[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Hegel on worshipping the state
While a student at Tübingen, Hegel’s favorite reading had been Rousseau. “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man.”[88] As discussed in Chapter Two, Hegel was also engaged deeply with the latest developments of Kantian and Fichtean metaphysics and epistemology and their implications for social and political thought.
The political battle lines were clearly drawn for Hegel: If Rousseau’s account of human freedom is the correct one, then the Enlightenment account of freedom must be a fraud. Disappointed by the outcome of the Revolution in France, where it seemed like the Rousseauians had had their world-historical chance, Hegel also had nothing but disdain for England, then arguably the most developed nation of the Enlightenment: “of institutions characterized by real freedom there are nowhere fewer than in England.” The so-called liberalism of the so-called Enlightenment nations actually represented an “incredible deficiency” of rights and freedom. Only by updating the Rousseauian model dialectically and applying it to the German context could we find “real freedom.”[89]
So what is real freedom to Hegel?
“It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”[90]
In the broader context of Hegel’s philosophy, human history is governed by the necessary working out of the Absolute. The Absolute—or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea—is the actual substance of the universe, and its developmental processes are everything that is. “God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.”[91]
The State, to the extent that it participates in the Absolute, is God’s instrument for achieving his purposes. “The State,” accordingly, “is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.”[92]
Given that the individual’s ultimate purpose in life should be to achieve union with ultimate reality, it follows that the “state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom.”[93] The consequence of this, morally, is that the individual is of less significance than the state. The individual’s empirical, day-to-day interests are of a lower moral order than the state’s universal, world-historical interests. The state has as its final end the self-realization of the Absolute, and “this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.”[94] Duty, as we have learned from Kant and Fichte, always trumps personal interests and inclinations.
Yet mere membership as a matter of duty is not enough for Hegel, given the grandeur of the state’s divine historical purpose: “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”[95]
In such worship, Hegel believed, we finds our real freedom. For ultimately, we individuals are but aspects of the Absolute Spirit, and in so relating to it we are relating to ourselves. “For Law is the objectivity of Spirit; volition in its true form. Only that will which obeys law, is free; for it obeys itself—it is independent and so free.”[96] Freedom is thus the individual’s absolute submission to and worship of the state.
There is of course the problem of explaining all of this to the average individual. The average individual, in the course of living day-to-day life, often finds that the laws and other manifestations of the state do not seem like real freedom. In most cases, Hegel stated, that is because the average person is ignorant of what true freedom is,[97] and no amount of explaining the higher dialectic to that person will make the laws seem like less of an infringement upon freedom.
Yet it is also true, Hegel granted, that in many cases the individual’s freedoms and interests will genuinely be set aside, overridden, and even smashed. One reason for this is that the state’s general principles are universal and necessary, and so they cannot be expected to apply perfectly to the particular and contingent. As Hegel explained, “universal law is not designed for the units of the mass. These as such may, in fact, find their interests decidedly thrust into the background.”[98]
But the problem is not merely one of applying the universal to the particular. Individuals must recognize that, from the moral perspective, they are not ends in themselves; they are tools for the achievement of higher goals.
“But though we might tolerate the idea that individuals, their desires and the gratification of them, are thus sacrificed, and their happiness given up to the empire of chance, to which it belongs; and that as a general rule, individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end.”[99]
And again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” And again echoing Rousseau: “Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”[100]
Individual life is surrendered rather a lot when very special human beings come along to really shake things up and move God’s plan for the world forward. “World-historical individuals,” as Hegel called them, are those who, usually without knowing so themselves, are agents of the Absolute’s development. Such individuals are energetic and focused, and they are able to amass power and direct social forces in such a way as to achieve something of historical significance. Their achievements, however, exact a high human cost.
“A World-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.”[101]
The innocent flowers should not object to their destruction. The World-historical individual is acting for the best interests of the whole. In that special individual the state is embodied, and the state is the future of the collective. Even while being destroyed, the innocent flower has worth only through—and so should glory in—his participation in that larger future.
Anticipating Nietzsche, Hegel argued that neither should the innocent flowers raise merely moral objections against the activities of the World-historical individuals. “For the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position.” The needs of historical development are of higher standing than those of morality, and so “the conscience of individuals” should not be an obstacle to the achievement of historical destinies.[102] The trampling of morality is regrettable, but “looked at from this point, moral claims that are irrelevant, must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment.”[103]
References
[88] Hegel, in Rousseau 1755, xv.
