Reason

The Actualisation of Rational Self-Consciousness

Consciousness, who serves as the ‘protagonist’ of the Phenomenology, is still an idealist at this stage. That is, we are still examining the increasingly sophisticated ways in which rational consciousness tries to see reason in the world. If we recall Robert Solomon’s suggestion¹ that Hegel’s book consists of two phenomenologies – one of theory and one of practice – then we can see how the journey of observing reason was a recapitulation (albeit in a more developed manner) of the theoretical development in the Consciousness chapter.² But now we are returning to the phenomenology of practice that begun in the Self-Consciousness chapter; thus, the Reason that self-consciousness embodies no longer wants simply to find rationality in the world, but to actualise it: ‘to engender itself by its own activity.’³ Through this process, self-consciousness will work towards experiencing what spirit really is: namely, ‘The I that is we and the we that is I.’⁴

Self-consciousness’s immediate certainty of being all reality was shattered by the emptiness of phrenology. The subject of this Actualisation chapter – that is, the consciousness whose development we (the phenomenologists) are observing – is the free, embodied self-consciousness that the phrenologist unintentionally discovered. The subject (or ‘rational self-consciousness’) who actualises herself in this chapter is precisely that which the judgment ‘the self is a thing’ failed to consider. All of the rigidity and dead matter that the phrenologist identified as individual spirit now serves as negative space, drawing an outline around the living, active spirit of the individual. Where the ‘observer’ character of the previous chapter was concerned with observation, we are now concerned with action; where the observer was concerned with the natural world, we are concerned with the ethical world.

This chapter is the beginning of the individual’s genuine action, since the genuine freedom that action requires was not to be found in Self-Consciousness prior to Reason. The freedom of the stoic and skeptic was cut off from the actual world, and the unhappy consciousness ended up giving up their freedom in following the priest’s instruction. A genuinely free individual (who is also rational and embodied) is on the scene only now, as the unintentional consequence of observational reason’s failure. Now, this is not to say that contemplation and desire play no role in human activity from this point forth; rather, they are incorporated into the subject’s more sophisticated activity: that is, action and actualisation.

The Story of Subjectivity (So Far)

Since the actualisation of the subject (that is, the ‘rational self-consciousness’) in this chapter parallels the development in the Self-Consciousness chapter – and since we have covered a long journey since that chapter – it might help to give a very brief summary of the latter.

Self-consciousness begins as the confident declaration that ‘I am myself’ is the most immediate certainty. In trying to assert itself, self-consciousness went about negating other things, destroying or consuming them in acts of desire.⁵ However, this cannot bring about long-term self-assertion and satisfaction, because defining oneself against some non-I ‘thing’ requires the thing to exist continuously – and the negation of it prevents this from happening. Self-consciousness realises that only a real Other – that is, another self-consciousness – can offer the recognition that self-assertion requires, because the Other has the capacity to negate themselves, and to ‘offer themselves up’ to self-consciousness.⁶ This is what leads to the famous relationship of master and slave (or ‘mastery and servitude’); after trying to defeat an Other in a fight for self-assertion (a ‘trial by death’), self-consciousness becomes too fearful of dying, and wagers that it is better to be enslaved to the Other than dead entirely.⁷

As the relationship between master and slave plays out, the master eventually realises that the denigrated slave is no longer a source of worthy recognition. Meanwhile, the slave comes to find a new form of self-awareness through their work: seeing themselves reflected in their work, the slave’s self-consciousness progresses beyond mere desire.⁸ This autonomy allows the slave, like Epictetus, to become a stoic who finds freedom and self-assurance in thinking rather than in the pain of enslaved labouring.⁹ However, the stoic becomes literally lost in thought, tangled up in concepts without content, and is thereby led towards skepticism which takes this abandonment of the world and makes it conscious. The skeptical self-consciousness hopes to find its freedom in ataraxia, an inner stability that comes from withholding all judgments about the world.¹⁰ However, the skeptic quickly gets dizzy in its constant contrarianism; and, more significantly, its adherence to nullifying everything is never itself nullified! In this regard, skepticism manifests itself as a self-contradictory self-consciousness, caught up in a performative contradiction.¹¹

Since the chaos of skepticism makes ataraxia a seemingly unreachable goal, self-consciousness becomes unhappy and posits the ‘unchangeable’ – the ataraxic, rational universal reality beyond appearances – as something beyond self-consciousness – something divine.¹² Now, like the master over the slave, the unhappy consciousness denigrates their contingent (i.e. bodily) existence with contempt; this is the first time in the Phenomenology that ‘absolute negativity’ is embodied. The unhappy consciousness looks for the divine unchangeable on Earth, but finds that the planet is nothing but the grave of God.¹³ The only hope that remains is for the subject to surrender their freedom to the counsel and instruction of the ‘priest’: a figure who mediates between the unhappy self-consciousness and the unchangeable God.¹⁴ This mediation is what concludes the Self-Consciousness chapter and marks the birth of Reason – the Reason that, failing to find itself reflected in the world through mere observation, now turns to action.

