Spirit

Prelude

History in the Phenomenology

According to Georg Lukács, in the Phenomenology the entirety of human history (up to 1807, at least) is ‘traversed three times’.¹ Using the terms that Hegel adopts later in the Encyclopaedia, Lukács considers these three repetitions to be concerned with subjective spirit, objective spirit, and finally absolute spirit. The first part covers the development of thought throughout history, from sensuous certainty to law-testing reason. The second part, which consists only of the chapter on Spirit, repeats this historical account from the perspective of the objective – social – context in which thought takes place. Finally, in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowing, we arrive at an absolute standpoint where the whole of history can be surveyed at once and the ‘laws governing the movement of history’ or ‘the dialectics of reality’ can be comprehended.² In this interpretation, the Phenomenology of Spirit is literally a history book; sensuous certainty is understood to be chronologically prior to perception, phrenology is understood as a successor (at least indirectly) to Baconian science, and so on.

This view of Hegel’s book is not very popular anymore. For a start, if Hegel were really trying to write a history, he would have made some significant errors: for example, the unhappy consciousness he describes quite early in the book exhibits a religious alienation (separation from God) that has manifested throughout history, in some cases after Hegel’s death (for example, in Kierkegaard). And although there are some coincidental accuracies in the ordering of positions (Augustine, for example, was a skeptic before he was an unhappy Christian, just like the Phenomenology’s protagonist), they are outnumbered by the inaccuracies (in Hegel’s narrative, stoicism precedes skepticism; in Greece, Pyrrho preceded Zeno). However, these points could be interpreted as signs that Hegel merely wrote a bad history – not that he didn’t intend to write a history at all. Michael N. Forster defends Lukács’s reading on the basis of certain remarks that Hegel himself makes:³

The series of the figurations of consciousness which consciousness traverses on this path is the full history of the cultivation of consciousness into science.⁴

Only the whole spirit is in time, and the shapes, which are shapes of the whole spirit as such, exhibit themselves in a sequence [Aufeinanderfolger], one after the other.⁵

Is it really the case, however, that ‘history’ or ‘sequence’ in this sense necessarily refers to the actual history of humanity, in the precise order that it took place? It is more accurate to think of the Phenomenology as a narrative of the development of thought (and subjectivity, society, and so on) that takes the shape of a history but is not itself directly correspondent with ‘real’ history. In what we have read so far, the concrete historical phenomena named by Hegel have only been examples of manifestations of particular shapes of consciousness, and this is wholly distinct from them being these shapes exactly. Hegel acknowledges this explicitly when he writes in the Self-Consciousness chapter: ‘As it has consciously appeared in the history of spirit, this freedom of self-consciousness has, as is well known, been called stoicism.’⁶ The ‘real’ stoicism – that is, the movement elaborated by Zeno, Seneca, and so on – is simply one ‘conscious appearance’ in history of what Hegel is talking about (albeit a particularly prominent appearance). The narrative depicted in the Phenomenology is thus a possible manifestation of the development of consciousness – a development whose stages manifest in contingent ways but is nonetheless governed by the necessity of logic.

With that being said, it is nonetheless the case that the chapters on Spirit and Religion are more consciously informed by ‘real’ history. We will see in Spirit, for example, that the Enlightenment reaches its truth in a revolution which eventually culminates in ‘terror’ – and this, of course, is precisely what happened in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. This relates to what Lukács got right about the structure of the Phenomenology: namely, that it is in the Spirit chapter that the history of society is foregrounded, no longer a ‘shadowy, enigmatic backcloth’ for the development of individual consciousness, but rather ‘a coherent rational order’ that allows us to comprehend ‘the rise of modern civil society’ (which, according to Lukács, is Hegel’s central preoccupation).⁷

From Nature to Spirit

As such, we are now at the moment where spirit comes to the foreground of Hegel’s focus. Given the title of the book – the Phenomenology of Spirit – we can be forgiven for being surprised that it has taken so long for this to happen. We might be especially surprised, given that the concept of ‘spirit’, though it has been used quite a few times, is still without a concrete definition. Nonetheless, we can find some clarifications by looking back to the preface. In §25, Hegel makes two important remarks: firstly, ‘That the true is only actual as a system, or, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the representation that expresses the absolute as spirit.’ Secondly, ‘Spirit knowing itself as spirit is science. Science is its actuality.’ What are we to make of this? For a start, Hegel seems to suggest that in order for us to achieve philosophy’s goal of conceiving the true (or the absolute) not just as substance but also as subject, we must express the absolute ‘as spirit.’⁸ Secondly, spirit is – it achieves its actuality – through knowing itself, and this self-knowledge is what Hegel calls ‘science’, or systematic philosophy. Consequently, we can take from these remarks that, for philosophy to rise from ‘the love of knowing’ to ‘actual knowing’ (§5), we must conceive of the absolute as something that comes to understand itself and that, through this process of self-interpretation, also becomes more actualised.

This seems still quite abstract, however, and it leaves us with a rather general and unhelpful definition of ‘spirit’ (as ‘that which is actualised through its self-interpretation’). Things become clearer when we put them in their proper context. The Phenomenology was the first text of Hegel’s split with Schelling, and its central concept of spirit is crucial to this split and to Hegel’s attempt to render himself independent from Schelling. In his early works at the start of the nineteenth century, Schelling emphasises life, organicism, and – most especially – nature in his account of the absolute. As Frederick Beiser writes, Schelling got close to ‘virtually equating the standpoint of absolute identity with nature itself.’⁹ However, this led to Schelling taking a quasi-Romantic stance towards the absolute – that is, a view wherein absolute truth can only be expressed artistically or poetically. Philosophy must begin, Schelling claims, with an ‘utterly nonobjective principle’ which cannot be ‘apprehended through concepts.’¹⁰ Such a principle, he argues, can be intuited only artistically; ‘The work of art merely reflects to me what is otherwise not reflected by anything, namely that absolutely identical which has already divided itself even in the self.’¹¹ Schelling’s view is that philosophy, being a form of thought and therefore based in concepts and distinctions, cannot represent nature in its absolute unity; rather, this unity can only be intuited by artistic means. This is precisely Hegel’s problem with Schelling; we might imagine that, when Hegel refers to philosophers who ‘take what thought has torn asunder and then stir it all together into a smooth mélange’ and who merely ‘fabricate the feeling of the essence’ of reality, he is referring not only to the Romantics but also to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie with its insistence on an unconscious, pre- (and indeed anti-) conceptual ‘nature’.¹² In Schellingian Naturphilosophie, Hegel argues, we find that ‘spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meagre feeling of divinity.’¹³

