Peter Singer: Hegel - A Very Short Introduction - book review

First of all, wow, what a great introduction. Peter Singer did a very good job of summarizing Hegel, who is probably rightly considered as one of the most difficult philosophers in history. Second of all, Hegel’s influence, not only on philosophy, but on history, culture, literature, and politics can’t be understated. All of late 18th to mid 19th century could be described as a Hegelian era, in which his thoughts influenced intellectual and political circles across Europe, for better or worse (some argue that he inspired Marx which then inspired communism…and the rest is history). The time in which Hegel wrote is fascinating too – he finished writing his famous work “Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807) right after the French Revolution and at the height of the First Industrial Revolution. Also, he wrote in what was considered “the golden age of German literature”, being twenty years younger than Goethe and ten years younger than Schiller.

Hegel’s original texts are notoriously difficult (some even say he’s a bad writer), so even a concise introduction to his thoughts is a tough enough challenge. His language is extremely abstract, so when reading anything related to him you really need to go into a different mental mode to even try to understand what he’s saying. Fortunately, Singer simplified Hegel’s main ideas in a digestible form, which is laudable in itself. It is also ironic, because Hegel is anything but digestible in his original form.

One of the key ideas of Hegel is that he saw history having a purpose, he thought that the human condition “could change from one historical era to another”. That is contrary to Kant, who “thought he could say on purely philosophical grounds what human nature is and always must be. History having a meaning basically suggests that “reflection on our past enables us  to discern the direction history is taking, and the destination it will ultimately reach.

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” (p. 15)

In other words, human history is the development of the human mind. He uses the German word “Geist”, which in English translates to something between mind and spirit (sometimes it’s either of them, sometimes it’s both).

Another key idea of Hegel is seeing the development of history through the lens of “thesis – antithesis– synthesis”, which is also called his “dialectical method”, which is a fancy word for a cycle of stability-conflict-resolution. 

For example, “Greece was a society based on customary morality, a harmonious society in which citizens identified themselves with the community and had no thought of acting in opposition to it. This customary community forms the starting point of the dialectical movement, known in the jargon as the thesis.” (p. 100)

Then comes the second stage:

“The next stage is for this thesis to show itself to be inadequate or inconsistent. In the case of the community of ancient Greece, this inadequacy is revealed through the questioning of Socrates. The Greeks could not do without independent thought, but the independent thinker is the deadly foe of customary morality. The community based on custom thus collapses in the face of the principle of independent thought. It is now the turn of this principle to develop, which it does under Christianity. The Reformation brings acceptance of the supreme right of individual conscience. The harmony of the Greek community has been lost, but freedom is triumphant. This is the second stage of the dialectical movement. It is the opposite or negation of the first stage, and hence is known as the antithesis.” (pp. 100-102)

Then comes the “last” stage:

“The second stage then also shows itself to be inadequate. Freedom, taken by itself, turns out to be too abstract and barren to serve as the basis for a society. Put into practice, the principle of absolute freedom turns into the Terror of the French Revolution. We can then see that both customary harmony and abstract freedom of the individual are one-sided. They must be brought together, unified in a manner that preserves them, and avoids their different forms of one-sidedness. This results in a third and more adequate stage, the synthesis. In the Philosophy of History, the synthesis in the overall dialectical movement is the German society of Hegel’s time, which he saw as harmonious because it is an organic community, yet preserving individual freedom because it is rationally organized.” (p. 102)

It's interesting that Hegel thought that the Prussian states of his time (which where heavily threatened by the French Revolution) were considered by him to be a synthesis. It does take out some of his credibility, and shows him as a somewhat conformist to his own state. Also, this three-stage process is cyclical, and doesn’t end on a synthesis. Ironically, the synthesis usually becomes the new thesis, and so on. In other words, although there’s progress in history, there’s still room for improvement. And even if the progression of history is not entirely smooth, it doesn’t go backwards either. The gains made in a previous epoch are not lost entirely.