Ethos

The launch into active reason is a little bewildering, as the subject is no longer a lonely adventurer who occasionally interacts with an Other in the form of a master, a priest, or a criminal; now, ‘the realm of ethical life opens itself up.’¹⁵ This is a realm of not just a single Other, but an entire community (a ‘polis’, perhaps): namely, a society of ‘individuals in their self-sufficient actuality’, possessing reason and an awareness of other individuals around them. ‘Ethical life’ is Sittlichkeit, a central term in Hegel’s philosophy, deriving from Sitte which can be translated into the Greek term ethos. (I will use ‘ethical life’ and ‘Sittlichkeit’ interchangeably.) Ethical life, for Hegel, can be understood simply as the ‘spiritual unity of the essence of those individuals’ that make up a society.¹⁶ Kalkavage points out that while, in the Self-Consciousness chapter, ‘the self waged war on thinghood’, and in the Reason chapter, thinghood and objectivity was ‘something to be desired in a positive sense’, with the birth of the free individual, the ‘subject now desires inter-subjectivity’ – that is, a recognition of subjectivity in its objects (namely, other individuals).¹⁷ Hegel describes this inter-subjectivity in some detail, and shows that it has a co-constitutive relationship with ethical life.

In the life of a people, the concept of the actualization of self-conscious reason has in fact its consummate reality, namely, where in the self-sufficiency of the other, each intuits its complete unity with the other, or where I have for an object this free thinghood of an other, which is the negative of myself and which I simply find before me, as my being-for-myself.¹⁸

What Hegel means in this remark is that, in ethical life, multiple individuals find unity in difference. I can recognise an Other as an individual in their own right, because we are both living in the same ethos. In this regard, Hegel suggests, we can understand ethical life metaphorically as ‘light [that] shatters into stars as innumerable luminous points, each shining by its own light’.¹⁹ Or, as Inwood suggests, the relationship between ethical life and individuals is comparable to the difference, in Saussure’s linguistics, between langue (language as such, the rules and conventions of language) and parole (the concrete linguistic utterances of an individual). There is no langue without parole, and vice versa; in the same way, there are no free individuals outside of ethical life, and no ethical life without free individuals.²⁰ More specifically, ethical life as the ‘universal substance’ of society is identified by Hegel as the ‘doing’ of the individuals, ‘the work which is brought forth by themselves’; thus, he recognises that the actualisation of the individual is essential to the cultivation of ethos.

The interdependence of the individual and the totality of ethical life runs as deep as the most basic, singular functions of the human being, Hegel argues. The individual’s ‘commonest functions’, he writes, are social not only in their form but also in their content: ‘the individual’s labor for his needs is a satisfaction of the needs of others as much as it is of his own needs, and the satisfaction of his own needs is something he attains only through the labor of others.’²¹ Aristotle had also recognised the intrinsic link between basic human functions and the functions of society: early in his Politics, he suggests that complex social institutions (like the State) emerge from the simplest forms of human interactions which themselves are based on humanity’s ‘natural desire to leave behind an image of themselves’.²² So, for Aristotle, ethical life can in some way be traced back to the reproductive desire of individuals. Hegel and Aristotle are making very similar points here: that is, that human functions become social functions, because the maintenance of life and self-actualisation involves help from others, communication with others, a division of labour, and so on. To put it in more explicitly Hegelian terms: in ethical life, my being-for-another is identical to my being-for-self. This unity, Hegel says, ‘speaks its universal language within the ethos and laws of a people.’

Already, therefore, we have reached a more sophisticated understanding of the individual and their relation to society. Recall that, for the psychologist, the individual and the customs of their society were assumed to be two distinct poles; no relation could be found between them, since the individual’s freedom undermined any possible attachment to social custom. Now, however, we have realised that the individual’s freedom is part of their immersion in the ethos of society, the two poles of the observational psychologist are, as Harris says, ‘brought together in a universal concept that has a higher level of comprehension.’²³ In ethical life, the substance of the individual and of the community are determined by individual activity:

In a free people reason is in truth actualized. It is a current living spirit not only in that the individual finds his destiny [Bestimmung], that is, his universal and singular essence, expressed and found present as thinghood, but also that he himself is this essence and that he has also achieved his destiny.²⁴

So far, this seems very triumphant. The individual has achieved their destiny; and every individual has done so by collaborating socially! This sounds an awful lot like spirit; that is, ‘the I that is we and the we that is I’. But we are not yet at spirit – we see this most plainly in the fact that we are still in the Reason chapter. So, what is there that lies in our way, between the self-actualising individual and spirit? Hegel makes two suggestions: first, there is the possibility that the individual loses their destiny and their attachment to ethical life: self-consciousness ‘lives surrounded by that destiny, then … leaves it behind’; alternatively, and more simply, it may be the case that the individual ‘has not yet achieved its destiny’.²⁵ In either state of affairs, it can be said that the individual ‘is spirit’ only according to the concept of spirit, and not in truth – that is, the individual ‘is spirit only immediately.’

