while private ownership forces other individuals to recognize the legal status of the property-owner, no individual is defined by their property (in the way that Antigone and Creon were defined by their social roles), since this can always be transferred or legally 'alienated'. The person is thus never really engaged with the world as such, and hence Hegel associates this outlook with Scepticism. Now, in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel begins his account of the rational state with this notion of personhood, and makes clear that he intends to incorporate this notion into his final picture, in a way that the Greeks were unable to do. However, Hegel makes equally clear that the rational state cannot be constructed around this social category alone, but that personhood must be balanced with a less abstract, less legalistic self-conception, which leaves room for some of the sense of political community felt by consciousness in the 'happy state' of Greek ethical life. In his discussion in the Phenomenology Hegel also attempts to bring out the one-sidedness of the social structure represented by imperial Rome. The difficulty Hegel identifies seems to be this: on the one hand, the only way the legal persons that made up the Roman state could feel any social unity with each other was through the figure of the emperor, who embodied the sovereignty of that state; on the other hand, such was the dissolution of the political community into a collection of self-interested individuals that the emperor could only stand up for the state by opposing those individuals and becoming a tyrant, so undermining any possibility of social cohesion. Once he is subjected to the arbitrary power of the emperor, the Roman citizen quickly comes to see how empty his appeals to legal right are, and hence feels himself to be alone in a morally arbitrary universe, in which 'might is right'. Much as Unhappy Consciousness had done before, consciousness now struggles to make itself feel 'at home' in a world from which it feels fundamentally alienated and estranged.
Self-Alienated Spirit: Culture
In the previous section, Hegel has presented a portrait of 'the happy state' of Greek ethical life, with an account of how it came to break down. In this section, he explores the consequences of that breakdown for the modern world, in which we face a series of oppositions that were not experienced as such prior to modernity, between state and individual, divine and human, duty and individual conscience. Hegel characterizes this shift as a transition from 'True Spirit' to 'Self-Alienated Spirit':
This [Self-Alienated] Spirit constructs for itself not merely a world, but a world that is double, divided and self-opposed. The world of the ethical Spirit [i.e. True Spirit] is its own present world; and therefore each of its powers exists in this unity, and in so far as they are distinct from one another they are in equilibrium with the whole . . . Here [i.e. for Self-Alienated Spirit], however . . . nothing has a Spirit that is grounded within itself and indwells it, but each has its being in something outside of and alien to it. The equilibrium of the whole is not the unity which remains with itself, nor the contentment that comes from having returned to itself, but rests on the alienation of opposites. The whole, therefore, like each single moment, is a self-alienated actuality.
In this section, therefore, Hegel tries to show how modern consciousness has adopted a series of fundamental dichotomies in its conception of the world, and how this has made it impossible for consciousness in this modern form to feel 'at home'.
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