“Often the synthesis, though adequately reconciling the previous thesis and antithesis, will turn out to be onesided in some other respect. It will then serve as the thesis for a new dialectical movement, and so the process will continue.” (p. 102)

Hegel’s criticism for Ancient Greece is the fact that it wasn’t functional without slavery and their tendency to consult an oracle for guidance was not something that “genuinely free people” would allow to be guided by. Instead, they would make their own decisions, using reason. And this is a central point in Hegel’s philosophy: 

Reason, in Hegel’s view, is universal, “If we know that all men are mortal and that Socrates was a man, then a law of reasoning tells us that Socrates was mortal. The law of reasoning that tells us this is a universal law – it holds not just for Greeks or for philosophers or even for Earthlings, but for all rational beings.” (p. 40) That’s why Hegel considered reason as the only guiding light through which to build better societies, because only through reason we could justify having a standard that would be agreed by all. The alternative – being guided by our wants and desires, or in other words, the liberal notion of freedom, the “abstract freedom” (the ability to do as we please) will only bring chaos and conflict. This abstract freedom is popular in liberal societies nowadays, which gives blessing to whatever circumstances happen to influence what people prefer. According to this view, to ask what influences our ‘desires’ that we act upon is to write one’s own values into the conception of freedom. In other words, to judge what and why people like something is to negate their real freedom of choice.

Hegel disagrees, and sides with radical economists, who think that this “negative” conception of freedom is absurd and makes an economic system artificial: it artificially creates new preferences so that some may profit by satisfying them (e.g. marketing, advertising).

“[Hegel] never loses sight of the fact that our wants and desires are shaped by the society in which we live, and that this society in turn is a stage in a historical process. Hence the abstract freedom, the freedom to do as we please, is effectively the freedom to be pushed to and from by the social and historical forces of our times.” (p. 38)

You can see his influence on Marx in this quote, although it’s important to note that Marx was much more of a materialist and took Hegel’s view to the extreme – Marx (along with Engels) was part of a group called “Young (or Left) Hegelians” which where a more radical view of Hegel’s philosophy that disagreed with some of Hegel’s conclusions, mainly his acceptance of Christianity, the Prussian state, and the general conditions of his time. They viewed his lack of radicalism as a failure, unlike Orthodox (or Right) Hegelians, who mostly agreed with Hegel’s late philosophy, but whose popularity eventually faded. The more radical Young Hegelians were at the forefront of political debates in the next few decades after Hegel’s death in 1831. 

The way in which some of Hegel’s followers turned against him is truly ironic. And if he were to live for another century he’d probably be surprised (or even horrified) to see the culmination of his influence in the form of communist dictatorships of the 20th century. Karl Marx, for example, agreed with Hegel’s account of alienation and the importance of labour, but he then developed his own view of labour under the capitalist system as the key form of alienation:

“To bring about the liberation of humanity, alienated labour must be abolished. To abolish alienated labour, Marx said, it is necessary to abolish private property and the wage system that goes with it: in other words, to institute communism.” (p. 112)

Another important part of understanding Hegel is his similarities and his differences with Kant. Here’s a summarization of Kant’s thought in Singer’s words:

“Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. This is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical works of all time. Kant set out to establish what our reason or intellect can or cannot achieve in the way of knowledge. He concluded that our mind is no merely passive receiver of information obtained by our eyes, ears, and other senses. Knowledge is only possible because our mind plays an active role, organizing and systematizing what we experience. We know the world within a framework of space, time, and substance; but space, time, and substance are not objective realities that exist ‘out there’, independently of us. They are creations of our intuition or reason without which we could not comprehend the world. What, then, one might naturally ask, is the world really like, independently of the framework within which we grasp it? This question, Kant says, can never be answered. Independent reality – Kant called it the world of the ‘thing-in-itself’ – is for ever beyond our knowledge.” (p. 4)

Kant’s achievement of that time was so impressive that many thought that there a few details left to be filled in before he “solved” philosophy once and for all. Kant’s ethic – his moral philosophy – could be summed up as “doing one’s duty for duty’s sake.” (his categorical imperative), because “pure, practical reasoning, independently of particular desires, could only embody the universal element in reasoning.” In other words, the only kind of action that is not the result of our innate or socially conditioned desires is action that is done according to reason. Hence, I must duty my duty because it is my duty, and in this view freedom is (paradoxically?) doing one’s duty. It seems counter-intuitive because in modern terms we associate duty with obedience to conventional rules, like the army, state, or family. Kant’s notion of duty is more broad. To him, freedom consists in following one’s conscience.