[89] Hegel 1830-31, 454; see also 1821, §236.
[90] Hegel 1830-31, 39.
[91] Hegel 1830-31, 35-36.
[92] Hegel 1830-31, 39; also 1821, Add., 152, para. 258; p. 279.
[93] Hegel 1821, Add., 152, para. 258; p. 279.
[94] Hegel 1821, §258
[95] Hegel 1821, §272. Otto Braun, age 19, a volunteer who died in WW I, wrote in a letter to his parents: “My inmost yearning, my purest, though most secret flame, my deepest faith and my highest hope—they are still the same as ever, and they all bear one name: the State. One day to build the state like a temple, rising up pure and strong, resting in its own weight, severe and sublime, but also serene like the gods and with bright halls glistening in the dancing brilliance of the sun—this, at bottom, is the end and goal of my aspirations” (in H. Kuhn 1963, 313).
[96] Hegel 1830-31, 39.
[97] Hegel 1821, §301.
[98] Hegel 1830-31, 35.
[99] Hegel 1830-31, 33.
[100] Hegel 1821, Add., 45, para. 70; p. 241.
[101] Hegel 1830-31, 32.
[102] Hegel 1830-31, 66-67.
[103] Hegel 1830-31, 67.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 7:40 am. Add a comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Kant on collectivism and war
Of the major figures in German philosophy in the modern era, Kant is perhaps the one most influenced by Enlightenment social thought.
There is a clear intellectual connection between Rousseau and Kant. Biographers often repeat Heinrich Heine’s anecdote about how Kant always took his afternoon walk at a set time, a time so regular that neighbors could set their clocks by his appearance—except on one occasion he was late for his walk because he had been so caught up in reading Rousseau’s Emile that he lost track of time. 
Kant had been raised as a Pietist, a version of Lutheranism that emphasized simplicity and eschewed external decoration. Kant therefore had no pictures or paintings hanging anywhere on the walls of his house—with one exception: over his desk in his study hung a picture of Rousseau.[37] Wrote Kant, “I learned to honor mankind from reading Rousseau.”[38]
Neo-Enlightenment thinkers attack Kant for two things: his skeptical and subjectivist epistemology and his ethic of selfless duty. Kant’s account of reason divorces it from cognitive contact with reality, thus destroying knowledge; and his account of ethics divorces morality from happiness, thus destroying the purpose of life. As discussed in Chapter Two, Kant’s powerful arguments were a mighty blow to the Enlightenment.
Politically, however, Kant is sometimes considered to be a liberal, and in the context of eighteenth-century Prussia there is some truth to that. In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, however, Kant diverged from liberalism in two major respects: his collectivism and his advocacy of war as a means to collectivist ends.
In a 1784 essay, “Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent,” Kant asserted that there is a necessary destiny for the human species. Nature has a plan. It is, however, “a hidden plan of nature,”[39] and as such it is one that requires special discernment by philosophers. That destiny is the full development of all of man’s natural capacities, especially man’s reason.[40]
By “man” here, Kant did not mean the individual. Nature’s goal is a collectivist one: the development of the species. Man’s capacities, Kant explained, are “to be completely developed only in the species, not in the individual.”[41] The individual is merely fodder for nature’s goal, as Kant put it in his “Review of Herder”: “nature allows us to see nothing else than that it abandons individuals to complete destruction and only maintains the type.”[4] And again, in his 1786 “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” Kant argued that the “path that for the species leads to progress from the worse to the better does not do so for the individual.”[43] The development of the individual is in conflict with the development of the species, and only the development of the species counts.
But it is also not the case that the species’ development is about happiness or fulfillment. “Nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well.”[44] The individual and even all existing individuals collectively now living are merely a stage in a process, and their suffering is of no account in the light of nature’s ultimate end. In fact, Kant argued, man should suffer, and deservedly so. Man is a sinful creature, a creature that is inclined to follow its own desires and not the demands of duty. Echoing Rousseau, Kant blamed mankind for having chosen to use reason when our instincts could have served us perfectly well.[45] And now that reason has awakened it has combined with self-interest to pursue all sorts of unnecessary and depraved desires. Thus the source of our vaunted freedom, Kant wrote, is also our original sin: “the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.”[46]
Accordingly, Kant admonished us, “we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as moral.”[47] Man is a creature made of “warped wood.”[48] Powerful forces are therefore needed in order to attempt to straighten our warped natures.
