Spirit

Alienated Spirit:
The World of Culture

Introduction and Summary

In an interesting passage of his early work The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, Hegel gives an analysis of the Last Supper.¹ He writes of the ‘bond of friendship’ and the acts that actualise friendship and love, and he takes the sharing of Jesus’s cup to be a paradigmatic case of such acts. But the passage is most interesting because it is one of Hegel’s earliest examinations of spirit. ‘Objectively considered, then, the bread is just bread, the wine just wine; yet both are something more’: in the Last Supper, as Hegel understands it, we see things take on a significance beyond their natural existence – that is, we see spirit arise from out of nature. We do not have to be religious to understand his point, since we can interpret it as an allegory: in the bread and wine that Jesus offers, Hegel writes, the spirit of Jesus ‘has become a present object, a reality, for external feeling’. Then, in the consumption of the bread and wine, the spirit that has become objective ‘reverts once more to its nature, becomes subjective again in the eating’. Hegel gives another analogy, this time non-religious: ‘This return may perhaps in this respect be compared with the thought which in the written word becomes a thing and which recaptures its subjectivity out of an object, out of something lifeless, when we read.’ Both the Last Supper and the act of reading have the same structure: something internal (Jesus’s spiritual presence, or the thought of a writer) is externalised, and then (through the eating or reading carried out by the Other) is re-internalised and takes on a new significance.

This motif – of going outside of oneself and then returning – is precisely how spirit comes on the scene. Now, in the Phenomenology’s sixth chapter, we are concerned with spirit in a more sophisticated sense: spirit is not here restricted to a small group of disciples or to a writer and reader, but is something permeating societies in general. The harmonious society of Greece was the site of spirit in its first, immediate existence. Now, before we reach the existence of spirit as self-conscious in and for itself, we must work through its second moment, its externalisation out of itself: that is, its alienation.²

Cultural alienation, as we will see, bears a strong resemblance to unhappy consciousness. Indeed, I would argue that this chapter can be understood as Hegel’s analysis of unhappiness on a social or spiritual scale, broader than on the individual scale of the self-consciousness chapter. What it means to be alienated is that self-consciousness and its ethical substance – that is, the individual and society – are in a conscious ‘unity’ (as opposed to the unconscious unity of true spirit in Greece) but nonetheless experience some kind of separation from each other. In other words, the individual recognises themselves as part of a society, as a constituent of their social environment, but nonetheless does not feel at home in this society. This runs parallel to unhappy consciousness wherein the subject felt alienated from a ‘God’ who – unbeknownst to them – was within them from the start. By alienating the individuals that constitute it, the ‘substance’ of the social world ‘is itself its own self-relinquishing’: it splits itself into two, externalising what is internal to it.³ This is precisely how ethical substance, as spirit, moves into its second stage: in undergoing this externalisation, alienation, or self-relinquishing, it ascends from out of its immediate existence (which we saw in Greece) and awaits the return into itself through which it will reach its truth.

Because of this similarity, and because of what preceded this chapter, we might be inclined to think that here Hegel is thinking of Christianity as it came to flourish following the conversion of Constantine. However, we also know that Hegel took the alienation described in this chapter as a defining characteristic of modernity, and his explicit references (to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Terror) suggest that he is thinking of the modern era. Robert Solomon argues that the Phenomenology simply jumps from Rome to modernity – a ‘glaring omission’ that proves to us that Hegel is not attempting a literal history.⁴ Fredric Jameson agrees that Hegel makes an omission, but only because medieval times were the subject of the unhappy consciousness chapter.⁵ On the other hand, Terry Pinkard argues that Hegel, unlike his contemporaries, did not think of the ancient era as separated from modernity by the so-called ‘Middle Ages’.⁶ On this view, for Hegel as for Nietzsche, the first signs of modernity are present in the birth of the Christian conception of selfhood; as such, when I refer to ‘modernity’ in the Hegelian context, this should be understood as including the medieval era. So, while Solomon is partially right – the Phenomenology is not a literal history, as I have explained above – he is wrong to find an ‘omission’ in the book. The present chapter takes us on a route from medieval Christianity through the Enlightenment and up to the climax of the French Revolution, in a manner that, admittedly, may be more logical than chronological.

To close the introductory section of this chapter, Hegel gives a summary of the entire section in one long paragraph. Spirit has become divided, opposed within itself, and gives way to ‘a doubled world’.⁷ Although the world is present before us, its essence is understood as belonging to some ‘beyond’ – everything thus ‘receives actuality from an other’. Individuals in self-alienated spirit take the truth of the world to be separated from the world they inhabit, postponed to a realm beyond life. The premodern world was divided (for instance, into human and divine law), but its inhabitants didn’t acknowledge this divide because they immediately identified with it, on the basis of ‘nature’. In alienated modernity, people actually acknowledge these dualisms and attempt to cope with them by conceptually comprehending them in various ways. Cultural formation (Bildung) is Hegel’s name for this coping, for conducting one’s life according to these dichotomies that the alienated individuals have posed. These individuals attempt to transform their selfhood (as the characters in Bildungsromane do) in order to align themselves with the ‘good’ side of a dichotomy – or, as Taylor puts it, ‘to close the gap between themselves and social reality.’⁸

Of course, all such attempts prevent a real unity with the world and keep the individuals from being at home in their world. This is why, in Hegel’s words, whenever the individual of culture enters ‘the actual world’ they always ‘pass over again back into actual self-consciousness’.⁹ The dualisms they construct in order to cope with an unwelcoming actually plunge them back into thought, closing them off from the world by rendering it as an ‘other-worldly beyond’.¹⁰ (This is yet another similarity with unhappy consciousness.) Hyppolite notes that Hegel’s inclusion of alienation within an account of cultural education is a challenge to his contemporaries (such as Herder, who did the most to introduce the notion of Bildung into German philosophy).¹¹ For classical Enlightenment thinkers, the individual undergoes education in straightforward upward progress, and for ‘humanist pedagogy’ nature undergoes a harmonious development within the human being. For Hegel, however, to undergo formation and education involves a movement of self-inequality and distance from oneself – this is precisely the externalisation I described above.