Now, up to this point, Hegel agrees with Kant (that we are not free when we act upon our desires). But then he starts criticizing his ethical theory, by raising a few objections. First, Kant is never specific about what we should do:

“This is not because Kant himself lacked interest in such practical questions, but because his entire theory insists that morality must be based on pure practical reasoning, free from any particular motives. As a result, the theory can yield only the bare, universal form of the moral law; it cannot tell us what our specific duties are. This universal form is, Hegel says, simply a principle of consistency or non-contradiction. If we have no point to start from, it cannot get us anywhere.” (p. 42)

His second objection to Kant is that “the Kantian position divides man against himself, locks reason into an eternal conflict with desire, and denies the natural side of man any right to satisfaction. Our natural desires are merely something to be suppressed, and Kant gives to reason the arduous, if not impossible, task of suppressing them.” (p. 44)

In other words, Kant doesn’t tell us why we should be moral:

“We are told that we should do our duty for its own sake, and that to ask for any other reason is to depart from the pure and free motivation morality demands; but this is no answer at all, just a refusal to allow the question to be raised.” (p. 44)

In Hegel’s view, one of French Revolution’s main failings was that they understood reason in a purely abstract and universal sense, and it was “the political embodiment of the mistake Kant made in his purely abstract and universal conception of duty, which would not tolerate the natural side of human beings.” The French government’s radicalism, which culminated in “The Reign of Terror”, when the state saw individuals as enemies and put them to death, was disastrous; but it also allowed us to learn that “to build a state on a truly rational basis we must not raze everything to the ground and attempt to start again completely from scratch. We must search for what is rational in the existing world and allow that rational element to have its fullest expression. In this manner we can build on the reason and virtue that already exists in a community.” (p. 49)

Hegel further expands on an idea of a “rational (or organic) community”, which is similar to “unplanned” ancient communities (as opposed to modern suburban copy cats and planned buildings) that grew up with custom as their basis, “made wiser by the past and ready to find rationality in a world that is the result of practical adaption rather than deliberate planning.” (p. 50)

And then, unlike the contemporary view, Hegel thought a rational community to be a constitutional monarchy.

“A constitutional monarchy is required because somewhere there must be the power of ultimate decision, and in a free community this power should be expressed by the free decision of a person. (Compare the Greek communities, which often consulted an oracle – a force external to the community – for the final resolution of difficult issues.) On the other hand, Hegel says, if the constitution is stable the monarch has nothing to do but sign his name. Hence his personal make-up is unimportant, and his sovereignty is not the capricious rule of an oriental despot.”  (p. 52)

This to me seems a bit naïve, and more of a wishful thinking than the actual unfolding of a constitutional monarchy, but that’s just me.

This kind of state, and this kind of community was, in essence, Hegel’s solution to the overly-abstract definition of law given earlier by Kant, “because the universal law is embodied in the concrete institutions of the state, it ceases to be abstract and empty. It prescribes to me the specific duties of my station and role in the community.” (p. 53)

We are free only when our choice is based on reason, or in other words, to base a state on individual likes and preferences (which are created and manipulated by external forces like marketing) is akin to “handing over the destiny of a community to chance.”

Again, I can see the logic in this idea, but I can also see the danger in it. Who is to decide what is rational? Reason? Yes. But can’t our perceptions of what is rational be manipulated as well? Can’t a ruler justify his doctrine and suppress other voices because his solution is the only “rational” one? Can’t rationality be misused? It surely can, and I think this is a big problem that I don’t see an immediate solution for. Hegel’s rational community still seems like a utopia to me – one that Marx took too far, in my opinion.

Singer tries to defend Hegel’s rational view by stating that “unlike most of us nowadays, Hegel was serious about reason”, which is fair enough and is probably true. In our current world, which is heavily influenced by post 1960’s neo-liberal and post-modern thinking, any mention of a Reason with capital R is usually taken with a laughter or irony, which I think is unfortunate. I do agree with David Foster Wallace who said that we need to go beyond irony and live with a “new sincerity” – a trend that he popularized that tried to expand upon and break away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism. Similarly to Kierkegaard (who opposed Hegel), Wallace argued that to live your life only in irony is self-defeating, because irony is only negative, it doesn’t build anything sustainable on its own:

“Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, ‘then’ what do we do?” – David Foster Wallace

Hegel, all in all being a serious guy, meant something quite objective and specific when he called a state “rational”. It had to be a state that individuals really did choose to obey and support, because they genuinely agreed with its principles and found satisfaction in being part of it. In this sense, Hegel would never agree with how a Stalinist or Nazi state dealt with its citizens – there was nothing genuine about them.