One of those forces is morality, a morality of strict and uncompromising duty that opposes man’s animal inclinations. A moral life is one that no rational person would “wish that it should be longer than it actually is,”[49] but one has a duty to live and develop oneself[50] and thereby the species. Inculcating this morality in man is one of nature’s forces.
Another force to straighten the warped wood is political. Man is “an animal that, if he lives among other members of his species, has need of a master.” And that is because “his selfish animal propensities induce him to except himself from [moral rules] wherever he can.” Kant then introduced his version of Rousseau’s general will. Politically, man “thus requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”[51]
However, strict duty and political masters are not enough. Nature has devised an additional strategy for bringing the species man to higher development. That strategy is war. As Kant wrote in his “Idea for a Universal History”: “The means that nature uses to bring about the development of all of man’s capacities is the antagonism among them in society.”[52] Thus, conflict, antagonism, and war are good. They destroy many lives, but they are nature’s way of bringing forth the higher development of man’s capacities. “At the stage of culture at which the human race still stands,” Kant stated bluntly in “Speculative Beginning,” “war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[53] Peace would be a moral disaster, so we are duty-bound not to shrink from war.[54]
Out of this self-sacrifice of individuals and the war of nations, Kant hoped, the species would become fully developed, and an international and cosmopolitan federation of states would live peacefully and harmoniously, making possible within themselves the complete moral development of their members.[55] Then, as Kant concluded in a 1794 essay entitled “The End of All Things,” men would finally be in a position to prepare themselves for the day of “judgment of forgiveness or damnation by the judge of the world.”[56] This is the hidden plan of nature; it is destined to happen; so we know what we have to look forward to.
References
[37] Höffe 1994, 17.
[38] Quoted in Beiser 1992, 43.
[39] Kant 1784/1983, 27/36.
[40] Kant 1784/1983, 18/30 and 27/36.
[41] Kant 1784/1983, 18/30.
[42] Kant 1785/1963, 53/37.
[43] Kant 1786/1983, 115/53.
[44] Kant 1784/1983, 20/31.
[45] Kant 1786/1983, 111/50.
[46] Kant 1786/1983, 115/54.
[47] Kant 1784/1983, 26/36.
[48] Kant 1784/1983, 23/33.
[49] Kant 1786/1983, 122/58.
[50] Kant 1785/1964, 398/65.
[51] Kant 1784/1983, 23/33, italics in original.
[52] Kant 1784/1983, 20/31.
[53] Kant 1786/1983, 121/58; see also 1795/1983, 363/121.
[54] Kant notes a fundamental opposition between human desire and nature’s goals: “Man wills concord; but nature better knows what is good for the species: she wills discord” (1784/1983, 21/ 32).
[55] Kant 1784/1983, 28/38.
[56] Kant 1794/1983, 328/93.
Bibliography
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago at 5:17 pm. 2 comments
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Why Kant is the turning point
Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitutive mechanism. He held that the mind—and not reality—sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosophy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard.
Wait a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about that? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason. That Kant was in favor of consistency and universality is of derivative and ultimately inconsequential significance. Consistency with no connection to reality is a game based on subjective rules. If the rules of the game have nothing to do with reality, then why should everyone play by the same rules? These were precisely the implications the postmodernists were to draw eventually.
Kant was thus different from previous skeptics and religious apologists. Many earlier skeptics had denied that we can know anything, and many earlier religious apologists had subordinated reason to faith. But earlier skeptics had never been as sweeping in their conclusions. Earlier skeptics would identify particular cognitive operations and raise problems for them. Maybe a given experience is a perceptual illusion—thus undermining our confidence in our perceptual faculties; or maybe it is a dream—thus undermining our confidence in be distinguishing truth from fantasy; or maybe induction is only probabilistic—thus undermining our confidence in our generalizations; and so on. But the conclusion of those skeptical arguments would be merely that we cannot be sure that we are right about the way reality is. We might be, but we cannot guarantee it, the skeptics would conclude. Kant’s point was deeper, arguing that in principle any conclusion reached by any of our faculties must necessarily not be about reality. Any form of cognition, because it must operate a certain way, cannot put us in contact with reality. On principle, because our minds’ faculties are structured in a certain way, we cannot say what reality is. We can only say how our minds have structured the subjective reality we perceive. This thesis had been implicit in the works of some earlier thinkers, including Aristotle’s, but Kant made it explicit and drew the conclusion systematically.