The second problem for Hegel is that Schelling’s insistence on unity, on nature/absolute as the pure identity of identity, results in an emptied-out philosophy that has no room for the qualitative difference that self-consciousness, society, and so on are characterised by. In Schelling’s words, ‘Absolute identity simply is and is as certain as the proposition A = A is.’¹⁴ Considered from the viewpoint of absolute truth, therefore, A = A is the most accurate – in fact, the only – description of reality; ‘there is no difference, distinction, or multiplicity in that dark night’, as Beiser writes.¹⁵ This ‘night’ is precisely what Hegel takes issue with, for how can an unconscious darkness of pure identity give rise to the ‘self-originating, self-differentiating wealth of shapes’ that philosophy is supposed to comprehend?¹⁶ Accordingly, Hegel famously regards the absolute of Naturphilosophie as ‘the night in which all cows are black’: from the viewpoint of the Schellingian absolute, everything is reduced to sameness, and nothing beside remains.¹⁷

Given that Hegel was something of a Schellingian for some time, it seems that he regarded Naturphilosophie as one of the most sophisticated attempts at conceiving the absolute as a substance (nature, in this case) – and not as subject, as Fichte had done. Schelling had gone further than Fichte, but nonetheless arrived at a dead end. Therefore, Hegel’s project to overcome Schelling was to conceive of something ‘higher’ than nature, which avoids the two problems outlined above: that is, something which is both accessible to consciousness and allows for qualitative difference. ‘The originality of Hegel’s thought’, Hyppolite writes, ‘does not lie in its concept of Life but in the philosophical attempt to conceptualize life by means of a dialectic which permits “finite determinations” to be engulfed in [but not erased by] “the indifferent”.’¹⁸ This conception of life is spirit. Spirit (when fully actualised through its self-understanding) is absolute reality aware of itself as both substance and subject. Being self-understanding, and thereby incorporating subjectivity and negativity, it makes sense that spirit is a notion that serves philosophy better than nature with all its quiet stillness. But what does it mean to say that spirit is ‘higher’ than nature?

In an 1802 work on natural law, Hegel claims that nature is merely the ‘actuality’ – the manifestation – of the absolute, while spirit is both the manifestation and the reflection of the absolute into itself: ‘the recovery of the universe into itself.’¹⁹ When something is reflected into itself (that is, when it becomes capable of understanding itself), it does not become something entirely different; as such, it would be a mistake to understand spirit as something supernatural, utterly ‘beyond’ nature. Rather, it is ‘higher’ than nature insofar as it is more developed; it is able to give an explicit account for itself while nature remains dormant, waiting to be interpreted by something outside of itself. When Kant, in his Anthropology, claims that ‘physiological’ knowledge is the knowledge ‘of what nature makes of the human being’, and ‘pragmatic’ knowledge is of ‘what he as a free-acting being makes of himself’, he unknowingly anticipates Hegel’s emphasis on the spiritual dimension of human life as something more developed than the natural dimension.²⁰ As we will see, the chapter on spirit features repeated triumphs of spirit (in the form of culture, universality, and so on) over the simplicity of nature, right from the start.

Another Beginning

Rational consciousness promised itself that it was ‘all reality’, ‘all truth’; however, being uncomprehending of its place in society and history, this promise is nothing more than a naïve assertion.²¹ For spirit, however, ‘the certainty of being all reality has been elevated to truth.’²² Note that it would be inaccurate to refer to ‘spiritual consciousness’ in the way that we refer to ‘rational consciousness’, precisely because spirit inherently belongs to a collective in a way that reason does not.

In the opening paragraph to the chapter on Spirit, Hegel refers to observing reason. The truth of observation, he claims – that is, the ultimate outcome of its internal logic – is the sublation of an ‘immediate instinct for finding, the sublation of this unconscious existence of the truth.’²³ What does he mean by this? Recall that the conclusion of observing reason was: ‘spirit is a bone.’²⁴ The ‘sublation’ of this insane statement is how, eventually (after a detour in the ‘Actualisation’ chapter into the origins of sociality), the ‘truth’ of spirit emerges from its ‘unconscious existence’. A sublation (Aufhebung) is a double (or ‘determinate’) negation. The first moment in the sublation of ‘spirit is a bone’ is immediate incredulity: of course this statement is false, ‘spirit’ and ‘bone’ completely contradict one another! The second moment is the truly Hegelian moment, where negativity is itself negated into a positive: spirit is this contradiction… Spirit is that element of human existence which cannot be found in the dead nature of a bone; it is in its spiritual existence that human society is ‘higher’ than nature. Put more concisely: spirit is that in virtue of which I am more than what I am made of, more than the sum of my parts.