After the dissolution of the most immediate form of cultural formation, spirit undergoes two more shapes, both of which are still based on systems of dichotomies. Firstly, spirit adopts a worldview wherein the world is taken as untrue in contrast to a harmonious beyond, posited by faith, ‘which has no actual present’.¹² Secondly, when this faith is interpreted in the secular terms of the Enlightenment, the ‘housekeeping of faith’ is brought into ‘disarray’ as the present world is comprehended coldly in terms of utility, and the beyond is taken to be utterly unknowable ‘absolute essence’. Though the Enlightenment robs the world of any substantiality, promoting only the equally empty worldviews of deism or materialism, the priority it affords to the actual individual paves the way for the absolute freedom exhibited in the French Revolution, through which spirit ‘abandons this land of cultural formation and crosses over into another land, into the land of moral consciousness.’

Cultural Formation and its Realm of Actuality

The fantasy of harmony and equilibrium in the Greek polis was maintained by a theologico-political narrative of beauty¹³ – ‘the first aesthetic ideology’, Rebecca Comay argues.¹⁴ The ruins of Greece are not spiritually empty, however: that the polis could be deconstructed proves that it was constructed to begin with, and it is in acknowledging this construction that modernity is founded. Thus Roman law invents the ‘person’, whose public appearance is not a face but a (legally instituted) mask; as Hobbes already noted,

The word person is Latin: instead whereof the Greeks have πρόσωπον, which signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage … So that a person, is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another.¹⁵

To be a ‘person’ in the modern world is to act out a persona; the atoms of the Roman world are ‘scattered stage props’ stripped of immediate Sittlichkeit.¹⁶ Ancient beauty gives way to modern masquerade. This is why it is culture, artifice as such, that defines modernity for Hegel. Modernity is the era in which individuals embrace artifice upon realising that, from the very start, the world itself is their artifice.¹⁷ ‘The task of Spirit’, Comay writes, ‘will be to reconstruct an existence amid the debris of empire.’¹⁸

Therefore, the world of culture is one wherein individuals are equal not through legal status or mutual recognition, but through equal alienated conformity to the cultural universal. Everyone relinquishes their individuality – gives up their desires, personalities, and so on – in order to bring the world to its actuality and achieve oneness with the beyond. Seeing the world as something alien, cultural individuals aim not to belong in the world but to ‘take possession’ of it, precisely by mastering nature (especially their own natural existence) according to God’s will.¹⁹ Bildung is the name for this mastery – a word we have seen before, when the servant of self-consciousness worked with its natural body upon the natural world and, in so doing, became the master of both. The difference now is that the object of cultural mastery is not just a discrete, isolated thing, but is instead wrapped up in the context of social substance.

By carrying out their life in this way, the individual comes to realise that their ‘actuality still solely consists in their sublation of [their] natural self.’²⁰ We should therefore understand ‘culture’ as that element of life which Rousseau was so upset about, through which ‘everything degenerates in the hands of man.’²¹ Unlike Rousseau, the individual at this stage of the Phenomenology venerates culture and is dismissive of nature: they regard individuality as ‘falsely posited as lying in the particularity of nature’; individuality is rather found in alienated Bildung, in the grand world of culture that looks with contempt upon the lowly world of our natural existence. The cultured individual urges us to forget the ‘powerless’ and ‘non-actual’ contingencies of nature; insofar as we are engaged in cultural formation, they claim, we are all equal before God. (This is the equality of ‘conformity’ that I introduced above.) The contrast to Rousseau might remind us of Rousseau’s once friend, turned rival, Denis Diderot. For Rousseau, education ought to liberate us from the ‘chains’ that society and culture have imposed on us: ‘What must be done is to prevent anything from being done.’²² Diderot, however, saw education as something positive. In §488 Hegel quotes Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (which he will return to further on), and characterises Diderot as an ‘honest’ self-consciousness who strives to overcome nature in seeking the universal through culture.

Without being aware of it, the individual still has a relation to the social world that it feels alienated from. In the process of cultural formation, ‘the individual empties itself of its own self’ – that is, renunciates its pre-cultural characteristics – and gives itself over to culture (or, more precisely, to the institutions, communities, and practices that embody culture).²³ ‘Hence,’ Hegel writes, ‘its cultural formation and its own actuality are the actualization of substance itself.’ Although the individual takes ‘culture’ to be an alien essence, instituted by God’s will, it is in fact constituted by the individual’s Bildung.

What shape does this constitution take? The individual, which still lives along the dualistic lines of unhappy consciousness, divides social substance up into opposing parts which exist through their opposition to one another. The ‘thinking’ of cultured individuals, Hegel explains, establishes the difference between these two parts by identifying one as ‘good’ and the other as ‘bad’.²⁴ The individual thus acts like the ‘soul’ of their society, attempting to understand its structure and development by fixing it into rigid categories. In this sense, the individual actually understands themselves not as an individual first and foremost, but instead as a living expression or articulation of the culture they live in – since, for now, they do not realise that they themselves constitute this culture. We will see the downfall of this form of individuality when each ‘moment’ it posits of society – ‘good’, ‘bad’, or whatever else – passes into its opposite and the entire categorisation is undermined.

The first form of categorisation Hegel presents us with breaks society up into various estates.

Just as nature explicates itself into universal elements, under which fall [air, water, fire, and earth] … In this way, the inner essence, or the simple spirit of self-consciousness actuality, explicates itself into just those kinds of universal, though spiritual, social estates.²⁵

This is a strange claim. The parallel drawn between a natural division (the four elements) and a social division (the estates) might remind us of the Greek system of human and divine law being based on ‘natural’ gender distinctions, and this resonance is probably intentional. The difference here, however, is that in this passage Hegel is presumably only giving an analogy, rather than a causal explanation. Nonetheless, the characteristics that he attributes to each of the four elements are comparable with the characteristics of the social estates he describes.