The movement that must be undergone in order for immediate ethical life to reach the stage of true spirit involves alienation. This is another instance of how Hegel considers negativity to have a positive power. In the Phenomenology, it is the negativity in each stage of knowing – the element that remains unconscious, unacknowledged, unaccounted for – that eventually springs forth and allows the stage to progress. Here, alienation plays the same role: for those living in the Eden of immediate ethical life, alienation serves as the forbidden fruit that awakens them into self-conscious reflection and pushes them out of immediacy and towards the ethical life of spirit.²⁶ The negativity of alienation is, of course, not the last step: Hegel’s ultimate aim (in the socio-political context, at least) is for us to overcome alienation, no matter how necessary this alienation might be.²⁷ The progression of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) therefore takes place in three stages, which Robert Brandom formulates like this:²⁸

Ethical life is ‘immediate’ when it is lived prior to alienation. Hegel has in mind the life of ancient Greeks, who claimed that ‘Wisdom and virtue consist in living in conformity with the ethos of one’s people.’²⁹ These Greeks lived prior to the separation of one’s social role from one’s individuality as such. One’s ‘destiny’, mentioned above, is simply given. At this stage, the Sittlichkeit is a ‘restricted ethical substance’.³⁰ It takes a moment of alienation – a sense of being outside of this ethos – in order for subjectivity and individuality to arise (this is Brandom’s Stage Two). The task of modernity for Hegel (and of the following parts of the Phenomenology) is to find how this modern, alienated subjectivity can still find themselves ‘at home’ in a form of Sittlichkeit. Prior to this task, however, we must properly understand how individuals become alienated in the first place.

In immediate ethical life, each singular consciousness has only ‘an unalloyed trust’ in the ethos surrounding them; culture and norms are simply given, not to be questioned.³¹ However, it is not in the nature of reason to accept a limit to its questioning that is simply handed down by social custom. By its very nature, consciousness ‘is immediately the going beyond the restricted’, ‘the going beyond of its own self’.³² In Hegel’s view, therefore, it is inevitable for a rebellious individualism to emerge out of immediate Sittlichkeit, in the figure of someone like Socrates. The singular self-consciousness is thus only a ‘vanishing magnitude’ in immediate ethical life, who vanishes precisely when they start to ask questions and distance themselves from the ethos that surrounds them. It is ‘in that lofty moment’ when the ‘singular self-consciousness’ becomes an individual.³³

Reason, as always, wants to find itself reflected in the world. The individual in premodern, immediate Sittlichkeit acts ‘with the purpose of doubling itself’, and wants ‘to engender itself as a This as its existent mirror image’.³⁴ The individual – who we can currently identify as an individualist – ‘is thereby cast forth into the world by his spirit to seek his happiness.’ The remaining pages of the Reason chapter accordingly trace the development of individualism that the alienated individual carries out.

This development, Hegel explains, tells a story both of gain and of loss. The individual, being the embodiment of Reason, is still led by instinct – by ‘natural drives’. On the one hand, individualism is the coming-to-be of a new ethical substance, one in which the individual finds themselves reflected in the world; in this coming-to-be, the natural drives are sublated and ‘the very rawness of the impulses is lost’.³⁵ On the other hand, individualism is the letting-go of society’s ethos as ‘rational self-consciousness has lost the happiness of existing within the substance’; in this sense, what is lost is not the impulses and drives themselves but the attitude (the ‘false representation’) that identifies these impulses as the individual’s destiny. We will eventually see the individual discover that it is not just impulsive happiness that is worth striving for, but morality: ‘the ideal of free obedience to a law that one gives to oneself.’³⁶ Thus, the post-alienation Sittlichkeit in Brandom’s Stage Three is one that incorporates both ethos and subjectivity – ethics and morality.