‘All the previous shapes of consciousness are abstractions’ from spirit, according to Hegel.²⁵ As such, and as mentioned above, spirit is often present implicitly or in the background of the Phenomenology’s earlier stages. For instance, the ‘ethical substance’ we saw in Reason is accordingly brought now to self-awareness, and becomes ‘ethical actuality’.²⁶ The present chapter is therefore a step forwards and a step backwards: literally we (the phenomenological observers) go ‘back in time’ to the Greece of Sophocles, but we do this with a uniquely modern capacity for critical reason. Harris explains this perfectly:

It is not Sophocles, or even Plato, who are “more advanced” than Kant. It is rather we who, because we stand upon Kant’s shoulders, can see and why the Hellenism of Schiller and Hölderlin is an advance over Kant. Kant knew more than anyone had ever known before him. But he knew it all “falsely”, because he did not grasp that a rational order must uncritically be, before anyone can critically “have” Reason at all.²⁷

It is in this sense that Hegel begins with a return to the ancient world in this chapter, not because he glorifies it as a lost, perfect society, but because it was a society of the ‘unwritten law’ which, demanding interpretation, gives rise to authentic ethical life, as opposed to the mere maxim-testing of Kantian morality.

Before he begins the analysis of ancient spirit, Hegel gives a short summary of the whole forthcoming chapter: firstly, spirit is present only abstractly or immediately, as ‘the formal universality of law.’²⁸ Through the eventual ‘estrangement’ (alienation) of people from this law, we witness the stage of ‘cultural formation’ (Bildung) which, at its climactic moment, undergoes a ‘revolution’ and gives rise to the Enlightenment. In the Enlightenment, Hegel claims, ‘the conscience of spirit’ becomes aware of itself, and gives form to a system of morality, comparable to but nonetheless more sophisticated than the quasi-Kantian system we have already seen. For now, however, this long journey begins with Sophocles’ Antigone and the ‘ethical life’ which it represents.

(Since Hegel is not engaged in a literary analysis of Antigone, and is merely interested in using the play as an illustration for his ideas, a short summary of the story is enough to understand his references to it. Antigone is the main character; she is the daughter of Oedipus, the dead king, and is mourning the death of her brothers Polynices and Eteocles, who died fighting each other. Creon, the new king of Thebes, has honoured Eteocles and consequently decided that Polynices is to be shamed and given no proper burial. Antigone, out of a sense of familial duty, opts to become ‘a pious criminal’ by burying her brother against Creon’s demands. She is consequently sentenced to death by Creon, and is buried alive. She hangs herself in the cave. Creon’s son, Haemon, loved Antigone and is so upset at Creon’s decision (and Antigone’s suicide) that he too kills himself, which causes Creon to condemn himself with grief and guilt.)

True Spirit, Ethical Life

As I have mentioned in my introduction, many of Hegel’s contemporaries idolised ancient Greece. In his own way, Hegel did as well; however, he attributed more discordance to Greek society than writers like Goethe, Schiller, or Winckelmann were willing to. In the present chapter (‘True Spirit, Ethical Life’), Hegel first analyses the harmonious dimension of ancient Greece (in the section ‘The Ethical World, the Human and Divine Law, Man and Woman’) – this is the dimension of Greece that his contemporaries admired. Secondly, however (in the section entitled ‘Ethical Action, Human and Divine Knowing, Guilt and Fate’), Hegel finds a disruption of this harmony which, he argues, the Greek tragedians were the first to recognise. In this way, Hegel is not as dogmatic a philhellene as some of his contemporaries were.

The Burial of the Dead

Aristotle argues that, in the study of ethics, ‘we must begin with things known to us’.²⁹ The ‘starting points’ of ethical reflection, according to Aristotle, originate in the habits we acquire in our upbringing; in other words, to study ethics, one must first have some ethical background on which to reflect. Ethical substance, which has not yet been raised to the self-awareness of ethical actuality, is that background in the stage of ‘ethical life’. Ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is for Hegel the stage in a society’s history where people do not fully acknowledge their participation as constituents of ethical substance; rather, they simply contemplate it as what is ‘there’.³⁰ In this sense, Harris argues, ethical life is akin to unhappy consciousness insofar as it is not really self-consciousness but is instead a mere ‘awareness’ of some other (namely, the ethical substance).³¹

In other words, the structure of ethical life – which we call law – appears to the citizen of ethical life as an immediate given. What is essential for Hegel, however, is that it is a split given: spirit ‘descends upon us’ in two ways, two kinds of law. Firstly, as a ‘natural ethical’ phenomenon, it is given as ‘divine law’ into which one is born as a person qua natural being: a law which is manifested in family ties.³² Hegel’s idea here is that the natural (that is, biological) relations between family members give rise to certain ethical obligations and duties that family members owe one another. This dimension of the law emphasises individuality; the family is (for Hegel) a private community separated from the universality of public life. With her sense of obligation to her brother, Antigone represents the divine law for Hegel. The second kind of law concerns this universality: it is the ‘familiarly known’ law, the legal system into which one is born as a person qua citizen. Hegel calls this ‘human law’; it is determined and enforced by ‘the government’, and is thus represented in Sophocles’ play be Creon.³³

The divine law of the family and the existence of oneself as a family member is more immediate than one’s status as a citizen. I consciously carry out my citizenship, and it can be debated and determined by the state (think of refugees, for example), but on the other hand I immediately am in a family, among ‘unblemished heavenly shapes’ of ‘unprofaned innocence’, without any conscious effort required on my part.³⁴ Divine law is intuitive, Hegel argues, and ‘does not lie in the daylight of consciousness.’³⁵

Nonetheless, it has a close relation to the human law of the public sphere; the relation between the two is crucial for Hegel and, in his view, is the source of the tension in Greek tragedy. Firstly and most simply, the public sphere requires the private sphere insofar as the latter literally produces the state’s population. Already, this gives rise to a tension which George Steiner captures:

Inevitably, the state will seek to absorb this familial sphere into its governance and order of values. Yet if it did so completely, it would destroy not only the individual but the procreative units from which it draws its military-political resources. Thus the state, even in the moment of conflict, will ‘concede divine honours’ to the domestic, ethically private dimension of existence.³⁶

Secondly, though the family emerges in the domain of nature and the individual, its ethical dimension is concerned with culture and the universal – because ‘the ethical is in itself universal.’³⁷ For Hegel, this means that love and sentiment have no relevance to the family as an ethical structure, because love is ‘natural’ and not ethical. Rather, the ethical purpose of the family is not to love and care for one another, but to allow one’s family members to break out of the family and into culture and the public sphere. Family duty ‘consists in taking the singular individual out of the family, in subjugating his naturalness and individuality, and thus in leading him towards virtue, towards a life lived in and for the universal.’³⁸ As such, Hegel thinks that the function of the family is to undermine the family; family ties are created so that they can be left behind.

