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Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
29Culture.mp3
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Culture
Hegel opens his discussion by focusing on 'Culture and Its Realm of Actuality'. 'Culture' here is a translation of the German term 'Bildung', which has connotations of education as well as of cultivated society and mores. Hegel associates several important dichotomies with this form of consciousness, the first being the way it distinguishes between the 'natural' self and the 'civilized' or cultured one. Whereas in the Greek and Roman world, nature played a fundamental role in determining the social identity of the individual (as 'man' and 'woman', for example), here the individual sees society as requiring the transformation of his or her purely natural being: 'Although here the self knows itself as this self, yet its actuality consists solely in the setting-aside of its natural self'. This is the kind of opposition between society and nature of which Rousseau complained, where man sets about trying to transform himself against nature. As well as seeing an opposition between nature and culture, modern consciousness also distinguishes its ends as an individual from those of the state, and so sets up an opposition between self-interest and the general interest, where it takes the former to be 'bad' and the latter to be 'good'. It then divides the social realm into 'wealth', which it views as 'bad' because it involves the pursuit of particular interests, and 'state power', which it views as 'good' because it is the realm of universal concerns. It then comes to see, however, that as an individual it is alienated from these concerns, and so comes to find the state alien and oppressive: 'It follows, then, that the consciousness that is in and for itself does find in the state power its simple essence and subsistence in general, but not its individuality as such; it does find there its intrinsic being, but not what it explicitly is for itself. Rather, it finds that the state power disowns action qua individual action and subdues it into obedience'. At the same time, the individual sees wealth as addressing his interests as an individual, his particular needs, while also benefiting other individuals in the same way: he therefore comes to see 'wealth' as good and state power as 'bad'. But consciousness may also reverse this evaluation once again, and see service of the state as ethically higher than mere individual self-enjoyment. Faced with this contradiction, consciousness now tries to resolve it by carving things up slightly differently, and either treating state power and wealth as both 'good', or treating them as both 'bad'. Hegel labels this as a contrast between noble and ignoble (or base) consciousness respectively, where the former is happy to serve the state and has a positive evaluation of its prosperity, and the latter resents its subordination to the ruler and despises the wealth that it nonetheless seeks. Hegel argues that just as consciousness could not uphold a simple dichotomy between state power as 'good' and wealth as 'bad', so too it cannot uphold this dichotomy between the noble and the ignoble, as the noble consciousness finds it impossible to put itself genuinely in service of the state, and so shows itself to be no better than the ignoble consciousness. Hegel's discussion proceeds as follows. First, the noble consciousness identifies itself with the state in a spirit of self-renunciation, as 'the heroism of service, the virtue which sacrifices the single individual to the universal, thereby bringing this into existence – the person, one who voluntarily renounces possessions and enjoyment and acts and is effective in the interests of the ruling power'. However, as the noble consciousness is aware that the state depends on its self-sacrifice, and as it does not really believe that the state is in a position to command its obedience, it is no more than 'the haughty vassal', who when it comes to the point is not really prepared to forgo his life or particular interests: 'It means that he has in fact reserved his own opinion and his own particular will in face of the power of the state. His conduct, therefore, conflicts with the interests of the state and is characteristic of the ignoble consciousness which is always on the point of revolt'. In order to preserve the noble/ignoble distinction, consciousness must achieve a more meaningful self-sacrifice than it has managed hitherto: we therefore move from 'the heroism of service' to 'the heroism of flattery', where the power of the state is established in the form of an individual monarch, another will set above that of his subjects, who swear allegiance to his power. However, the ruler now becomes divorced from the universal interest, and himself becomes a self-serving despot. As a result, the noble consciousness finds itself despising the sovereign, much like the ignoble consciousness did. Consequently, while initially the noble consciousness saw the monarch's role as a dispenser of wealth in a positive light, and was grateful to him for his largesse, once the monarch becomes a despot, the noble consciousness now views his need for royal patronage as humiliating, and so wealth becomes nothing more than a badge of enslavement: 'It finds that it is outside of itself and belongs to another, finds its personality as such dependent on the contingent personality of another, on the accident of a moment, on a caprice, or some other utterly unimportant circumstance
. . . The spirit of gratitude is, therefore, the feeling of the most profound dejection as well as of extreme rebellion'. Once again, the outlook of the noble consciousness has become that of the base consciousness. At the same time, the monarch becomes corrupted yet further, as the power that comes with wealth leads him to despise those whom he rules: 'In this arrogance which fancies it has, by the gift of a meal, acquired the self of another's “I” and thereby gained for itself the submission of another's inmost being, it overlooks the inner rebellion of the other; it overlooks the fact that all restraints have been cast off, overlooks this state of sheer inner disruption in which, the self-identity of being-for-self having become divided against itself, all identity, all existence, is disrupted, and in which the sentiment and view-point of the benefactor suffer most distortion'. In this socially alienated world, where consciousness has found it impossible to overcome the division between society and the individual, nothing has retained the value it appeared to have, as each has become transmuted into its opposite:
It is this absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and of thought; it is pure culture. What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth, nor their specific Notions, 'good' and 'bad', or the consciousness of 'good' and 'bad' (the noble and the ignoble consciousness), possess truth; on the contrary, all these moments become inverted, one changing into the other, and each is the opposite of itself . . . What we have here, then, is that all the moments execute a universal justice on one another, each just as much alienates its own self, as it forms itself into its opposite and in this way inverts it.
In becoming aware of this interchange between its categories, what Hegel calls 'the disrupted consciousness' begins to have a more dialectical understanding of such concepts, in contrast to the rigid thinking of what Hegel calls 'the honest individual': 'The honest individual takes each moment to be an abiding essentiality, and is the uneducated thoughtlessness of not knowing that it is equally doing the reverse. The disrupted consciousness, however, is consciousness of the perversion, and, moreover, of the absolute perversion. What prevails in it is the Notion, which brings together in a unity the thoughts which, in the honest individual, lie far apart, and its language is therefore clever and witty'. Using as his model here Diderot's Rameau's Nephew (which was published posthumously, in Goethe's translation), Hegel contrasts this nihilistic wit of the nephew's 'disrupted consciousness' with the inarticulacy of the 'honest' narrator, who tries to calm the former's attempt to overturn all values. In the face of the nephew's deep self-knowledge and profound social criticism, the 'honest individual' is made to look naive and foolish, particularly in his suggestion that the individual remove himself from the world of perversion and return to nature. In fact, however, Hegel suggests that while the 'honest individual' is powerless to change the cynical nephew, this 'disrupted consciousness' will transform itself, for in its wit there is already a higher seriousness, as its sense of the hollowness of the cultural world leads this consciousness beyond it.
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