In the last paragraph before Hegel actually examines the shapes of individualism, he gives a dense summary of how these shapes develop. This development runs parallels to the story in the Self-Consciousness chapter; however, rather than dealing with a singular object or a singular Other, the rational individual deals with communities; this is not surprising, given that the individual has just emerged from a society of immediate ethical life. At first, the individual is desiring: they are concerned most of all with personal pleasure and hedonistic, yearning love that allows an individual ‘to intuit itself in another self-consciousness.’³⁷ This moment echoes the story of Faust, though Hegel does not mention him (or Goethe, his friend) by name. When the individual realises the limits of pleasure, they turn to a more communal form of self-expression, a kind of loving humanitarianism driven by the ‘law of the heart’. The individual wants to act, to help, and so on; however, this leads them to the realisation that ‘the good can only be put into practice through the sacrifice’ of the singular individual. This is what gives rise to a kind of virtue, a good in-itself which demands that we let go of the ego and its individual desire. This is the final shape of individualism – and, in wanting to let go of individual desire, it doesn’t strictly cohere to the label of ‘individualism’. At the end, after all this development, the individual realises that ‘its purpose has in itself already been put into practice … that the good is the doing itself.’³⁸ The individual then enters civil society, wherein they seek not to save the world or virtuously master themselves, but to socially express themselves through the society around them. The result of this adventure is an individual

which no longer finds any resistance in an actuality opposed to it, and whose object and purpose are only this giving voice to itself.

Pleasure and Necessity

All theories, dear friend, are gray; the golden tree of life is green.

The pleasure-seeking individual is modelled on Goethe’s Faust. At the time of writing the Phenomenology, Hegel would not have read the same Faust as us; prior to 1808, only a ‘fragment’ of the text existed. Nonetheless, he would have been familiar with the story of the scholarly man Faust who, having grown disillusioned with his philosophical and scientific knowledge, makes a deal with the devil (Mephistopheles) so that he can ‘be done with peddling empty words’ and ‘feel brave enough to venture forth and bear earth’s torments and its joys.’³⁹ Ultimately, Faust wants to find the ultimate pleasure, namely, love; he seems to find this in Gretchen, but the result of their relationship is ruin and shame when Gretchen becomes accidentally pregnant and they unintentionally kill her mother. (In this way, Faust is an inversion of the story of Adam and Eve: Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge, and the gift of knowledge leads to ruin. Faust, on the other hand, rejects knowledge and seeks an Eden of pleasure, and it is this pleasure that leads him to ruin.)

Hegel’s passage on Pleasure and Necessity therefore describes the alienated individual’s ‘first purpose’ as one of finding love: ‘to become conscious of oneself as a singular essence within that other self-consciousness, or to make this other into itself.’⁴⁰ The individual desires ‘the intuition of the unity of both self-sufficient self-consciousnesses’ – for instance, the unity of Faust and Gretchen. In Mastery and Servitude, Hegel showed that an individual’s self-consciousness (their very awareness of self) is not possible without recognition from another individual. In Pleasure and Necessity, he shows that an individual’s self-actualisation is not possible without their recognising their situatedness in a greater whole: the social context (responsibility) and the human context (mortality and death). The process by which this takes place starts out with a Faustian ‘plunge into life’; the individual has abandoned ‘the seemingly heavenly spirit’ of observational knowing and doing, and have succumbed to ‘the spirit of the earth’.⁴¹ This is a direct reference to the ‘Erdgeist’ in Faust, which Hegel describes as ‘a spirit to whom the only being which counts as the true actuality is that of the actuality of singular consciousness.’ The individual is now concerned only with the particular, sensory things of this world insofar as they might satisfy one’s desire. Faust chooses the Earth over Heaven because the Earth is the natural home of his body.

Hegel describes the abandonment of observational reason with all the Romantic grandeur that this individualist idolises: ‘out of the motionless being of thinking’, the pleasure-seeker has ‘the law of ethos and existence, together with the skills related to observation and theory, only as a gray and gradually vanishing shadow behind it’.⁴² ‘The shadows cast by science, laws, and principles, which alone stand between it and its own actuality, vanish like a lifeless fog’, and the Faustian individual is left with a clean slate upon which their self-actualisation can take place.⁴³

This actualisation is, as we have established, ‘a doing of desire.’ The amorous individualist wants to obliterate the otherness of its object (the love-interest); this, Hegel points out, is a little different to the more primitive form of desire in the Self-Consciousness chapter, which started out by wanting to obliterate its object as such – to consume it, destroy it, and so on. In Pleasure and Necessity, desire wants to be one with the Other: to overcome its very Other-ness and witness it as the ‘objectified selfhood’ of the desiring individual.⁴⁴ This witnessing is the moment of pleasure. Kalkavage is right to identify Pleasure and Necessity as ‘the erotic version of sense-certainty’: in the pleasure seeker we find the desire inherent to self-consciousness fused with sensuous certainty’s desperation to grasp its object immediately, to attach itself directly to what it points to.⁴⁵ The relation in sensuous certainty between the ‘I’ and the ‘This’ is paralleled here in the relation of Faust (or the pleasure seeker) and the pleasure he desires. Of course, the relation of sensuous certainty wasn’t actually immediate: it was, unbeknownst to the ‘I’, mediated by the universal. The same goes for the relation of pleasure seeking; this time, the universal is not a mere concept but is the social sphere which Faust naïvely thinks he has left behind.