Now, what I talked about so far in this “introduction to Hegel” is really the easier part, the heavier one (that comes from his Phenomenology) is way more abstract and hard to grasp, but I’ll still try to explain the main ideas.  

His Phenomenology of Spirit (or as Singer likes to call it, Phenomenology of Mind) basically deals with the emergence of self-consciousness and how It eventually becomes aware of itself (yes, I barely get it too).

A very simplified summary of Hegel’s thought would be this: “Absolute knowledge is reached when mind realizes that what it seeks to know is itself”, or in other words, there is no “beyond” for the mind to know, because mind constitutes reality. Reality is the creation of the mind – this is a view that is in opposition with Kant who thought that there is a “thing-in-itself” that we can’t fully grasp once we try to us our limited human reason. 

It is important to note that by “absolute knowledge” Hegel doesn’t mean knowledge of everything, “Absolute knowledge is knowledge of the world as it really is, in contrast to knowledge of mere appearances. To gain absolute knowledge we do not have to know all the facts it is possible to know. It is the job of the scientists to learn more and more about the universe. Hegel’s aim was the philosophical goal of showing how real knowledge is possible, not the scientist’s aim of increasing the knowledge we have.” (p. 90)

Hegel described himself as an “absolute idealist”, and “idealism” in philosophy means something different from its definition in normal language: it has nothing to do with having ambitious ideas or striving for perfection:

“The philosophical term should really be ‘idea-ism’ rather than ‘ideal-ism’, for its sense is that it is ideas, or more broadly our minds, our thoughts, our consciousness, that constitute ultimate reality. The opposed view is materialism, which contends that ultimate reality is material, not mental. (Dualists believe that both mind and matter are real.) Hegel believes, then, that the ultimate reality is mind, not matter.” (p. 91)

To understand what he’s saying, we have to understand his idea of “sense-certainty” being limited. Similar to Descartes, he thought that our senses can’t describe the whole of reality, because our senses (sometimes) deceive us – the Sun may appear as small in the sky, but in reality is much bigger. If you put half a stick in a water you can “see” it bent, but in reality it’s just refraction, so your eyes are deceiving you. In this case, the notion of refraction only exists because our mind was able to theorize and create a concept that would explain reality which could not be properly explained by mere senses.

“From the stage of sense-certainty onwards, every attempt to gain knowledge of an objective reality independent of mind failed. The raw information received by the senses proved meaningless until it was brought under a conceptual system produced by consciousness. Consciousness had to shape the world intellectually, to classify and order it, before knowledge was possible. So-called ‘material objects’ turned out to be not things existing quite independently of consciousness, but constructs of consciousness, involving concepts like ‘property’ and ‘substance’.” (p. 91)

Then came the moment when self-consciousness became aware of itself. Or in Singer’s words it “had itself as the object of scrutiny.”:

“At the level of self-consciousness, consciousness became aware of the laws of science as laws of its own creation, and so for the first time mind had itself as the object of its scrutiny. It was also at this stage that consciousness began to shape the world practically as well as intellectually, by taking material objects and working on them, fashioning them in accordance with its own images of how they should be. Self-consciousness then began to shape its social world too, a process culminating in the discovery that reason is sovereign over everything. In other words, although we set out merely to trace the path of mind as it comes to know reality, at the end of the road we find that we have been watching mind as it constructs reality.” (p. 92)

“Reality is constituted by mind. At first mind does not realize this. It sees reality as something independent of it, even as something hostile or alien to it. During this period mind is estranged or alienated from its own creation. It tries to obtain knowledge of reality, but this knowledge is not genuine knowledge because mind does not recognize reality for what it is, and so regards it as a mysterious thing beyond its grasp. Only when mind awakens to the fact that reality is its own creation can it give up this reaching after the ‘beyond’. Then it understands that there is nothing beyond itself. Then it knows reality as directly and immediately as it knows itself. It is at one with it. As Hegel puts it in the concluding section of the Phenomenology, absolute knowledge is ‘mind knowing itself in the shape of mind’.” (pp. 92-93)