Kant is a landmark in a second respect. Earlier skeptics had, despite their negative conclusions, continued to conceive of truth as correspondence to reality. Kant went a step further and redefined truth on subjective grounds. Given his premises, this makes perfect sense. Truth is an epistemological concept. But if our minds are in principle disconnected from reality, then to speak of truth as an external relationship between mind and reality is nonsense. Truth must be solely an internal relationship of consistency.
With Kant, then, external reality thus drops almost totally out of the picture, and we are trapped inescapably in subjectivity—and that is why Kant is a landmark. Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether.
This interpretive point about Kant is crucial and controversial. An analogy may help drive the point home. Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a woman’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices—whether to cook or clean, whether to cook rice or potatoes, whether to decorate in blue or yellow. She is sovereign and autonomous. And the mark of a good woman is a well-organized and tidy kitchen.” No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of woman’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. He gives reason lots to do within the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason. The point for any advocate of reason is that there is a whole world outside our skulls, and reason is essentially about knowing it.
Kant’s contemporary Moses Mendelssohn was thus prescient in identifying Kant as “the all-destroyer.”[21] Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant rejects objectivity. Once reason is so severed from reality, the rest is details—details that are worked out over the next two centuries. By the time we get to the postmodernist account, reason is seen not only as subjective, but also as incompetent, highly contingent, relative, and collective. Between Kant and the postmodernists comes the successive abandonment of the rest of reason’s features.
References
[21] Quoted in Beck 1969, 337.
Bibliography
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:46 pm. Add a comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism
In addition to his religious concerns, Kant was also grappling with the problems that the empiricists and the rationalists had run into in attempting to develop satisfactory accounts of reason.
For all of their differences, the empiricists and rationalists had agreed with the broadly Enlightenment conception of reason—that human reason is a faculty of the individual, that it is competent to know reality objectively, that it is capable of functioning autonomously and in accordance with universal principles. Reason so conceived underlay their confidence in science, human dignity, and the perfectibility of human institutions.
Of those five features of reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant concluded that the sad experience of recent philosophy demonstrated that the most fundamental of them, objectivity, must be abandoned. The failures of empiricism and rationalism had shown that objectivity is impossible.
For reason to be objective, it must have contact with reality. The most obvious candidate for such direct contact is sense-perception. On realist accounts, the senses give us our most direct contact with reality, and they thereby provide the material that reason then organizes and integrates into concepts, those concepts in turn becoming integrated into propositions and theories.
If, however, the senses give us only internal representations of objects, then an obstacle is erected between reality and reason. If reason is presented with an internal sensory representation of reality, then it is not aware directly of reality; reality then becomes something to be inferred or hoped for beyond a veil of sense-perception.
Two arguments had traditionally generated the conclusion that we are aware only of internal sensory representations. The first was based on the fact that sense-perception is a causal process. Since it is a causal process, the argument ran, it seems that one’s reason comes to be aware of an internal state at the end of the causal process and not of the external object that initiated the process. The senses, unfortunately, get in the way of our consciousness of reality. The second argument was based on the fact that the features of sense-perception vary from individual to individual and across time for any given individual. One individual sees an object as red while another sees it as gray. An orange tastes sweet—but not after tasting a spoonful of sugar. What then is the real color of the object or the real taste of the orange? It seems that neither can be said to be the real feature. Instead, each sense-perception must be merely a subjective effect, and one’s reason must be aware only of the subjective effect and not the external object.
What both of these arguments have in common is a recognition of the uncontroversial fact that our sense organs have an identity, that they work in specific ways, and that the form in which we experience reality is a function of our sense organs’ identities. And they have in common the crucial and controversial premise that our sense organs’ having an identity means that they become obstacles to direct consciousness of reality. This latter premise was critical for Kant’s analysis.
The empiricists had drawn from this analysis of sense-perception the conclusion that while we must rely on our sense perceptions, we must always be tentative with regard to our confidence in them. From sense-perception we can draw no certain conclusions. The rationalists had drawn the conclusions that sense-experience is useless as a source of significant truths and that for the source of such truths we must look elsewhere.