The pleasurable unity of lovers ‘positively signifies that [the individual] has come to be objective self-consciousness to itself’: now that there is love, some real satisfaction has been found.⁴⁶ However, this satisfaction only takes the individual to a certain point. It is limited, and its limitation is what it shares with the desire of the Self-Consciousness chapter. To start with, pleasure is shared in a loving relationship, the unity of two selves. However, such a relationship necessarily gives way to certain hardships – for instance, the accident of conception, or the realisation that your loved one will die. These hardships fracture the unity of the relationship, and reveal the way in which necessity takes precedence over pleasure-seeking. Life always gives way to death; one cannot plunge into the former without eventually coming to face the latter. When an individual realises this, they finally realise the social responsibility that is inherent to self-actualisation. ‘Self-recognizing pleasure reduces the agent self to a moment in a greater whole’, Harris writes.⁴⁷ Self-actualisation cannot be achieved through pleasure-seeking alone.

Andrew Cutrofello suggests that Pleasure and Necessity prefigures Foucault’s criticism of ‘the repressive hypothesis’ in The History of Sexuality.⁴⁸ Foucault argues against the prevalent hypothesis that (particularly in the Victorian era) talk of sexuality is repressed by social authority and that, consequently, expressing one’s sexuality is socially subversive. In fact, he claims, our very understanding of sexuality is socially constructed – conditioned by these authorities we claim to subvert. Consequently, attempts to express one’s pleasure against a repressive necessity actually amounts to one’s subsumption under the discourse of that necessity. So, why does this discourse of ‘repression’ come about? Cutrofello suggests that

Hegel’s answer is clear: because we live in an age in which we falsely define individuals as the simple opposite of society as a whole. We will see ourselves as repressed until we realize the inadequacy of defining ourselves in terms of the pleasure principle.⁴⁹

As such, although philosophers like Foucault like to criticise Hegel for affirming self-consciousness by denying the alterity of others, we can see here that Hegel does the very opposite: he shows that, in trying to affirm one’s pleasure against society’s necessity, one actually ends up subsumed by that necessity. Real self-recognition, we will see, comes about when the individual reconciles themselves to the alterity of others. The individualist who looks for some common essence in all humanity – pleasure-seeking, in this instance – will always fail for Hegel.

So, Faust’s desire earns him some kind of relationship with Gretchen, but their relationship never becomes something permanent and ethical; indeed, Gretchen ends up being charged with murder after she drowns the illegitimate child she had with Faust. Bound to Mephistopheles’s pact, Faust is unable to pursue anything beyond worldly pleasure, unable to truly integrate himself in a community; in Robert Stern’s words, ‘pleasure-seeking now appears as an alien constraint on his happiness, a kind of external necessity or fate which seems to destroy him.’⁵⁰ Hegel expresses this in logical terms by saying that the Faustian individual’s practice ultimately amounts to

the further expansion of those empty essentialities, or of pure unity, of pure difference, and of their relation … the simply and empty but nonetheless inexorable and impassive relation whose work is only the nothingness of singular individuality.⁵¹

As a consequence, Hegel explains, the pleasure-seeker’s ‘plunge into life’ has ultimately been reversed: the individual has ‘instead plunged into the consciousness of its own lifelessness … as dead actuality.’ Hegel describes this reversal as taking the individual from pure being-for-itself (the selfish pleasure-seeker who ‘has jettisoned all community’) to pure being-in-itself (the hard, basic actuality and ‘lifeless necessity’ of mortality, like the skull that phrenology finds at the apex of observational reason).⁵²

Someone like Faust feels the reversal from the Eden of pleasure into the hell of necessity, but does not understand it rationally. As such, here is the point that we leave Faust behind. Only the individual who can recognise the fall into necessity as the inherent outcome of pleasure – someone who can recognise the unavoidable death that awaits us at the end of life – can reverse this reversal and ‘know necessity as itself’, thereby progressing to a new shape of individualism.⁵³

The Law of the Heart and the Insanity of Self-Conceit

As it is with every stage of development in the Phenomenology, some individuals may remain in the Faustian world of pleasure and necessity. The movement to this new kind of individualism, of ‘the law of the heart’, is not necessary. ‘The hedonist might well stay a hedonist, increasingly jaded and self-destructive’, Robert Solomon writes; ‘he or she might become an absurdist, a sadist, retreat to the asceticism of “Unhappy Consciousness” or throw oneself into work or join the marines to learn some “discipline”.’⁵⁴ The individualist that refuses to succumb to their failures, however, attempts to cope with necessity by adopting it for themselves. On an immediate, emotional level, this individualist ‘knows that it has the universal, or the law, within itself’.⁵⁵ This is the law of the heart, the conviction of the Romantics which blames society for the tragedy of pleasure and necessity and insists that the search for pleasure, emotion, and passion is a natural law. I will accordingly refer to the individualist self-consciousness in this stage as the Romantic.