Hegel’s grand conclusion is that “individual minds exist together, or they don’t exist at all.” Thus, this is what Hegel meant by the mind being the ultimate reality – the mind is the constructor of reality, not just the knower of reality:

“Hegel insists that knowledge is only knowledge if it can be communicated. The necessity of language rules out the idea of an entirely independent consciousness. Consciousness must interact with other consciousnesses if it is to develop into self-consciousness. In the end, mind can only find freedom and self-understanding in a rationally organized community. So minds are not separate atoms, linked together by the accidents of association. Individual minds exist together, or they do not exist at all.” (pp. 95-96)

Hegel also distinguishes his absolute idealism from subjective idealism:

“Hegel rejects the view that there are countless different ‘realities’ corresponding to the countless different minds that exist. He calls his form of idealism absolute idealism to distinguish it from subjective idealism. For Hegel there is only one reality, because, ultimately, there is only one mind.” (p. 94)

I think it sounds very similar to eastern philosophies (“All is One”), although it is different in the way that it arrives at this conclusion by Logic – which by the way I will have to explain too (Hegel is not the most straight-forward philosopher, if you haven’t noticed yet).

For Hegel, Logic is the study of reality in its purest form.

“Hegel’s view of mind as ultimate reality has a further consequence for the importance of logic. Since mind shapes the world, a study of rational thought will reveal the principles on which the world has been shaped. To put it in terms of Hegel’s own image: to understand God’s eternal essence before the creation of the world is to understand the basis on which the world was created.” (p. 99)

Simply put, Hegel thinks that understanding the Universe = understanding God:

“It is the essence of the absolute idea to manifest itself in distinct, limited forms, and then to return to itself” (p. 104) So what is this “absolute idea”? A conscious entity? God?

In his Phenomenology, Hegel talks about “the unhappy consciousness”, a term to explain man’s alienated soul caused by regarding God as something apart from the world. “If God exists, he is in the world, and human beings partake in his nature.” Thus art and religion are ways in which “the absolute idea” comprehends itself. But Hegel doesn’t claim that “all is God” – he’s not a typical theist, and some people even consider him an atheist, which to me seems self-contradictory when reading his thoughts about self-consciousness. What the hell is he then? Singer says he’s a “panentheist” (not pantheist btw). Yeah, weird stuff, but here it is:

“Not an orthodox theist, not a pantheist, not an atheist – what else is left? Some years ago a Hegel scholar named Robert Whittemore argued that Hegel was a panentheist. The term comes from Greek words meaning ‘all in God’ it describes the view that everything in the universe is part of God, but – and here it differs from pantheism – God is more than the universe, because he is the whole, and the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. Just as a person is more than all the cells that make up his or her body – although the person is nothing separate from the body – so on this view God is more than all the parts of the universe, but not separate from it. Equally, just as no single cells amount to a person, so no individual parts of the universe amount to God.” (p. 107)

“If God is the absolute idea, the ultimate reality of the universe, the whole of its parts, we can understand why the absolute idea must manifest itself in the world, and there progress to self-comprehension. God needs the universe in the same way as a person needs a body.” (p. 108)

This is the part where you realize that Hegel, although extremely obscure and even mystical, is also quite original. His idea of God is anything but typical, “For Hegel sees God not as eternal an immutable, but as an essence that needs to manifest itself in the world, and, having made itself manifest, to perfect the world in order to perfect itself.” (p. 108)

But this is also the part where I sense danger in his idea of “perfecting” the world. It seems like it inevitably leads to Utopian, totalitarian ideas; and I’m not saying it’s Hegel’s responsibility that his ideas may lead to that (like I wouldn’t say that Nietzsche is at fault that his ideas were misused by his sister to gain popularity among Nazis), but it also doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have anticipated that his “rational community” can lead to totalitarianism.

It's ironic that for this “very short introduction” of Hegel I wrote the longest book review I’ve ever written, but it fits that it’s Hegel – this man is incredibly difficult to understand, even when he is paraphrased (Hegel in original is a torture to read). His ideas where arguably butchered (some people would say improved) by Marx and other philosophers that followed his death, but it is undeniable that he is one of the most influential modern philosophers, and is one that should be studied even if you don’t necessarily agree with him. He should be studied because he’s had (and still has) a huge influence on historicists – people that urge us to view everything in the aspect of historical change, an idea which can be dangerous if demagogues use it to gain power and justify their “rational” measures.