1. Air: the element which endures and in which ‘everything individual is sublimated’ – corresponding to the social essence as it is purely in itself and equal to itself, and the ‘state power’ which renders individuals as uniform.²⁶
2. Water: the element which stands for ‘the real possibility of difference’, which in its form is ‘ever sacrificed’ rather than enduring – corresponding to the social essence as it is for itself, unequal to itself and self-sacrificing, manifest in ‘wealth’, the social form of free consumption and self-interest.
3. Fire: the element of ‘individuality existing on its own account’, ‘a self-relating negativity’ – corresponding to the social essence existing in and for itself, giving way to the rise of real subjectivity and self-consciousness. The ‘force of fire’ in a society is thus its latent potential for a revolution which will come about only when its estates (‘state power’ and ‘wealth’) are recognised as dissolving into one another.
4. Earth: the element distinct from all the others which is ‘indeterminate’ but nonetheless is ‘the totality which holds together’ the other elements – corresponding to social essence as such, the ground ‘from which [social phenomena] start and to which they return.’

The cultured world is thus divided into two estates: state power (which Harris identifies with ‘public service’ in general) and wealth.²⁷ In keeping with its unhappy dualism, cultural consciousness quite clumsily comes to regard the former as good and the latter as bad. State power is understood as the ‘unchanging essence’ grounding all individuals, while wealth is the institution through which individuals come to realise themselves as singular individuals – and, since culture despises self-interest and prioritises the ‘general’ good, it looks with disdain upon wealth.²⁸ Again, this is consistent with a Christian view of society: Augustine divides the world in a similar manner, into two ‘cities’, one that lives by the standard of ‘flesh’ (that is, individualistic human affairs) and the other by the standard of ‘spirit’. ‘The earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self … The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of a good conscience.’²⁹

This division is not so rigid, however. We saw in unhappy consciousness that the believer who surrendered themselves to God was actually self-obsessed, taking pains over their ‘willing, acting, and consuming’, and we learned in the animal kingdom that activity that seems purely individualistic is in fact always public, always dissolved into ‘the doing of each and all’.³⁰ In the same way, the ‘self-interest’ of wealth actually benefits everyone in its production of common wealth; ‘each in his own consumption benefits everyone else.’³¹ Likewise, state power is the source of social stability in which everyone is able to find and express their individuality. Both estates are intrinsically related to one another, and self-consciousness thus realises its capacity to choose between the two (or, indeed, to choose neither of them). Do I want a life of public service, or of making wealth? With regards to the elemental analogy above, therefore, self-consciousness has become fire in its capacity to choose and judge between the dual sides of society.

Judge for Yourselves!

We shall get drunk; we’ll pass on scurrilous gossip; we’ll indulge in all kinds of profligacy and vice. It’ll be absolutely delicious. We’ll prove that Voltaire has no genius, that Buffon, who’s always on his high horse, is just a pompous ranter; that Montesquieu is nothing but a wit; we’ll tell D’Alembert to stick to his sums and we’ll give a really good going-over to all those petty stoics like you, who despise us out of envy, cloak their pride in modesty, and live soberly out of necessity. And music? Ah, then indeed we’ll have music!

Self-consciousness’s judgment is conditioned by its alienation; it judges society because it regards society as an external object from it. If it ‘finds itself’ within the object – that is, if it feels at home within it – it regards it as good. On the other hand, ‘the object in which it finds its own opposite is [judged to be] bad.’³² Self-consciousness is therefore seeking ‘happiness’, as Kant defined it: ‘the harmony of nature with his whole end.’³³ The objects of this judgment are the same as before – state power and wealth – and, at first, it judges wealth to be the good. On this understanding, state power is an oppressive force that rids people of their capacity for individual expression; wealth, on the other hand, is the realm of consumption and production wherein everyone is able to express themselves, while still nonetheless contributing to society – wealth ‘gives itself away and gives to everyone a consciousness of their selves.’³⁴ This liberal judgment is made, Hegel claims, on behalf of self-consciousness as it is for-itself – that is, the individual insofar as they are concerned with their individuality and outward expression.

On the other hand, the individual can also judge society on behalf of their existence in-itself: on this more communitarian understanding, state-power is the good. It is the ruling power of the state that gives order to our lives and establishes a context in which we are able to act at all; through the state I find my ‘ground and essence expressed, organized, and activated.’³⁵ From this perspective, wealth only begets a ‘transitory’ existence wherein individuals ‘enjoy’ themselves in isolated and specific senses.

This first kind of judgment seems to have reached an impasse. ‘There is a twofold finding-of-equality and a twofold finding-of-inequality,’ Hegel writes: given that the individual has two dimensions, it is always able to compare social estates with just one of these dimensions at a time and end up contradicting itself when it reorients its judgment.³⁶ It is therefore necessary to progress to a higher form of judgment: namely, one which takes the self to be in-and-for-itself, and reflectively takes the self as its object. The criterion of judgment – namely, do I ‘find myself’ within society? – remains the same. The individual either feels themselves participating in state-power and wealth as an equal to these institutions, and thus is classed as a ‘noble’ consciousness, or otherwise they find themselves to be unequal in the face of these institutions are are classed as ‘base’ [niederträchtige – sipteful, contemptuous, or mean].³⁷ The noble consciousness acts with an air of obligation, gratitude, and respect for society’s institutions; the base consciousness, on the other hand, ‘hates the ruler and only obeys him with concealed malice’ and, seeing the pervasion of wealth inequality, is eager for revolt.³⁸

In Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot presents a dialogue between ‘Moi’ (me) and ‘Lui’ (him – young Rameau). Moi is a philosophe; he values culture, music, and writing, and praises education for allowing us to overcome the ‘delicate constitution’ in our nature.³⁹ Rameau, on the other hand, is an erratic hedonist; he deplores the inequality of the world, where some people ‘can’t even find a crust to chew on’, and he mocks the philosophes for their pretensions.⁴⁰ As Alasdair MacIntyre writes, ‘Where the philosophe sees principle, the family, a well-ordered natural and social world, Rameau sees these as sophisticated disguises for self-love, seduction and predatory enterprise.’⁴¹ It seems that Hegel’s introduction of the noble and base consciousness is inspired by Diderot’s novel; both Rameau and the philosophe occupy the same world, but they judge it in completely opposite ways, and in this way Rameau resembles the base consciousness.