Adamant that the heart rules above all else, the Romantic claims that ‘actuality’ – that is, the society they live in, along with its ethos and laws – is ‘a violent order of the world’ that oppresses the individual, and is at the same time ‘humanity suffering under that order, … subjected to an alien necessity.’⁵⁶ The Romantic has a paternalistic ethic, hating the law of existing society and opposing it with their own passionate law – which, of course, is unactualised and amounts to very little outside the realm of the emotions and immediate feelings. The aim, therefore, is to actualise the law of the heart and restore the People to the natural bliss of freedom. Think of Rousseau, the predecessor of all Romantics, and his declaration: ‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’⁵⁷ While Romanticism marks a development from Faustian individualism, it seems that Hegel regards it as driven by pleasure-seeking. For the Romantic, he claims, there is no higher pleasure than that of the brave liberator who destroys these chains, who ‘seeks their pleasure in the exhibition of their own admirably excellent essence and in authoring the welfare of mankind.’⁵⁸ (Hegel’s sarcasm here is a hint of his general attitude towards Romantics.)

What happens if the Romantic manages to actualise their law? What happens when the law of the heart ‘becomes an actuality which is in and for itself lawful’ and binding on society?⁵⁹ The result is that ‘the law escapes the individual’; a law of the heart is no longer of the heart if it is transformed from a private feeling into a public order. The validity of the law was its tie to a particular heart, a particular feeling; consequently, as Hyppolite writes, ‘No sooner is it actualized than it escapes the particular heart that gave it life.’⁶⁰ A Romantic can work to liberate The People according to their heartfelt law, but as soon as the ‘liberation’ is carried out, the law is no longer their own, and they are just as alienated as those they sought to emancipate. What the Romantic really ‘authors’ is ‘his own entanglement in the actual order … he is entangled in an order which is not only alien to him but which is also a hostile dominance.’⁶¹ Yet again, an attempt at individualist subversion ends in the loss of individuality.

Furthermore, there is a strange contradiction of singularity and universality in the Romantic. On the one hand, the content of the law of the heart is individuality (of emotion, feeling, etc.) wanting to preserve its singularity; on the other hand, for the law of the heart to be valid and legitimately lawful, ‘every heart must recognize itself in the law.’⁶² The result of this contradiction, of the attempt to render a particular as universal is that, universally, everyone follows their own particular law of the heart. In a way, Kant had already thought of this kind of criticism. Targeting Hume and the utilitarians, for whom moral judgment is based upon upon the weight of emotions and desires, he writes:

It is, therefore, strange that intelligent men could have thought of passing off the desire for happiness as a universal practical law on the ground that the desire, and so too the maxim by which each makes this desire the determining ground of his will, is universal. For whereas elsewhere a universal law of nature makes everything harmonious, here, … the most extreme opposite of harmony would follow. … For then the will of all has not one and the same object but each has his own (his own welfare).⁶³

Everyone follows their own heartfelt pleasure, and thus explicitly turns against the ‘law’ that the Romantic had imagined. The heart has betrayed itself; its law is the very basis on which it permits everyone else to contradict its law! What emerges is a relativistic situation; everyone in this situation, Harris remarks, is legitimised in saying:

Why should that have priority? … You say that it is really the welfare of humanity that you care about; but so do we. And we can see that you are actually on the wrong side.⁶⁴

From this experience, consciousness learns that society is not a ‘dead necessity’, a mere actuality to be shaped by a willing individual. Rather, it is a universal, ‘brought to life’ by the individuals which it engulfs and alienates from themselves.⁶⁵ The Romantic is shocked by the revelation that ‘actuality is a living order’; ‘society is not like a block of marble to be chiselled by an individual’, but a totality that consumes the individuals that animate it.⁶⁶

This is where the ‘insanity of self-conceit’ sets in. The Romantic still lives in a contradiction, where ‘actuality’ of law turns into ‘non-actuality’, ‘essence’ into ‘non-essence’, and so on; so, in a desperate attempt to cope with this contradiction, they blame all of society’s ills on the individuals that make it up. It is their fault, the Romantic thinks, for not following my heart. ‘The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit.’⁶⁷ The Romantic understands now that society is not a simple unity with its own pre-given order, and that it is comprised of (reasonably) free individuals; and yet, they have no shame in angrily blaming these individuals for the contradiction that they live in: ‘the universal order is an inversion’ to the mad Romantic, ‘completely fabricated by fanatical priests and gluttonous despots, along with their various lackeys.’