This brings us to abstract concepts. The empiricists, stressing the experiential source of all of our beliefs, had held that concepts too must be contingent. As based on sense-perception, concepts are two stages removed from reality and so less certain. And as groupings based on our choices, concepts are human artifices, so they and the propositions generated from them can have no necessity or universality ascribed to them.
The rationalists, agreeing that necessary and universal concepts could not be derived from sense-experience—but insisting that we do have necessary and universal knowledge—had concluded that our concepts must have a source somewhere other than in sense-experience. The problematic implication of this was that if concepts did not have their source in sense-experience, then it was hard to see how they could have any application to the sensory realm.
What these two analyses of concepts had in common is the following hard choice. If we think of concepts as telling us something universal and necessary, then we have to think of them as having nothing to do with the world of sense experience; and if we think of concepts as having something to do with the world of sense experience, then we have to abandon the idea of knowing any real universal and necessary truths. In other words, experience and necessity have nothing to do with each other. This premise too was critical for Kant’s analysis.
The rationalists and the empiricists had jointly struck a blow to the Enlightenment confidence in reason. Reason works with concepts. But now we were to accept either that reason’s concepts have little to do with the world of sense experience—in which case, science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble—or we were to accept that reason’s concepts are merely provisional and contingent groupings of sense-experiences—in which case science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble.
Thus, by the time of Kant, the Enlightenment philosophers’ account of reason was faltering on two counts. Given their analysis of sense-perception, reason seemed cut off from direct access to reality. And given their analysis of concepts, reason seemed either irrelevant to reality or limited to merely contingent truths.
Kant’s significance in the history of philosophy is that he absorbed the lessons of the rationalists and empiricists and, agreeing with the central assumptions of both sides, transformed radically the terms of the relationship between reason and reality.
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 5:13 pm. Add a comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Rousseau and the French Revolution
Rousseau died in 1778 when France was at the height of its Enlightenment. At the time of his death, Rousseau’s writings were well known in France, though he had not exerted the influence that he would when France entered its revolution. It was Rousseau’s followers who prevailed in the French Revolution, especially in its destructive third phase.
The revolution had started with the nobility. Spotting the weakness of the French monarchy, the nobles had succeeded in 1789 in forcing a meeting of the Estates-General, an institution that they usually controlled. Some of the nobles had hoped to enhance the power of the nobility at the expense of the monarchy, and some had hoped to institute Enlightenment reforms.
The nobles, however, were unable to form a unified coalition, and they were no match for the vigor of the liberal and radical delegates. Control of events slipped out of the hands of the nobles, and the Revolution entered a second, more liberal phase. The second phase was dominated by broadly Lockean liberals, and it was they who produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
The liberals, however, were in their turn no match for the vigor of the most radical members of the Revolution. As the members of the Girondin and Jacobin parties assumed greater power, the Revolution entered its third phase.
The Jacobin leaders were explicitly disciples of Rousseau. Jean-Paul Marat, who took on a disheveled and unbathed appearance, explained that he did so in order “to live simply and according to the precepts of Rousseau.” Louis de Saint-Just, perhaps the most bloodthirsty of the Jacobins, made his devotion to Rousseau clear in speeches to the National Convention. And speaking for the most radical of the revolutionaries, Maximilien Robespierre expressed the prevailing adoring opinion of the great man: “Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind.”
Under the Jacobins, the Revolution became more radical and more violent. Now the spokesmen for the general will, and having at their disposal plenty of the “universal compulsory force” that Rousseau had dreamed about with which to combat recalcitrant private wills, the Jacobins found it expedient that many die. The guillotine was busy as the radicals ruthlessly killed nobles, priests, and just about anyone whose politics was suspect. “We must not only punish traitors,” urged Saint-Just, “but all people who are not enthusiastic.” The nation had plunged into a brutal civil war, and in an enormously symbolic act, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793. That only made things worse, and all of France declined into the Reign of Terror.
The Terror ended with the arrest and execution of Robespierre in 1794, but it was too late for France. Its energies were dissipated, the nation was exhausted, and a power vacuum emerged that Napoleon Bonaparte would fill.