There is, however, a second duty for the family which is ‘positive’ rather than ‘negative’. The family’s positive duty is towards the family member who, ‘out of the long progression of his dispersed existence, is condensed into one completed shape’: that is, the individual who has died.³⁹ In performing a proper burial for the dead, the family resists the deceased’s dissolution into nature: by mourning, the dead individual is reasserted – ‘saved’ – as a universal being. As Hegel understands it, the Greeks practiced burial rites because they interpreted human life as always already ethical; natural existence (and natural relations like those of the family) must be taken as embodying ethical norms. Burial is the divine law’s way of maintaining the spiritual existence of an individual. But this maintenance can also come from the spiritual realm itself, the realm of human law and government. As an example, Hegel points out the frequency of warfare in ancient Greece: Greek war, he claims, was a way of making men ‘feel the power of their lord and master, death’, and preventing them from falling back into their ‘mere’ natural existence.⁴⁰

In the domain of both human law (war) and divine law (burial), death is the crucial moment in determining an individual’s ethical status. When an individual dies in vain, or dies without being mourned, their universal (ethical) dimension is destroyed as they become absorbed by nature; if, however, they die for a ‘cause’, or their death is properly mourned, then the ethical community ‘supplements the abstract natural movement by adding to it the movement of consciousness, by interrupting nature’s work, and by wresting the blood-relation away from destruction.’⁴¹

Women and Men

Following this, Hegel turns back to family relations and their spiritual significance – or, indeed, insignificance: Hegel’s analysis of the family is particularly cold and dismissive of familial love and care. The specific picture of a family that he analyses is strictly heterosexual and is oriented almost totally to the purpose of having children. He starts, therefore, with the relationship between a husband and wife. This relationship, Hegel claims, is ‘only the representation and picture of spirit’; it does not have significant spiritual value because the recognition between a husband and wife is ‘natural’ (that is, romantic and emotional) rather than ethical. Furthermore, he argues, the actuality of a marital relationship is external to the relationship itself – the relationship is actualised in the child. Hegel even claims that, with the birth of the child, the purpose of the marital relationship is achieved and the relationship consequently becomes obsolete (‘disappears’).⁴² This is presumably what Beauvoir is thinking of when she repeatedly attributes to Hegel the idea that ‘the birth of children is the death of parents.’⁴³

What about the relationship between parent and child? This also is too impure for Hegel. Firstly, again, it is ‘affected by emotion’ (Hegel does not use the word ‘love’ to identify this emotion, but instead describes it as the parent’s awareness that the child symbolises the actuality of their marital relationship); secondly, the child – despite being the ultimate product of the parents’ relationship – attains their own being-for-itself, their own autonomy, and becomes ‘an alien actuality’ to their parents, undermining any sense of harmony in the family. Likewise, the child’s relationship to their parent is impure because they are aware of the ‘vanishing’ of their parents’ marital relationship. This is an awareness that is brought onto the child ‘only through the separation from their origin’, that is, through the precise separation that Freud would also eventually identify as constitutive of human mental life.⁴⁴

The only immediate family that remains is that of siblings. It is here that Hegel finally finds a relation ‘equal’ enough to be purely ethical – though, as we shall see, this ‘equality’ can appear as such only from a misogynistic perspective. Brother and sister ‘are the same blood’, Hegel claims; ‘however, in them it has reached its state of rest and equilibrium.’⁴⁵ The brother and sister are equals, he argues, because neither one of them gave birth to the other, and neither one has desire for the other; thus, there is no contamination of ‘nature’ within their relationship, and it is purely ethical. But why is this reserved only for the brother-sister relation, and not brother-brother or sister-sister relations? In fact, Goethe seems to have asked a similar question. In his March 28, 1827 conversation with Eckermann (on Hinrichs’ The Essence of Ancient Tragedy), Goethe remarks: ‘I should think that the love of a sister for her sister would be still purer and more sexless!’⁴⁶ To be sure, if Hegel had allowed for brothers to be equal, he would have a hard time explaining how Polynices and Eteocles killed each other. The unsatisfying Hegelian answer to this puzzle is that the difference between men and women, in his view, is parallel to the difference between human law and divine law. Indeed, since he reduces women to the realm of nature and the biological role of reproduction, and defines divine law in terms of nature, Hegel seems to take the human-divine (or public-private) distinction as derived from the gender binary. So only the brother-sister relation is purely concerned with ethical matters, because the brother and sister are not only free from natural contaminations (that is, parenthood or love) in their relationship, but also because they both have their own place in the division of the law and need not compete for the same vocation. ‘It is nature, not the accident of circumstances or of choice, which assigns one sex to one law and the other to the other law’, Hegel boldly claims.⁴⁷ In the Philosophy of Right, he doubles down on this idea, claiming that a division of humanity into men and women is rational and necessary on the basis that it allows the ‘vitality’ of ethical substantiality to ‘achieve a concrete unity.’⁴⁸ The ethical substance of humanity, he claims, splits itself up into ‘the one’ – men, who devote themselves to the state and to learning – and ‘the other’ – women, who devote themselves to the family and familial ‘piety’.⁴⁹ Because of this ethical purity, Hegel sees the sister’s duty to the brother as absolute. As Antigone herself says, ‘if my husband died, I could find another. Another man could give me another child. But with my mother and father buried in Hades no brother could ever come into being from them.’⁵⁰ Hegel is surely thinking of these lines when he writes that ‘the loss of a brother is thus irreplaceable to the sister, and her duty towards him is the highest.’⁵¹