This insanity cannot last forever. Blaming ‘priests and despots’ doesn’t solve the Romantic’s problem, which remains the same: the law of the heart – the Romantic’s heart, in particular – remains unactualised. And yet, the Romantic thinks, it was the attempt to actualise my law that led me into this mess! The gluttony of the despots, the fanaticism of the priests … this was all permitted by ‘the law of the heart’. With this realisation, the Romantic ‘experiences instead [their] law as non-actual and the non-actuality as [their] own actuality.’⁶⁸ In other words, they realise their own involvement in the ‘perversity’ they see around them: ‘To be sure, the social order is the work of individuality, but not of a particular individuality: it is the immediate result of the interplay of individuals.’⁶⁹

As the assuredness of Romanticism begins to fade away, a new picture of society emerges. In this picture, society is the universal that emerges from all of its individuals freely acting on the law of their own heart; ‘What seems to be the public order is therefore this universal feud within which each in itself wrests for himself what he can.’⁷⁰ Society is stable on the surface, but beneath this stability is the ‘war of all against all’ that Hobbes described; society ‘has for its content restless individuality, for which opinion or singularity is law.’⁷¹ This state of affairs is what Hegel calls the Weltlauf, the way of the world, or the ‘rat race’, as Harris refers to it.⁷²

Virtue and the Way of the World

To introduce this final stage of self-actualisation, Hegel looks at the development of this chapter as a whole with regards to its logical structure.⁷³ In Pleasure and Necessity, we had a simple opposition of individuality (the pleasure-seeker) and universality (social norms). In The Law of the Heart, the structure was more complex: the Romantic represented an ‘immediate unity’ of individuality and universality, since the universal moral law was derived from their individual heart. The rest of society, from the perspective of the Romantic, represented an opposition of individuality and universality: the innocent individual being repressed by the ‘violent order’ of society. In the present stage of virtue we are confronted with a character who, dismayed by the chaos and rampant individualism of the way of the world, looks to suppress their individuality and let themselves be guided by a universal standard of virtue. Logically speaking, we find an individual who aims to let universality sublate individuality; for the rest of society (those who partake in the way of the world), universality is sublated by individuality: the individual ‘is the essence’ of life.

Virtue is thus a rejection of the individualistic forms of self-actualisation that preceded it, a rejection of the idea that the law has a relation to one’s personal whims. The position of the ‘knight of virtue’ is therefore rather paradoxical: since the success of virtue is the overcoming of individuality, there will be no individual to celebrate this success should it take place. The knight of virtue ‘engages with the way of the world; but its purpose and true essence lie in defeating the actuality of the way of the world. As a result, the existence of the good which is thereby brought about is the cessation of its doing.’⁷⁴ The knight of virtue is an individual against individuality; their goal is to remove themselves from the picture. Moreover, since the ‘true essence’ of virtue – that is, a world in which everyone is virtuous – is not yet actual, and since it stands completely outside the domain of individuality, the knight of virtue ‘only has faith in’ the possibility of global virtuousness.⁷⁵ Put together, the self-sacrificing goal of the knight of virtue and the inherent uncertainty in this goal make the quest for virtue a remarkably different kind of self-actualisation to the previous two kinds.

The knight of virtue’s faith in the possibility of a virtuous world is based on the assumption that, in itself, the way of the world is good. Only in the actual, perverted state of the world is society corrupted by vice. (In this regard at least, in its belief in humanity’s inherent goodness, virtue is comparable with the previous stages of self-actualisation.) Here is where the real difficulties arise. To start with, the knight is unwittingly relying upon the way of the world in order to criticise it: ‘Virtue wants the world to be good,’ Inwood writes, ‘but it only knows what this amounts to from the dispositions already [supposedly] inherent in the world.’⁷⁶ Moreover, how is the knight supposed to encourage virtue and attack vice, when the target of the attack is supposedly good in itself? Though virtue wants to attack the way of the world as vicious and misguided, it is forced to recognise that the way of the world is indeed the actuality – the real manifestation – of a true good.