At the end of Rameau’s Nephew, the two men finish their conversation and part ways. Things are not quite so simple in the Phenomenology, since these two forms of judgment still only concern the social estates as they are in themselves. To be sure, the judging individuals are self-conscious in and for themselves, but their judgment is born out of the fact that they simply confront state power and wealth as lifeless essences, ‘predicates which are not yet themselves subjects’.⁴² Public service and self-interest are just goals in the abstract; they are not yet concretised in institutions or embodied by communities. This, Hegel argues, is the reason for spirit being in two halves (noble and base) in this stage of its development. To overcome this split, and to overcome the division between the individual and the estates that they judge, both essence and judgment will enter into a syllogism. (Here, incidentally, is a good example of Hegel’s characteristic approach to logic: logical order for him is not something imposed on reality, nor is it extracted from reality; rather, existence itself, being a living process, exhibits its own logic; the task of us as philosophers is to keep track of this logic.) This syllogism will show how the noble consciousness will (d)evolve into the base consciousness that young Rameau exemplified, and that the latter is the truth of this stage of spirit’s development.

The Feudal Drama and Language

Methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon.

We begin when the noble consciousness acts on its judgment. In their satisfied agreement with society, the noble individual devotes themselves to ‘the heroism of service’: they devote their lives to state power, to the public good.⁴³ In doing so, they establish the second estate of the Ancien Régime – the nobility – and bestow actual existence onto state power. Through the renunciation of their self-interest, the noble earns respect; through the devotion of their existence to state power, they transform state power from an abstract goal into an actualised institution (the law, the rule of the land, etc.). However, this institution is not yet truly embodied; it has no ‘particular will’ but is only as ‘essential’ will, a custom without a self-directed executive (like a King) to interpret this custom. Hegel refers to the nobles as ‘vassals’, who value themselves only insofar as they have the ‘honour’ of contributing to the upkeep of state power. Nonetheless, for as long as state power is not embodied in a self-conscious, particular actuality, the ‘counsel’ offered by the vassal is of little use; the ‘general good’ is all that has power.⁴⁴

In this undeveloped shape, Hegel explains, state power ‘is indecisive about the different opinions about the common good.’ It is not yet government. There may be a monarch, to be sure, but the monarch has no being-for-itself on which to discriminate between the contradictory directions it might receive in the form of counsel. The counselling vassals themselves, meanwhile, renounce themselves (that is, sacrifice themselves to state power) only in a qualified sense. If their counsel opposes the ‘general good’ – however indistinct the latter might be – their life will be on the line. Having to censor themselves in the face of the danger of death, ‘the counselor in fact reserves for himself his own opinion and his particular individual will in the face of state-authority.’⁴⁵ Consequently, it turns out that the noble consciousness is not quite as deferential as it once thought; the vassal ‘is always within a stone’s throw of rebellion’, harbouring a latent contempt for the inequality between their being-for-itself and the universality of state power. Base consciousness is the truth of noble consciousness.

If it is to retain its being-for-itself, and avoid either dying or becoming a lifeless servant to state power, the counselor must somehow sacrifice themselves completely, ‘as it does in death’, but without dying.⁴⁶ The only way it can do this is by relinquishing its being-for-itself, and it can only do that insofar as state power is also a self. How can this be done? How am I able to completely give myself over to something (or, indeed, someone) without dying? In Hyppolite’s words, the task is ‘to find an exteriority of the I such that that exteriority still remains I.’⁴⁷ Hegel finds such an exteriority in language.

I pray you, sweetheart, counsel me whether it is better for a man to speak or to die?

We have already encountered the theme of language in the Phenomenology. In the first chapter of the book, it is in language that ‘we immediately refute what we mean to say’; in the fifth chapter, the subject who speaks ‘abandons [their inwardness] to their other.’⁴⁸ Language is thus understood in terms of loss; through language our interiority is abandoned, we lose hold of our intention. In other words, to speak is to surrender without dying: this is why the noble counsellor must turn to language

At this point, Hegel develops his philosophy of language in reflections which take the form of language for their content. The counsellor speaks of themselves – they say ‘I’. Only in language does the ‘I’ properly come into existence; it distinguishes itself from ‘you’ and expresses my existence for others. Before the act of language, Hegel claims, the self merely ‘reflects itself into itself’, taking on only ‘an incomplete existence, a soulless existence’.⁴⁹ This distinguishing is not something stable, however. In being spoken – in being ‘brought to a hearing’ – the ‘I’ loses any sense of private particularity, in the same manner as the ‘now’ and ‘here’ of sensuous certainty did, and thus enters the sphere of the universal.⁵⁰ The sound of speech and the sight of writing (i.e., the particularities of language) might be fleeting, but the meaning, the universality of language, persists just so long as it is heard or read.

Language thus starts to actualise the ‘I that is we’, to materialise the spirit that is implicit within culture. (Hegel seems to have recognised a close link between language and spirit even before writing the Phenomenology; in an 1805 letter to Johann Heinrich Voss, who translated the Odyssey into German, Hegel wrote that just as Luther had done for the Bible, his endeavour was ‘to teach philosophy to speak German.’⁵¹) Between the two extremes of culture – the individual and social substance (here, the noble consciousness and state power) – language serves as the mediating middle through which ’spiritual substance enters into existence.⁵²

However, this spirit is still only subjective and is thus undeveloped. Of the two extremes that are united in language, one of them (consciousness, the counsellor) follows state power out of honour but not true obligation, and this is because the other extreme (state power, the monarch) currently takes form only as the ‘common good’ and not as an actual ‘will’.⁵³ The exercises of language will attempt to overcome this imperfection. We will see the crucial function of language, by which the individual alienates themselves and becomes universal and by which state power gains selfhood, take two different shapes in its development: one of absolutist flattery, the other of dogmatist ‘laceration’.⁵⁴

To start with, noble consciousness gives rise to a state-power-with-selfhood (an empowered monarch) through flattery, the speaking successor to the silent ‘heroism of service’. Flattery endows the monarch with their name and all its authoritative connotation; it elevates the monarch to a ‘pure individual singular, no longer only in his own consciousness but in the consciousness of all.’⁵⁵ It is generally accepted that here Hegel is thinking of Louis XIV, the paragon of absolute monarchy in France. Around the king, the rest of the nobility sit and serve as his ‘ornaments’, Hegel writes, and the purpose is to reproduce his authority through flattery.