At this point, and because of the general incoherence of his account of gender, some commentators have suggested that Hegel was projecting his own feelings about his sister into his own work.⁵² Christiane Hegel was intelligent, politically engaged (she smuggled letters to a political prisoner) and read enthusiastically (along with writing poetry); she and her brother were, initially, very close. In 1815, Christiane came to stay with Hegel and his wife Marie after the birth of their son; however, following the visit she developed a hatred for Marie and a disappointment in Hegel. Eventually, she became ill – a case of ‘hysteria’, according to Hegel – and spent time in a sanatorium.⁵³

Whatever Hegel’s motivations, he views this organisation of society as a significant turning point (and starting point). In this ancient world – ‘the Eden of the spirit’, as Harris calls it – everyone has their place, and the individual human nature of Reason has given way to the self-conscious ethical community of Spirit.⁵⁴ In §460, Hegel recounts the various deadlocks of reason and describes how they are overcome in harmonious ethical life. That which the coldness of observing reason failed to find in a dead bone, ‘in which the self would have had no share’, is found here as ‘a set of given mores’. The virtue-obsessed individualist is relegated to the past, and now the individual finds pleasure situated in their family life, which is itself situated in the state. In other words, Hegel says, we have reached ‘the knowing of the law of the heart as the law of all hearts’ – or, ethos [Sitte].

Greek society is thus ‘a peaceful equilibrium’, Hegel claims.⁵⁵ Each part – each family and the individuals within it – experiences satisfaction because it is a part of the whole. The equilibrium of the whole, however, persists in a ‘living’ condition only through the continuous mission it poses against injustice. The stability of society is maintained in the face of ‘an inequality which is then brought back to equality by justice.’ For Hegel there are two kinds of justice, corresponding to the two kinds of law in society. Human law establishes justice by means of the government, which subsumes the ‘self-sufficiency’ of society’s estates under a governing universal, brining back ‘singular individuals who are moving out of and away from [society’s] equilibrium.’ Divine justice is carried out by the individual, sovereign of the household, through means of death: in the face of natural evil which ‘just happens’ (since, according to Hegel, injustice against an individual in this harmonious state is never brought about by the polity, but always by nature), an individual transforms a ‘mere event’ into a ‘work’ by taking being and finality – that is, death – into their own hands. Through these forms of justice, and through the permeation of the human and divine spheres of life into one another, the Greeks inhabit ‘a world unpolluted by any division.’⁵⁶ Hegel describes the logical structure of this social stability as follows:

Its movement consists in one of its powers peacefully coming to be the other so that each preserves and brings forth the other. To be sure, we see it dividing itself into two essences and their actuality, but their opposition is instead the proof of one through the other, and their mediating middle and element is the immediate permeation of each by the other in which they immediately come into contact with each other as actual powers.⁵⁷

If this sounds idyllic, we have to be patient: as always in the Phenomenology, each beginning is a claim to certainty which is not yet truth. This section on ‘the ethical world’ is only an immediate attempt at grasping justice in society, and in the following section we will see – through the tension of Antigone – how this grasp is illusory, and how the organisation of Greek life gives rise to fatal tensions. However, there are firstly some issues in Hegel’s thought so far that ought to be addressed.

The Phenomenology is concerned with change. Though it is not a history book (as established above), it is nonetheless focused on how certain structures – of thought, self-consciousness, society – can eclipse and give way to something new; thus, the stability of Greek life in the current chapter will eventually crumble. However, some of Hegel’s views on women and the family in this chapter, despite clearly being conditioned by his own position in history, are seemingly taken as natural and necessary. Seyla Benhabib has pointed out that, although Hegel acknowledges that gendered differences are culturally determined (in his readings of Chinese concubinage and of Herodotus on Egypt), he nonetheless takes the restriction of women to the private sphere (or the sphere of ‘divine law’) as inherently rational and necessary.⁵⁸ In the passage quoted above from the Philosophy of Rights, Hegel describes the division between men and women as having ethical significance derived from a natural basis. And is ‘the family’ not itself socially constructed? Every human has biological ties (no matter how indirect) with every other human; why is it just the parents, siblings, and children that are considered ‘the family’? Doesn’t a (historically contingent) state, with whatever laws it may or may not have regarding marriage, reproduction, abortion, and so on, have a role in determining what familial relations are possible (or, indeed, enforced)?⁵⁹ Moreover, when Hegel invokes the Roman ‘Penates’ (household gods) in describing the social place of ‘the feminine’, is he not himself ascribing these rigid gender norms to societies beyond Greece?⁶⁰

Hegel is sexist here in a particularly pernicious way: by reducing women’s subordinated place in society to a natural necessity, he snatches them out of history (and therefore spirit, as well). As Benhabib puts it, ‘Hegel’s Antigone is one without a future; her tragedy is also the grave of a utopian, revolutionary thinking about gender relations. Hegel, it turns out, is women’s gravedigger.’⁶¹

Furthermore, there is a possibility that Hegel’s insistence on distinguishing the public and private spheres actually undermines the possibility of ethical life. Beauvoir suggests that, in restricting ethics (and the universal) to public life, and rendering the private sphere as the domain of natural instinct (‘a contingent region where morality no longer applies’), Hegel attempts a justification for ‘private’ misogyny and leaves room for the hypocrisy of men’s lives.⁶² When a man has responsibilities only outside of the home, he is free to live a double life and treat his wife and family however he pleases:

His wife is often astonished – like Thérèse Desqueyroux [a François Mauriac character] – at the contrast between the high tone of his comments, his public conduct, and ‘his persevering inventions in the dark.’ He preaches repopulation: he is cunning in having no more children than is convenient for him. He exalts chaste and faithful wives: but he invites his neighbour’s wife to commit adultery. We have seen the hypocrisy with which men decree that abortion is criminal when every year in France a million women are put by men in a situation to have an abortion.⁶³

Beauvoir’s point is that, in the kind of society Hegel is describing in this chapter, the total lack of universality in the familial (or divine) context gives men a space in which to shrug off ethical commitments entirely. (Think of Rousseau who, despite having a lot to say regarding how one should raise children, gave all of his five children away to the poor conditions of a founding home.) If an ethical commitment can be simply forgotten in a certain circumstance, is it a commitment at all?