Where virtue comes to grips with the way of the world, it always meets with those places which are themselves the existence of the good. It is the good, which as the in-itself of the way of the world is inseparably intertwined with everything in the appearance of the way of the world, and which also has its existence in the actuality of the way of the world. For virtue, the way of the world is thus invulnerable.⁷⁷

The central paradox for the knight of virtue is, therefore: to act, to enter the social and political arena, would be to bloody the clean sword of virtue. ‘Virtue is not only like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny’, Hegel writes; ‘rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons [virtues, that is] that virtue started the fight.’ The quest to impose virtue on the world, to eliminate individuality and the chaotic way of the world, is thus nothing more than ‘shadow-boxing’ (Spiegelfechterei, literally ‘fencing at mirrors’).⁷⁸

Hegel takes his criticism further. Not only is the knight of virtue’s project doomed to inactivity, but it is incoherent at its very core. The ‘virtue’ that is supposedly waiting to guide our lives is an ‘abstract non-actual essence’ – that is, a mere idea regarding human living, existing only for consciousness. But what good is such an idea if it has nothing corresponding to it in real, actual social life? We saw this criticism previously in the chapter on phrenology: to posit an inherent ‘disposition’ in a human is of no consequence if it has no concrete bearing on the behaviour of the human.⁷⁹ If the knight of virtue is to respond by saying that the inherent goodness of humanity can be actualised, if we would only overcome our attachment to individuality, then we need only ask: what is actuality, in a social context, if not that which is carried out and enabled by individuals? The knight of virtue differentiates between what is ‘in-itself’ and what is, but the ‘in-itself’ is nothing unless it is actualised as what is. In Hegel’s words, ‘Virtue wanted to consist in bringing the good to actuality through the sacrifice of individuality, but the aspect of actuality is itself nothing but the aspect of individuality.’⁸⁰

The way of the world wins the ‘fight’ against virtue, then, but Hegel doesn’t regard this win as particularly impressive. The knight of virtue’s only weapon was ‘empy words which elevate the heart but leave reason empty; they edify but erect nothing.’⁸¹ This is not a difficult opponent to defeat, then.

At this point, towards the end of his critique of virtue, Hegel distinguishes between ancient virtue and the virtue of Reason; it is only the latter that he is criticising. ‘Ancient virtue had its own determinate, secure meaning’, he writes, ‘since it had its basis, itself rich in content, in the substance of the people, and it had an actual, already existing good for its purpose.’⁸² Aristotle acknowledged that virtue comes not from the ‘nature’ of humanity in-itself, but from the actual habits of individuals; Confucius, who Hegel unfairly dismissed, analysed virtue by observing the behaviour of others and attempting to understand them on the basis of this actual behaviour.⁸³ Reason’s understanding of virtue, on the other hand, has left the substance of social reality behind, and is left with nothing meaningful to say:

The emptiness of [virtue’s] oratorical flourishes in their struggle with the way of the world would be revealed at once if what its oratory really means were simply to be stated. – It is therefore presupposed that what these oratorical flourishes mean is well known. The demand to put this familiarity into words would either be fulfilled by a new torrent of fancy oratory, or by an appeal to the heart, which internal to itself is supposed to state what those fine words mean, which is to say, it would amount to an admission that it cannot, in fact, say what it means.⁸⁴

Through the defeat of its account of virtue, Reason learns that the good is not incompatible with individuality; rather, goodness is realised by individuals interacting with one another in society. Simply put, the way of the world is better than the cynical knight of virtue took it to be; individuality’s ‘doing is at the same time universal doing which is in-itself.’⁸⁵ That is to say, Reason has come to the realisation that a society of individuals, acting on self-interest, come to the common good without knowing it. This is the exact notion that Adam Smith famously observed as the ‘invisible hand’ of society:

[An individual] generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. …He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.⁸⁶

It is at this point that the development of self-consciousness’s actualisation comes to a conclusion, now that the individual and their self-motivated action realises their role – finds their home – in society. This is a significant moment in the Phenomenology as a whole: the unexpected conclusion to observing reason was that rationality, and meaning in general, cannot be found in concrete reality (in the form of a dead skull, for instance) in itself; it requires self-consciousness, which is for itself, to play a role. We know, however, that to focus exclusively on the for itself results in failure and abandonment of the world (in the form of unhappy consciousness); as such, the actualisation of self-consciousness in this chapter was the development of that which is in-and-for-itself: namely, the concretely acting individual in society. Now that the individual has found its place in society, after the dissolution of rational virtue, we have for the first time in the Phenomenology achieved a union of the world and the individual, object and subject, in-itself and for-itself. As Eckart Förster remarks, the individual ‘now knows, as we do, that the opposition of subject and object with which it started has been sublated, and that both subject and object are moments of a spirit higher than either’.⁸⁷

Indeed, Spirit is the next part in the book, coming after Reason. Before beginning his examination of spirit, however, Hegel spends one final chapter looking at the rational individual from the perspective of its conclusion: that is, the perspective of the individual who is real in-itself and for-itself, who, in Hyppolite’s words, ‘is directly in the midst of the world and it wishes only to express itself.’⁸⁸