One way of understanding this process is that the flattering language of the nobility serves as recognition of the monarch’s right to rule. Recognition, for Hegel, is the phenomenon through which the Other, who might ordinarily be an obstacle to my acting, actually opens up my freedom to act.⁵⁶ This is why flattery does not just please the monarchy, but in fact ‘gives it a self-conscious existence’ with the capacity for ‘willing and deciding’.⁵⁷ This flattery is an illustration of the performativity of language.

The nobles also benefit from this relationship; in thanks for their flattery, the monarch delegates power of the state back to them. The king is the ‘self’ of state- power – its will and direction – and his nobles are its ‘essence’, through which his will is actualised. Through this delegation, however, the monarchy begins to undermine itself: state-power, despite having become spirit, has become ‘an essence whose spirit consists in being sacrificed and relinquished’.⁵⁸ Power is handed out generously as the gift of privilege and, as such, becomes … wealth. The monarch unwittingly transforms themselves into a mere distributor of wealth, a servant to the now-prosperous nobility. ‘All that remains to it of universally recognized and non-mediated self-sufficiency is the empty name’: the king might as well exist only as a portrait on a bank note. The nobles consequently see little equality between themselves and the monarch. And in their scrambling for wealth, their flattery has become totally inauthentic; it is nothing more than a way for them to receive extra riches. They become like Regan and Goneril in King Lear, and in them the difference between noble and base consciousness has totally dissolved.

The social world is now one of ‘clients’ and ‘benefactors’. A ‘client’ – an individual who devotes their life to accruing wealth – sees their selfhood placed ‘under the authority of an alien will’, Hegel explains.⁵⁹ What he means by this is that, now that wealth has become the central concern, the point around which a life is oriented, it has become an end in itself. Individuals have thus emptied out their selfhood into wealth, depending on it completely (as an ‘alien will’). Self-consciousness takes wealth as its object, but wealth is itself just the objectified, alienated form of self-consciousness; as such, and just as with the end of observing reason, self-consciousness has found itself manifest as a dead thing.⁶⁰ Upon acknowledging this contradiction – between themselves as an independent subject for-itself and as a dead thing – the individual ‘stands above’ it, ‘sublates the self’s sublation’, and takes the form of ‘absolute elasticity’.⁶¹ This elastic subject accepts wealth from their benefactors but dismisses their benefactors nonetheless, looking with contempt and cynicism upon the social world.

As the rich benefactors and patrons of society arrogantly think that ‘with a meal’ they can purchase the selfhood of their clients, they overlook the ‘inner indignation’ and ‘pure disruption’ that this selfhood represents.⁶² There is nothing stable about the elastic individual; they are a cynical nihilist, willing to change their mindset in an instant, devoted only to a complete lack of devotion at all. Hegel dramatically describes how the aristocratic benefactor stands before this nihilism, underestimating it completely:

It stands immediately before this most inward abyss, before this bottomless depth, in which all foothold and substance have vanished, and in these depths it sees nothing but a common thing, a play of its vagaries, an accident of its arbitrary choices. Its spirit is just essenceless opinion, a superficiality forsaken by spirit.⁶³

Perhaps in this notion of ‘essenceless opinion’ there is a foreshadowing of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, two bourgeois critics of society, with their notions of ‘chatter’ and ‘idle talk’. Kierkegaard criticises the chatter which talks about ‘anything and everything’ without any reflection or inwardness;⁶⁴ Heidegger describes (but does not disparage, he claims) the idle talk which ‘gossips’ with an air of authority but loses a ‘primary relationship’ to its subject matter.⁶⁵ However, the nihilistic critic that Hegel is describing is a lot less serious and reverent than Kierkegaard and Heidegger; this critic is the young Rameau whose mockery ‘is the perfected language of this entire world of culture’.⁶⁶

Rameau is practically undefeatable in conversation: by the time someone has refuted a point of his, he has already moved on to something else. He ‘repudiates his own abjectness’, Hegel writes; his identity is ‘disruption’, the total lack of consistent identity. As a form of self-consciousness, Rameau (and any ‘client’ consciousness that he represents) still asserts himself and his identity, but ‘this identical judgment is at the same time the infinite judgment’: that is, his identity is defined by a negation.⁶⁷ Keeping in mind that infinite judgments always have the structure ‘X is not Y’, we should understand Rameau’s identity to be defined as something like: ‘I am not cultured’. Crucially, it is in this disavowal that Rameau most exemplifies culture: the disruption of his nihilism and relativism are culture in its absolute truth, in the chaotic and constant dissolution of all of its elements into one another.

The ‘turmoil-ridden judging’ is the final stage in culture’s development. The individual who has undergone the greatest Bildung, the greatest cultural formation, is what Hegel calls ‘the disruptive consciousness’, and it is they who most truthfully represent the feudal world of culture.⁶⁸ In their ‘candor’ (that is, their self-awareness in having no consistency) this cultured individual finds ‘a strain of reconciliation’; they are ‘denatured’ by a ‘strain of the ridiculous’ – Hegel is quoting Diderot here – and thereby get closer to a truly spiritual existence.⁶⁹

Because the disruptive consciousness represents the truth of culture as a whole, their opponent – the philosophe, or what Hegel calls ‘simple consciousness’ – is left lost for words. If they can muster up anything beyond mere ‘monosyllables’, they will still be representing only a particular moment of culture and will therefore be saying nothing that the disruptive nihilist does not already know.⁷⁰ If they cite examples of ‘the excellent’ – stories that are supposed to convince us that, really, culture does have a noble element, and wealth and flattery aren’t just hypocritical emptinesses – the nihilist can simply respond by pointing out that these are only individual cases; they don’t hold up to the holism of the disruptive view of society. ‘To present the existence of the good and the noble as a single anecdote, whether fictitious or true,’ Hegel writes, ‘is the most caustic thing that can be said about it.’⁷¹

From Nihilism to Faith

Perhaps the most famous account of nihilism in the history of philosophy is given by Nietzsche. Both Hegel and Nietzsche see a link between nihilism and culture, and both understand culture in contrast nature. Nietzsche condemns modern culture for its espousal of a moral denigration of the natural instincts of life: culture and its morality are ‘a condemnation pronounced by the condemned’, a self-renunciation of life carried out by people who have willingly subjected themselves to a highest value – a God.⁷² Hegel’s cultured individual, similarly, is invested in mastering their natural existence according to God’s will. A crucial difference these accounts, however, is that while for Nietzsche nihilism is the result of a Christian moral worldview, in Hegel the nihilist is not yet at the stage of Christianity proper. Culture for Hegel is not the result of a theological crisis, but instead of the dissolution of social harmony and unity. The ‘disruption’ expressed by Rameau is precisely the disharmony of Greek spirit after having come into spiritual daylight (and being absolutised in Roman law). It is only through the inwardness that this disruption induces that we will be led closer to Christianity.