The story of the Counter-Enlightenment then shifts to the German states. Among German intellectuals, there had been some early sympathy for the French Revolution. German intellectuals were not ignorant of the Enlightenment in England and France. Several were attracted by Enlightenment themes, and in the mid-1700s Frederick the Great had attracted to Berlin several Enlightenment-minded scientists and other intellectuals. Berlin for a while was a hotbed of French and English influences.
For the most part, however, the Enlightenment had made a few inroads among intellectuals in the German states. Politically and economically, Germany was a set of feudal states. Serfdom would not be abolished until the nineteenth century. The majority of the population was uneducated and agrarian. Most were deeply religious, dominantly Lutheran. Unthinking obedience to God and to one’s feudal lord had been ingrained for centuries. This was especially true in Prussia, whose people Gotthold Lessing called “the most servile in Europe.”
So among the Germans the reports of the Terror of the French Revolution caused horror: They killed their king and queen. They hunted down priests, cut off their heads, and paraded up and down the streets of Paris with the heads stuck on the ends of pikes.
Yet the lesson most German intellectuals took from the Revolution was not that Rousseauian philosophy was the culprit. To most, the culprit was clearly the Enlightenment philosophy. The Enlightenment was anti-feudal, they noted, and the Revolution was a practical demonstration of what that means—the wholesale slaughtering of one’s sovereign lords and ladies. The Enlightenment was anti-religion, they noted, and the Revolution is a practical demonstration of what that means—killing holy men and burning down churches.
But from the German perspective, the situation became worse, for out of the power vacuum in France arose Napoleon.
Napoleon was also provided an opportunity by a weakened feudal Europe. Europe’s hundreds of small dynastic units were no match for Napoleon’s new military tactics and his sheer audacity. Napoleon ran roughshod over old feudal Europe, swept into the German states, defeated the Prussians in 1806, and proceeded to change everything.
From the perspective of the Germans, Napoleon was not only a foreign conqueror, he was a product of the Enlightenment. Where he conquered and ruled, he extended equality before the law, opened government offices to the middle class, and guaranteed private property. On matters of religion, he destroyed the ghettoes, gave Jews freedom of religion, and gave them the right to own land and practice all trades. He opened secular public schools, and modernized Europe’s transportation network.
Napoleon outraged many powerful forces in doing so. He abolished guilds. He angered the clergy by abolishing church courts, tithes, monasteries, convents, ecclesiastical states, and he seized much church property. He angered the nobles by abolishing feudal estates and feudal dues, by breaking up large estates, and generally by lessening the power of the nobles over the peasantry. He functioned, in effect from the Enlightenment perspective, as a benevolent dictator, as one who embraced many of the modern ideals but who used the full force of government to impose them.
His dictatorial impositions went further. He enacted censorship wherever he went, conscripted subjugated peoples to fight foreign battles, and taxed subjugated peoples to finance France.
So now most German intellectuals faced a serious crisis. The Enlightenment, as they saw it, was not merely a foreign disaster across the Rhine—it was a dictatorial presence ruling Germany in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte. How, wondered every German, did Napoleon win? What did the Germans do wrong? What was to be done?
The poet Johann Hölderlin, Hegel’s roommate in college, declared: “Kant is the Moses of our nation.” For the story of how the now-dead Kant was to lead Germany out of bondage, we return to Königsberg.
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[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 8 months ago at 8:39 am. Add a comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Previous post: Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment.]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism
Once the corruption is totally swept away, the project of building a moral society can commence. Naturally, the good edifice to be raised must start from a good foundation. The primitive state of nature was good, but unfortunately we cannot return it. Reason, once awakened, cannot be dulled entirely. But neither can we tolerate anything that would lead us back to contemporary advanced civilization. Fortunately, history provides us with good models, for looking back upon most tribal cultures we find that their societies, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man.[19]
The best we can do, accordingly, is to try to recreate in modern form a society on that model.
The re-creation must begin from a proper understanding of human nature. Contrary to the claims of the Enlightenment philosophes, man is naturally a passional animal, not a rational one.[20] Man’s deepest passions should set the direction of his life, and reason should always give way before them.