Lastly, a different kind of criticism: in describing ancient society, Hegel seems to erroneously attribute to the Greeks a kind of somatophobia: an attitude of fear, rejection, or dismissal of the body and bodily existence. He describes burial rites as a practice that ‘elevate’ the individual ‘above his confinement within the natural polity’, for instance.⁶⁴ As I have explained, part of Hegel’s overall project is to foreground a dimension of existence – ‘spirit’ – that is higher than nature. This is not necessarily mistaken, but in this particular moment of his project, he sees the Greeks as having a commitment to spirit that makes them reject nature, to regard it as belonging to the inferior and merely particular realm of the private sphere. Indeed, Hegel is not the first to describe the Greeks in this way. Plato has been both praised and criticised for an apparent somatophobia (by the Christian and feminist philosophical traditions, respectively).⁶⁵ Indeed, there are moments in Plato where this interpretation seems plausible, particularly in the Phaedo: when Socrates describes the soul in the body as a prisoner in the cage, this is comparable to Hegel’s picture of the Greeks as ‘confined’ within nature.⁶⁶ But at the same time, Plato identifies appetite – something that necessarily relates to embodiment – as the largest aspect of the soul, and claims in multiple places (Charmides 156e, Republic 591c-d) that the soul cannot be healed or cared for without the body also being tended to, and vice versa.⁶⁷ While Hegel portrays ancient Greek life as concerned exclusively with a disembodied universal ethos, more informed accounts (such as those by Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault) show that the ancients understood ethics, and even notions as abstract as ‘soul’, in terms of embodied care for oneself. Foucault frequently refers to the Greek word χρῆσις (khrêsis), which refers to a kind of behaviour: of use, care-taking, instrumental employment, and so on. Greek philosophy and culture, he argues, always foregrounds some relation of care – whether it is a medical-therapeutic one (in Plato, Epicurus, the Stoics, and Philo of Alexandria) or one of athletic or gymnastic training (in Plato, the Stoics, and later in various Roman thinkers) – and it is in terms of this care that both the body and the soul, embodied and ethical existence, are understood.⁶⁸ This is recognisably different from Hegel’s Greek citizens, who are desperate to leave the limits of the body behind and dwell with the universal – just as long as they are men.

Hegel’s picture of ethical life in the ancient world is thus misleading in several ways. The consolation for us, however, is that the next section in the Phenomenology shows this ethical life to be constitutively unstable.

Of (wo)man’s first disobedience

We have now moved from the ‘ethical world’ to ‘ethical action’ – to ‘human and divine knowing, guilt and fate.’ This is where the central element of Antigone – that is, its tragic element – becomes relevant. Tragedy is a crucial literary form for Hegel; an obvious reason for this is that tragedies are concerned with some inherent weakness or negativity within the order of things that brings about their downfall, and Hegel is, above all else, a philosopher concerned with the power of negativity. While writers of the Baroque and Neo-Classical periods idolised the Homeric epic, after the French Revolution it was the Greek – and especially Sophoclean – tragedy that was most celebrated.⁶⁹ By the time of the Phenomenology, Hegel was fascinated by Sophocles, having attempted a translation of Oedipus at Colonus in July of 1787. Until the early twentieth century saw Freud put Oedipus Rex at the centre, Antigone was the most celebrated of the Sophoclean plays. In this section on ethical action, the tragedy is employed to show the fate at the heart of the ethical world, and the necessity of its collapse into instability. To examine this fate is crucial for Hegel because he wants to demonstrate the necessity of positive law in governing ethical life.

What is defining about Hegel’s view on tragedy is that he is interested not in a conflict between right and wrong, nor in the hamartia latent within a ‘right’, but in a conflict between two rights. Some of us might be inclined to see Antigone as a straightforward hero and Creon as a straightforward villain, but for Hegel they are both in the right insofar as they simply express the law of the sphere they inhabit (human or divine). Indeed, in the ethical world the individual exists but hasn’t come forth ‘in his own right’: the developed and conscientious individual is so far only ‘the non-actual shade’ of the world they live in.⁷⁰ At least at the opening of the play, neither Antigone nor Creon reflectively ‘identify’ with the human and divine law that they embody; rather, they immediately ‘are’ the expressions of those laws.

This section is also concerned, therefore, with the inception of a truly ethical individual. Hegel explains that it is through action that this individual comes about (‘in their own right’, as he puts it) – ‘the deed is the actual self.’⁷¹ An individual develops a ‘character’ – a relevant term, given that we are looking at drama – only when they actively decide in favour of some ethical power, principle, or law.⁷² In this situation of action, human and divine law no longer harmoniously complement one another; instead, they undermine one another, and ‘each proves itself to be the nullity’ of the other in a revelation of ‘dreadful fate’.⁷³ The practitioners of human law see the warriors of divine law as unjust, and vice versa:

While it sees right only on its own side and sees only wrong on the other, the consciousness that belongs to divine law beholds on the other side human, contingent violence; and that consciousness which belongs to human law beholds on the other side the obstinacy and disobedience of inward being-for-itself.⁷⁴