It is therefore the disrupted nihilist that truly represents culture – not the simple consciousness of the philosophe. Only from an incredibly acculturated position can one do what Rameau does: criticise culture while nonetheless remaining within it. The simple consciousness, being as simple as it is, cannot accommodate this seeming contradiction and might therefore demand a ‘withdrawal’ from the world. Perhaps culture is not so good, after all! – If it leads to such confusion and irreverence as we see in Rameau, what good can it be? Should we revert to the ‘simplicity of the natural heart’, the ‘backwoods of animal consciousness’? It was Rousseau that took simple consciousness in this direction with his condemnation of culture. The disruptive consciousness, however, embraces that one cannot abandon a world that one is shaped by: ‘for even Diogenes in his barrel is conditioned by it.’⁷³

(We find this embrace in Voltaire’s criticisms of Rousseau, which are just as funny as Rameau: ‘One acquires the desire to walk on all fours when one reads your work [the Discourse on Inequality]. Nevertheless, since I lost this habit more than sixty years ago, I unfortunately feel that it is impossible for me to take it up again.’⁷⁴)

The cultured nihilist laughs about existence, about the ‘vanity of all actuality’.⁷⁵ The most immediate contrast to this laughter is, of course, the weeping of the unhappy consciousness: the ‘teacher’ in Ecclesiastes also regards the world as ‘vanity’, and Augustine despairs at the ‘havoc of disruption’ which tears the human spirit ‘to pieces’.⁷⁶ Diderot – and Hegel here – are thus presenting us with the comedic analogue to the tragedy of modern unhappy consciousness. Whether it laughs or cries, however, the cultural subject in modernity comes to the same conclusion: we are all alienated from ourselves (‘Man is beyond man’ – Pascal), and contradiction is the ultimate truth not only of our subjectivity, as psychoanalysis will also come to emphasise, but also of our cultured society itself.

Despite his laughter, therefore, Rameau is just as alienated as the unhappy consciousness of the fourth chapter. Cultural speech ‘is the madness of the musician’ just as unhappy consciousness carried out the ‘shapeless roar’ of ‘musical thinking’.⁷⁷ Just as the unhappy consciousness felt irreparably separate from God, the cultured individual like Rameau ‘understands very well how to pass judgment on what is substantial, but has lost the ability to take hold of it.’⁷⁸ Just as the fickleness of skepticism gave way to the isolation of the unhappy subject, so too does the ‘vanity’ of Bildung pass over into a kind of inwardness (insight) that can no longer grasp the world ‘as positive’ and must invest hope and trust in some sort of beyond (faith).

Faith and Pure Insight

The interplay between faith and insight, which is a kind of prelude to the Enlightenment and its critique of religious superstition, begins with the alienation of Bildung’s disruptive consciousness. Rameau recognises that he himself is part of the world that he holds in such contempt. Indeed, the name he is given – Rameau’s nephew – symbolises his cultural inheritance, his tie to cultural actuality.⁷⁹ For Rameau himself, the response to this is nothing more than laughter. To go further than Rameau, however, would be to overcome this contradiction of self-contempt by fleeing from cultural actuality altogether. As such, in resolute resistance to the vanity of the cultural world, the disruptive subject can take flight to the other, ‘non-actual world of pure consciousness, or of thinking.’⁸⁰ While the subject naturally continues to exist and live in the actual, concrete world, they work to find fulfilment and meaning in the world of thought. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. It is common in modernity to suppose that the world around us is too dry and indifferent – or, in this case, too vain – for us to find meaning in it, and that we must therefore retreat into thought to ‘construct’ a meaning for ourselves. We live in one world and think in another.⁸¹ Alasdair MacIntyre claims that Rameau’s nephew criticises a world that is implied by moral emotivism: a world wherein non-manipulative (i.e., ethical) relations are impossible because everything boils down to preference and desire, and there are no impersonal criteria of action.⁸² If we accept this, then, we can understand faith’s flight from actuality as a flight from the emotivist scenario; the construction of a faith-world is an attempt to establish a ground for non-manipulative relations between people.

In the case of faith and pure insight, however, we are not quite dealing with a constructed world of thought. This flight into thought is ‘only the immediate elevation that is not yet accomplished within itself’: only to us, the phenomenological observers, is it clear that the subject themselves devises the world of faith from a set of projected images. From the subject’s point of view, faith concerns an encounter with content that is irremediably beyond us. As such, in Faith and Pure Insight Hegel examines a ‘pure consciousness’ as opposed to an ‘actual consciousness’. The subject does not take themselves to be representing or reflecting upon the actual world but sees themselves as brushing up against that which is totally other. Put otherwise: the ‘actuality’ of the faith-world is no actuality at all.

There is a similarity here to chapter four and the enslaved consciousness’s flight into stoic thought. Stoicism’s movement from concept to concept stood for a kind of self-enclosed freedom, just as consciousness’s current dwelling in thought provides an escape from the inanity of cultural chaos. The crucial difference, however, is that faith and pure insight are concerned with content while stoicism was concerned only with form. Stoicism entertained itself not with ‘representations’ but with ‘concepts’.⁸³ On the other hand, and as I have already alluded to, faith takes its content from the world of culture – without knowing that it does so – and constructs a supersensible world through a process of idealisation or projection, and it is this content which is criticised by pure insight.