Passions are an appropriate foundation for society, since one of the deepest desires is to believe in religion, and, Rousseau believes, religion is essential to social stability. That desire to believe can and must override all Enlightenment objections. “I believe therefore that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will. I see it or, rather, I sense it.”[21] Rousseau’s feeling that God exists, however, did not provide him with much detailed information about the nature of God. God “is hidden equally from my senses and from my understanding,” so his feeling gave him only the sense that a powerful, intelligent, and good being created the world. The arguments of the philosophers about God not only did not clarify matters, they made things worse: “The more I think about it,” Rousseau wrote, “the more I am confused.”[22] So he resolved to ignore the philosophers—“suffused with the sense of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about the nature of God”[23]—and to let his feelings guide his religious beliefs, holding that feelings are a more reliable guide than reason. “I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the inner light; it will lead me astray less than they lead me astray.’“[24] Rousseau’s inner light revealed to him an unshakeable feeling that God’s existence is the basis for all explanations, and that feeling was to him immune to revision and counter-argument: “One may very well argue with me about this; but I sense it, and this sentiment that speaks to me is stronger than the reason combating it.”[25]
This feeling was not to be merely one of Rousseau’s personal whims. At the foundation of all civil societies, Rousseau argued, one finds a religious sanction for what its leaders do. The society’s founding leaders may not always genuinely believe in the religious sanctions they invoke, but their invoking them is nonetheless essential. If the people believe that their leaders are acting out the will of the gods, they will obey more freely and “bear with docility the yoke of the public good.”[26] Enlightenment reason, by contrast, leads to disbelief; disbelief leads to disobedience; and disobedience leads to anarchy. This is a further reason why, according to Rousseau, “the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”[27] Reason, accordingly, is destructive to society, and should be limited and replaced with natural passion.[28]
So important is religion to a society, wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, that the state cannot be indifferent to religious matters. It cannot pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or even view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject the Enlightenment’s dangerous notions of religious toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers:
“While the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty. If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death.”[29]
A society properly founded on natural passion and religion will override the self-centered individualism that reason leads to, making it possible for individuals to form a new, collectivized social organism. When individuals come together to form the new society, “the individual particularity of each contracting party is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body, and will.” The will of each individual is no longer that individual’s own, but becomes common or general, and under the direction of the spokesmen for the whole. In moral society, one “coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.”[30]
In the new society, the leadership expresses the “general will” and enacts policies that are best for the whole, thus enabling all individuals to achieve their true interests and their true freedom. The requirements of the “general will” absolutely override all other considerations, so a “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.”[31]
Yet there is something about human nature, corrupted as it is now by reason and individualism, that militates and always will militate against the general will. Individuals rarely see their individual wills as being in harmony with the general will; consequently “the private will acts constantly against the general will.”[32] And so to counteract these socially destructive individualistic tendencies, the state is justified in using compulsion: “whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”[33] The power of the general will over the individual will is total. “The state … ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole.”[34] And if the leaders of the state say to the citizen, “‘it is expedient for the state that you should die,’ he should die.”[35]
We thus find in Rousseau an explicitly Counter-Enlightenment set of themes, attacking the Enlightenment’s themes of reason, the arts and sciences, and ethical and political individualism and liberalism. Rousseau was a contemporary of the American revolutionaries of the 1770s, and there is an instructive contrast between the Lockean themes of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in the Americans’ Declaration of Independence and Rousseau’s social contract oath for his projected constitution for Corsica: “I join myself—body, goods, will and all my powers—to the Corsican nation, granting to her the full ownership of me—myself and all that depends upon me.”[36]
Lockean Enlightenment politics and Rousseauian Counter-Enlightenment politics will lead to opposite practical applications.
References
[19] Rousseau 1755, 50.
[20] Rousseau 1755, 14.
[21] Rousseau 1762a, 276.
[22] Rousseau 1762a, 277.
[23] Rousseau 1762a, 277.
[24] Rousseau 1762a, 269.
[25] Rousseau 1762a, 280.
[26] Rousseau 1762b, 2:7.
[27] Rousseau 1755, 22.
[28] Rousseau extended the limiting of reason to limiting its tools of expression: “Considering the awful disorders printing has already caused in Europe, and judging the future by the progress that this evil makes day by day, one can easily predict that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their States as they once took to establish it” (1749, 61). And following the examples of Cato the Elder and Fabricius, Rousseau urged: “hasten to tear down these amphitheatres, break these marble statues, burn these paintings, chase out these slaves who subjugate you and whose fatal arts corrupt you” (1749, 46).
[29] Rousseau 1762b, 4:8.
[30] Rousseau 1762b, 1:6.