Hegel believes that this mutual distrust must come about necessarily precisely because the individuals on each side, being immediately identified with their ethical position, cannot ‘know’ the principles of their opponent, or the ‘right’ that their opponent expresses. To be sure, human and divine law are unified as two sides of the same social order, but this unity can (thus far) be seen only from a perspective outside of the lived ethical situation. For the actual characters of Antigone, human and divine law are separate because an individual can only ‘know’ one or the other. Hegel compares this one-sidedness of Antigone and Creon to the ‘opposition between the conscious and the unconscious’; while both are present in the same substance, only one is present on the surface to a particular perspective.⁷⁵

Knowledge is perhaps not the best term here: the ethical ‘knowledge’ that Hegel is concerned with is not something reflective but is exactly the immediate identity of an individual with their ethical position that was mentioned above. Creon and Antigone do not experience inner conflict; in virtue of their ethical character, they simply know that they are doing the right thing. Unfortunately for us, Hegel’s explanation for how an individual attains this immediate knowledge is born from his gender essentialism. As quoted above: ‘It is nature, not the accident of circumstances or of choice, which assigns one sex to one law and the other to the other law.’⁷⁶

Of course, with their knowledge being grounded in their particular ethical position, both Antigone and Creon remain one-sided in their acting. This is what gives rise to what Hegel calls guilt. Both characters appear as guilty because they do not overcome their one-sidedness and yet they remain within the natural distribution of ethical life – that is, the two-sidedness of human and divine law. Thus they both make a false claim to ethical wholeness – or, in other words, an immediate claim to the (ethical) absolute. When it carries out the ethical deed, self-consciousness ‘posits a separation of itself within itself as that between what is active and what is for it the negative actuality confronting it.’⁷⁷ That is, ‘guilty’ self-consciousness comes to see the world as divided between itself and the unjust world that it is trying to overthrow. Moreover, the only way to be innocent would be to not act at all: ‘innocence amounts to non-action, like the being of a stone, not even that of a child.’⁷⁸ Now, inactivity on the level of a stone is something that a human cannot possibly achieve; what Hegel is saying, therefore, is that to act, in any way at all, is to confront or ‘estrange’ oneself against actuality. This is an idea that has appeared multiple times in the Phenomenology ever since self-consciousness became social: the idea that activity is public, external to any ‘inner self’, and thus involves negativity and confrontation in ways that the ‘inner self’ might not expect or have control over. As soon as we act, we are guilty.

As such, the guilt of Antigone and Creon is that, in their ethical deeds (by which I mean: the deeds they carry out in conflict with each other), they are overstepping the bounds of their naturally given limitations (their ethical domain – their gender). The position of the guilty individual, in Harris’s words, is: ‘I must know the whole, but the fundamental thing that I know is that the whole is categorical for me in the male shape (or the female shape) according to Nature’s decree.’⁷⁹ Antigone and Creon’s acts are tainted by a kind of original sin – the ‘sin’ of humans that consists in them acting outside of the ‘image’ that they were created in.⁸⁰

For Hegel, therefore, guilt is part of ‘the developed nature of actual acting.’⁸¹ Because ethical life is made up of multiple interrelated values, principles, and laws, and because most of these are not immediately known to us (in the particular ethical kind of ‘knowledge’ described above), acting in accordance to one particular law calls forth an other, interrelated law ‘as a violated and hostile essence now demanding revenge’ – and this would presumably be true even when the principle or law in one’s action is only implicit. Here Hegel refers to Oedipus Rex: a deed, such as Oedipus’s murder of his father (not knowing it was his father) and marriage to his mother (not knowing it was his mother), ‘awakens’ unconscious and unknown element/s of the social world, and it is this unconscious dimension that comes to affect the doer and bring about tragedy:

In this way, a power that shuns the daylight preys on ethical self-consciousness, a power which bursts forth only after the deed is done and when it has taken self-consciousness in its grip.⁸²

Again, this is why a deed is always beyond its doer: since my action is external to me, it is always already intertwined with the unconscious elements of the actuality in which my action is contextualised. The mistake is to take a one-sided ethic as the truth, and fail to realise that the truth lies in all sides of actuality.

Returning to Antigone, Hegel claims that she is even more guilty than her father Oedipus because she knows (albeit not immediately) the law that she transgresses. It is for this reason that Antigone always acknowledges her guilt, even from the start.⁸³

Guilt gives way to the undoing of both Antigone and Creon. When Antigone recognises Creon’s power to oppose her, her active ‘character’ gives way to a submissive and passive ‘disposition’ that cannot act, and the exact same happens to Creon as he too realises the one-sidedness of his ethics.⁸⁴ (The reason that they have these dispositions, rather than just abandoning their allegiance to the divine and human laws as a whole, is because they, by nature, still retain an emotional investment – pathos – in the law they express.) This is the fate or destiny that causes the ethical world to crumble. For Hegel, the collapse of Thebes and the downfall of Antigone and Creon is the success of ‘absolute right’, and the moment in which the characters recognise that the law cannot be one-sided:

The victory of one power and its character along with the conquest of the other would thus only be one part [of ethical advancement]. It is in the equal subjection of both sides that absolute right is first achieved, and ethical substance, as the negative power that devours both sides, has emerged.⁸⁵

It is characteristic of Hegel to find a metaphysical meaning in the concrete events of the tragedy. As Hyppolite understands it, the metaphysical meaning here is concerned with ‘the opposition between nature and self-consciousness.’⁸⁶ A person is born into a family and rises out of unconsciousness into individuality. But the circumstances of their individuality – the fact and context of their birth, etc. – are contingencies of nature. And since spirit here is present only immediately, nature still triumphs and ‘has a right’ over self-consciousness and thus determines the fate of the individual.⁸⁷ The reason Antigone and Creon enter such a conflict, then – and the reason that one cannot simply give way to the other – is that they are by nature driven to act according to principles which are too diverse for a society of ‘true spirit’ to accommodate. By giving the same reason for the conflict between Polynices and Eteocles, Hegel shows that it is not only Antigone and Creon who succumb to this triumph of nature over immediate spirit, but that there is a logic internal to such societies that causes their ‘shattering’.