With such a focus on faith, the supersensible, and the beyond, and with talk of ‘elevation’ that will eventually be echoed in Feuerbach’s anthropological critique of Christianity, Hegel is clearly focused on a form of religion in this part of the Phenomenology. Indeed, faith and pure insight stand in the middle of the book’s triptych of religion. The sentiment of religion began with the struggle of unhappy consciousness, but the unhappy subject was ultimately caught in a ‘movement of substance-less consciousness’; since faith has emerged from an experience of ethical substance, it is a more developed form of religious thinking. However, since faith’s relation to substance is one of immediate opposition, it cannot yet count as religion in and for itself – this will come later.⁸⁴

So much for the generalities of faith. What about pure insight? Why are the two combined in Hegel’s title for this section? In the Phenomenology, when the word ‘and’ appears in the title of a section, substituting it for the word ‘is’ is often revealing:⁸⁵ in ‘Perceiving; or the Thing and Illusion’, we discover that the ‘thing’ of perception is an illusion, unconsciously held together by the operation of the understanding; in ‘Mastery and Servitude’, we find proof that ‘many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they’ (Rousseau).⁸⁶ In the case of the present chapter, however, faith and insight are quite separate; indeed, as in the case of ‘human and divine law’, they are best understood as opponents.

The protagonist of the chapter is pure consciousness. Since it is essentially alienated from a world that it opposes, ‘it has in its own self the determinateness of opposition.’⁸⁷ That is to say, opposition is constitutive of pure consciousness; for this reason, it is also directed against itself, opposed to itself. In this opposition, it becomes a ‘twofold consciousness’, and ‘faith’ and ‘pure insight’ are the names for its two facets. We can understand the difference between the two when we recognise that faith is a form of consciousness and insight is a form of self-consciousness.⁸⁸ That is, while faith takes the form of mere apprehension, pure insight involves the comprehension which results from a reflective, inward turn.⁸⁹ On the basis of this idea, Hegel analyses both facets of pure consciousness from three perspectives: first, as they exist in and for themselves, outside of any relationship; second, as they are characterised by their (oppositional) relation to actuality; third, as they exist in relationship to one another, as the constituents of pure consciousness.⁹⁰

1. Faith

   As we will see, the faithful consciousness closely resembles Pascal, a figure who is mentioned only rarely by Hegel. His name does not appear in the Phenomenology, but in the 1802 work Faith and Knowledge, Hegel concludes with reference to the ‘infinite grief’ that arises in the ‘formative process of culture’, and quotes Pascal:

   For nature is such that it points everywhere to a God who has been lost, both within man and elsewhere.⁹¹

   Being in a state of alienation, pure consciousness must assume that the truth is outside of it; nonetheless, the inwardness that results from this alienation prevents pure consciousness from apprehending an ‘outside’ that is anything more than a projection of its own existence. Faith is this projection, and thus has content but no insight, no self-reflection. This, if anything, is ‘infinite grief’. Faith conjures up a representation, ‘a supersensible world which is supposed to be essentially an other’ but which, in truth, is nothing other than the self itself.⁹² Considered in and for itself, faith takes this supersensible world as its ‘absolute object’: ‘the real world elevated into the universality of pure consciousness’.⁹³ The difference between the actual world and the world of faith is that, in the latter, the various essences do not undergo a process of alienation. Of course, this will have to fail – we have long since established that spiritual development necessarily involves alienation. Only to us do the essences of the faith-world appear as undergoing alienation and movement; for faith, ‘their difference is a motionless diversity, and their movement is an event.’ That is to say, the different essences of the faith-world appear to faith not as moments of a process, but as divine announcements ex nihilo – signs that ‘sparkle’, in Pascal’s words, and indicate ‘the presence of a God who hides himself’.⁹⁴ These essences correspond to the three persons of the Trinity, because the faith that Hegel is interested in is specifically Christian. (This specificity might be a consequence of Hegel’s contingent circumstances; Jameson, however, suggests that Christianity is particularly appropriate because it began as a slave religion and, like this faith, ‘occupied a position of inessentiality with respect to the Unchangeable.’⁹⁵)

   Hegel is imprecise in establishing faith’s projection of cultural actuality onto the trinity, so any reconstruction will share the gaps in his account. To start with, faith idealises state power (or the good) as ‘the absolute essence’ (the father), which it apprehends as spirit existing in and for itself.⁹⁶ In its spiritual actualisation, however, this essence undergoes necessary estrangement and self-sacrifice – unbeknownst to the faithful consciousness – and ‘passes over into being for others’; it thus becomes a self (the son). Lastly, in keeping with the process of spiritualisation, this alienated self returns to its origin and both absolute essence and selfhood are united spiritually (the holy spirit). Failing to recognise these three moments as part of a process, faith has theologically reified the dynamic phenomena of the society in which it occurs – ‘the flux of the actual world’, as Hegel calls it.⁹⁷

   Faith’s attitude towards this actual world is the concern of the second perspective from which Hegel looks at faithful consciousness. Crucially, the faithful subject still ‘has its actuality’ – that is, it lives – in the real world. It nonetheless regards the world to be one of vanity and ‘spiritless existence’.⁹⁸ Pascal inherited his disdain for actuality from the Jansenists, but he stands out from the Jansenists for the fact that he nonetheless engaged with actuality, as a scientist. His contention with Descartes is not that the latter was wrong but, rather, ‘useless and uncertain’: ‘Even if [Cartesian philosophy] were true, we do not believe the whole of philosophy to be worth one hour’s effort.’⁹⁹ ‘Torn as he is between two realms,’ MacIntyre writes, Pascal ‘can see each from the point of view of the other and his own predicament from both.’¹⁰⁰ Faith thus remains amidst actuality while it scorns it. The difference between faith and unhappy consciousness is thus the same as the difference between Pascal and the earlier Jansenists. Pascal, as Hyppolite says of faith, ‘lives in one world and thinks in another’: he holds the objectivity of science in one hand and the subjectivity of belief in the other. This is the reason for his consistent dualisms, and his warning against ‘two excesses’: ‘Excluding reason, allowing only reason.’¹⁰¹ Indeed, because it still remains with one foot in actuality, faith is aware of the criticisms that someone like Rameau could level against it. It knows very well that the church and its people, and all the substantial elements of its religion, are the ‘espèces’ that Rameau exposes; but it has faith nonetheless, because it rejects also the vanity embodied in someone like Rameau. Faith therefore practices the contradictory, superstitious kind of belief captured by Octave Mannoni in a single phrase: ‘je sais bien, mais quand-même’ (‘I know [that] well, but all the same…’).¹⁰² Faith cannot give reasons for its belief, since to do so would be contrary to the very nature of faith.