[31] Rousseau 1762b, 2:4.
[32] Rousseau 1762b, 3:10.
[33] Rousseau 1762b, 1:7.
[34] Rousseau 1762b, 2:4.
[35] Rousseau 1762b, 2:5.
[36] Rousseau 1765, 297, 350. See also 1762b, 1.9.
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 8 months ago at 1:23 pm. 2 comments
Intellectual systems and movements are defined philosophically by means of their characteristic claims in the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, ethics, and politics. As historical movements, they are defined by the time of their formulation and most vigorous activity.
So in the following table I offer a definitions of pre-modernism and modernism, each with the implicit genus “philosophical system” and a five-dimensional differentia.
Next: Defining post-modernism in contrast to modernism and pre-modernism.
[This chart is from Chapter 1 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004). The chapter from which it is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 8 months, 1 week ago at 1:03 pm. 1 comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche
Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy is another fundamentally Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason and individualism. His philosophy is a partially secularized version of traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology. While Kant’s concerns centered upon epistemology, Hegel’s centered upon metaphysics. For Kant, preserving faith led him to deny reason, while for Hegel preserving the spirit of Judeo-Christian metaphysics led him to be more anti-reason and anti-individualist than Kant ever was.
Hegel agreed with Kant that realism and objectivism were dead ends. Kant had transcended them by making the subject prior, but from Hegel’s perspective he had been too wishy-washy in doing so. Kant made the subject responsible only for the phenomenal world of experience, leaving noumenal reality forever closed off to us. This was intolerable to Hegel—after all, the whole point of philosophy is to achieve union with reality, to escape the merely sensuous and finite and to come to know and be one with the supersensuous and infinite.
However, Hegel had no intention of trying to solve the epistemological puzzles about perception, concept-formation, and induction that had set Kant’s agenda, in order to show us how we might acquire knowledge of the noumenal. Instead, taking a cue from Johann Fichte, Hegel’s strategy was to assert boldly an identity of subject and object, thus closing the gap metaphysically.
On Kantian grounds, the subject is responsible for the form of awareness; but Kant was still enough of a realist to posit a noumenal reality that was the source of the content that our minds shape and structure. For Hegel, the realist element drops out entirely: the subject generates both content and form. The subject is in no way responsive to an external reality; instead, the whole of reality is a creation of the subject.
“In my view,” Hegel wrote at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, “which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject”.[23] The Subject that Hegel had in mind is not the empirical, individual subject of traditional philosophy. The creative Subject that is also Substance is the universe as a whole (or God, or Spirit, or the Absolute), of which we individual subjects are mere portions. Realists had seen the universe as a whole as an object or set of objects within which there are some subjects. Hegel reversed that: the universe as a whole is a subject, and within the subject are objects. Such a bold posit solves a lot of problems.
We can get even more necessity and universality than Kant had given us. Hume had told us that we cannot get necessary and universal truths from reality. Kant, agreeing with Hume’s conclusion, had suggested that we supply necessity and universality from ourselves. That grounded necessity and universality, but at a price: since we supply them subjectively, we cannot be sure that they apply to reality. Hegel agreed with Kant that our minds supply necessity and universality, but said that all of reality is a product of mind, the Mind that contains all of our little minds within it. Since reality comes from us, we can know all of reality in all of its glorious necessity.
We can also get a universe that does not dehumanize us. Hegel argued that the realist and objectivist models had, by separating subject and object, inevitably led to mechanical and reductionist accounts of the self. By taking the everyday objects of empirical reality as the model and explaining everything in terms of them, they necessarily had to reduce the subject to a mechanical device. But if instead we start with the subject and not the object, then our model of reality changes significantly. The subject, we know from the inside, is conscious and organic, and if the subject is a microcosm of the whole, then applying its features to the whole generates a conscious and organic model of the world. Such a model of the world is much more hospitable to traditional values than the materialist and reductionist leanings of the Enlightenment.
Hegel could also claim to be more of an advocate of reason than Kant was. Reason, Kant, taught us, is fundamentally a creative function. And, Kant also taught us, it can know only its own phenomenal creations. But having asserted that reason creates all of reality, Hegel could offer us the very optimistic, Enlightenment-sounding conclusion that reason can know all of reality.
References
[23] Hegel 1807, 17.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago at 4:17 pm. 1 comment