Atomised

Pacem sine dubio post haec, verum cruentam. / After that there was peace, certainly; but peace with bloodshed.

The outcome of Greek ethical life is a society in ruins, where half of the population is unheard (by being sentenced to death, in Antigone’s case) and the other half is paralysed by guilt. Having lost a harmonious context in which to direct their lives – that is, having lost hold of spirit – people turn to violence and vengeance. As Charles Taylor writes:

Being repressed by the state, the family and particularly its women take their revenge in subtle forms of corruption. Women induce their menfolk to exercise power for the dynasty rather than for the public weal, they turn the heads of youth away from the wisdom of the elders; and since this youth in turn must be exalted by the state as its defenders, their corruption has disastrous effects.⁸⁸

It is quite confusing, therefore, that Lacan criticises Hegel for finding ‘some form of reconciliation’ at the end of Antigone.⁸⁹ What we actually find in Hegel at this point is a fateful decline into a society of alienation; as he puts it in his System of Ethical Life, Greece fell into an era of ‘dismembering, for which there was no reconciliation’ – an era of ‘boredom of the world’.⁹⁰ The way he puts it in the Phenomenology is that ‘the universal is splintered into the atoms of absolutely multiple individuals’: since spirit has fallen from society, people have no harmony and are reduced to lone, ‘aloof’ individuals.

In this atomised society, it isn’t communities (families, states, and so on) that take centre stage, but individual self-consciousnesses. The kind of self-consciousness on the scene now is ‘personality’ (in the sense of having legal ‘personhood’), which is akin to stoic self-consciousness insofar as it renounces actuality and reaches ‘the thought of self-sufficiency’, existing ‘absolutely for itself.’⁹¹ Stoicism fled from the world to be in the ‘unity of pure thinking’ and, in the same way, the legal status of the person is rooted not in ‘a richer or more powerful existence’ nor ‘a universal living spirit’ but is bound to the self-consciousness of the person and nothing else. This state of legality is the practical analogue to stoicism, or is stoicism in the sphere of political action. As such, it will go through the same movement that stoicism did – that is, it will fall into disarray and emptiness. Skepticism, which resulted from stoicism, was in a state of contradiction because it doubted the reliability of perception while nonetheless relying on it. Skepticism is ‘the contradiction between the self-sufficiency of consciousness and its un-self-sufficiency.’⁹² The state of legality is also in contradiction: it wants to render each individual as self-sufficient (whether this is in legal personhood or the right to property) but, having lost ‘the spirit which subjugated it and held it together in its unity’, these designations of self-sufficiency are empty of content. To be a ‘person’ is thus the most minimal, ‘inessential’ status; ‘to designate an individual as a person is an expression of contempt.’⁹³

In these passages, Hegel is thinking not of Greece but of the Pax Romana – the age of Rome in its early days as an empire. The early emperors, in Hegel’s view, ruled almost anonymously over several nations and rendered those nations spiritless. States in the empire are no longer run by institutions born within them, so the law ruling over their people is not born out of the spirit of the community; as such, it is purely formal and does not accommodate for the diversity of cultures and ethe in the various nations. The Greek way of life, wherein society was an organically self-sustaining unity, has given way to the Roman mode wherein people belong to their identity only through artificially imposed laws and customs.⁹⁴ Hegel might have been influenced here by Edward Gibbon, who made this remark on the ‘poison’ inherent in Roman peace:

This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.⁹⁵

Now, in such a spiritless and artificially united world, the only way that individuals can be expected to remain within their community is equally artificial. As such, it is not through some sense of cooperation or common interest but through the rule of an emperor that individuals are held together in this Roman society. The atoms of society are ‘collected’ (but not quite united, perhaps) beneath an ‘equally spiritless point’: the emperor, ‘lord of the world’.⁹⁶ In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel describes this early form of empire as one wherein ‘no moral bond any longer existed; the will of the Emperor was supreme, and before him there was absolute equality.’⁹⁷ The power of this emperor is ultimately arbitrary; though he ‘knows himself as an actual god’ (think, for example, of the self-obsessed Caligula), his capacity to rule over a spiritless society is only ‘formal’, and his life is a ‘monstrous excess’ just as that of the citizens he rules over.⁹⁸ These individuals, Hegel claims in the Philosophy of History, are thus left ‘entirely emancipated from control, [with] no inward life, no prospective nor retrospective emotions, no repentance, nor hope, nor fear – not even thought’: every condition of their life is purely contingent, bringing nothing but chaos.⁹⁹ This moment is the political analogue to the climax of skepticism, wherein any individual’s way of living seems as valid as any other’s. The skeptic’s loss of certainty is akin to the Romans’ loss of what Montesquieu called virtue: the love or value that a citizen places in their state, on the grounds of that state being democratically instituted.¹⁰⁰

Hegel’s analysis of Rome and the legal status of its citizens is a critique of societies devoid of real spirit – ‘a critique of individual relation and communication insofar as these are merely juridical’, as Hyppolite has it.¹⁰¹ In the end, the Roman individual is totally alienated and left as an individuated self. Of course, this alienation gives rise to loneliness and isolation; however, Hegel sees within it the earliest seeds of modernity. The modern subject, the self that determines their own world, grows out of the individualised person we have just encountered:

The actuality of the self which was not present in the ethical world has been attained by its return into the person, and what was unified in the ethical world now comes on the scene as both developed and as alienated from itself.¹⁰²

We are not yet at the full flourishing of modernity. Rather, we are at the beginnings of another shape of spirit, one wherein individuals embrace their alienation from themselves and assert it as the content of their individuality. Hegel’s name for this shape is Bildung – culture, or cultural formation.