   Faith conceives of the world’s vanity as the forgetting, ignoring, or opposition to the idea of God entering the world as Christ. Descartes is a theist, to be sure, but his God is the ‘God of the philosophers’, a God to be used in proofs and deductions. The world’s dynamism and cultural disruption are antithetical to the motionless of the faith-world, and faith thus commits itself to a life of ‘service and praise’ in the hopes of uniting with God. For the unhappy consciousness, this unity was possible only through the work of a priestly mediator; in faith, however, it is established through the religious community of ordinary people (by means that Hegel does not specify). We are thus in Dante and Luther’s era of conciliarist Christianity that speaks in the vernacular and rejects priestly authority. Nonetheless, in the heart of the individual, actuality remains spirtless, and one’s faithful service is ultimately futile: it can never reach its goal ‘in the present’, Hegel claims – and the faithful subject might indeed know this (think of Pascal’s wager: in a vain world where God is hidden, only through a wager can I grasp his existence). From the perspective of faith, the divine and the faith-world are infinitely distant in space and time, and infinitely distant from comprehension. Pascal compares God to infinity insofar as we can apprehend and acknowledge both of them but can ‘know the nature’ of neither; ‘we can clearly understand that there is a God without knowing what he is.’¹⁰³ Faith is thus reduced to a kind of silence. In truth, the ‘beyond’ it tries to seek is, as we already know, within itself, and the faithful subject can only access this inner if it gives way to self-reflection – that is (and here is Hegel’s third perspective on faith), if it sustains a relationship to pure insight.¹⁰⁴

2. Pure Insight

   The word ‘insight’, as well as the German ‘Einsicht’, can be read literally: it is an inward seeing. But inwards into what? One can see into the object of one’s sight, or into oneself reflectively. In the case of ‘pure insight’, as Hegel describes it, both of these modes are carried out simultaneously. By casting a scrutinising look at its object – that is, faith – pure insight also comes to look inwards (more precisely, into the modern alienated self as such) and turn its scrutiny into dissolution; insight unmasks faith and reveals it to be a superstition.¹⁰⁵ This is why, as Gadamer has recognised, insight ‘involves an escape’:

   Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we called experience in the proper sense. Insight is something we come to. It too is ultimately part of the vocation of man—i.e., to be discerning and insightful.¹⁰⁶

   ‘It too is ultimately part of the vocation of man’: indeed, pure insight has practical motivations insofar as, like faith, it is a defence mechanism; the two are ‘shadow brothers’, in Comay’s words.¹⁰⁷ Their difference lies in how they defend themselves against their alienation: while faith fled from the world, insight ‘directs itself against it’ with relentless criticism.¹⁰⁸ In this way, the subject of pure insight has the paradigmatic position of a social critic: they are both inside society and outside of it, alienated from that which they are thrown into.

   Faith was previously defined as having content with no self-reflection; we can conversely define pure insight as self-reflection without content. It is pure consciousness in the form of a ‘restless movement’ of being-for-itself.¹⁰⁹ Just as he did with faith, Hegel analyses pure insight from three perspectives: as it is in and for itself, in its relation to actuality, and in relation to faith.

   As mentioned above, while faith is a form of consciousness, pure insight is a form of self-consciousness: where faith apprehended the ‘absolute essence’ of the faith-world, pure insight comprehends itself as an ‘absolute self’.¹¹⁰ This is a high achievement of reason; where reason in the fifth chapter was only the certainty of being ‘all truth’, pure insight reaches actual knowledge of itself as all truth. This knowledge is established through a rigorous process of conceptualising: that is, annulling the self-sufficiency of anything that is not self-consciousness by revealing such things to be mere acts and figments of self-consciousness – in other words, concepts. Insight works to reveal that the activity of faith is not apprehension but projection – which, as phenomenological observers, we knew all along. Insightful self-consciousness thus undermines everything that is not itself. It comes to recognise itself as the truth – and thus finally fulfil the project of reason – precisely be reducing to falsehood everything that is other to it. Moreover, in revealing that faith was wrong not for apprehending the wrong God, or the right God in the wrong way, but by failing to think properly, insight exposes it as a self-imposed lack of independence. Therein is the first sign that Kant was right to identify the Enlightenment (which grows out of pure insight) as the overcoming of ‘self-incurred minority’.¹¹¹

   The fact that conceptualising is a process is crucial: insight is not immediately given but is a project that must be realised. The aim of this project is to conceptualise all of actuality, rendering all things of the world ‘into one concept’: namely, the absolute self.¹¹² The differences of cultural actuality which ‘in mutual forcibleness and confusion … fight and deceive each other’ will thus be flattened. Not only the beliefs of faith, but all claims of culturation, all social essences, ambitions and promises of wealth or power – all these will be revealed, deep down, to be aspects of self-consciousness. In its first appearance, Hegel explains, pure insight was still ‘singularly individual’; here we might think of Descartes’ Meditations, wherein insight is individual enough to be carried out alone in one’s living room. We might also think of the name of young Rameau’s philosophical opponent: ‘moi’. But the overall project of insight, being rational and thus allowing for no unconceptualised remainder, aims for universality. ‘Pure insight is supposed to be the possession of all self-consciousnesses’.¹¹³ Insight aims for universal selfhood – not in a relativist, laissez faire way, which would amount to a return to the spiritual animal kingdom and the various estates of culture, but in the sense of establishing a new kind of modern individual who is engaged in a life of comprehensive thought and who has, in Kant’s words, ‘cast off the yoke of minority’.¹¹⁴ This is why insight aims for one concept to unify all the others; if it is possible to conceptualise everything under the rubric of ‘absolute self’, it is possible for everyone to have worked through and against the disruption of cultural actuality. ‘This pure insight is thus the spirit that calls out to every consciousness: Be for yourselves what you all are in yourselves – rational.’¹¹⁵