CHAPTER XIII
HEGEL’S SUPRA-ETHICAL OPTIMISTIC WORLD-VIEW
Ethics in Hegel’s nature-philosophy, and in his philosophy of history
IN his speculative philosophy Fichte’s first and chief interest was ethical. Hegel, deeper and more objective than he, aims at truth before everything._(_47_)_ While using any helpful considerations which are provided by facts, his aim is to discover the meaning of Being. He therefore cannot join Fichte in the violent procedure, suggested by his ethic, of giving the world the categorical imperative for father and epistemological idealism for mother. Before going so far as to write out a birth-certificate for the world, he undertakes some material investigations. He studies the laws which govern events, as they are revealed in history. He then lays these as the foundation for the constructive operations which are to explain the origin of the world out of the notion of Being. His philosophy, therefore, is a philosophy of history become cosmic. The building, so far as one can measure it externally, is solidly constructed. That is why it is still convincing even where its lines lose themselves in infinity.
What, then, does Hegel discover to be the principle underlying the course of events in history? He discovers that every process of becoming advances with natural progress, and that this progress realizes itself in the occurrence of a consecutive series of contradictions which invariably issue in reconciliation! In thoughts as in facts, [pg 142] every thesis evokes an antithesis. Then these unite in a synthesis which preserves what is valuable in either of them. Every synthesis that is reached becomes again a thesis for a new antithesis. From these there results again a new synthesis, and so on for ever.
With the aid of this scheme Hegel can expound the course of history. From it he is also able to develop the basic principles of logic. Hence he is sure that from it it must be possible to make intelligible how the notional world which can be logically developed out of the notion of Being passes over into being the world of reality. He carries this fancy through to its conclusion in such magnificent fashion, that even we, who are proof against its charm, can understand how it was possible to become intoxicated with it.
While Fichte seeks to give an ethical meaning to the expansion of pure Being into the world of reality, Hegel from the very outset takes his stand upon the assertion that in its ultimate analysis the meaning of the world can only be an intellectual one. The Absolute has no other object in bringing a world into existence than to become conscious of itself. It is infinitely creative spirit, but not, as in Fichte’s thought, with the object of endlessly working, but with that of returning into itself by the road of its own creations.
In nature the Absolute comprehends itself only very dimly. It is first in man that it really experiences itself, and that in three ascending stages. In the man who is concerned merely with himself and nature it is still subjective spirit. In the communal spirit of men who cooperate for the legal and ethical organization of human society, it expands to objective spirit and at the same time, on a basis of notions provided within this spirit, shows itself capable of being creative. In art, in religion, and in philosophy it becomes conscious of itself as absolute spirit, existing in and for itself and having overcome the contradictions of subject and object, thought and Being. In art it contemplates itself as such; in religious devotion [pg 143] it presents itself as such; in philosophy, which is pure thought, it comprehends itself as such. With the world represented as thought, the Absolute experiences itself.
Before the destiny to which Spinoza submits with a smile, against which Fichte and Schleiermacher rebel, Hegel bows in courageous reverence for truth. His world-view is supra-ethical mysticism. The ethical is to him only a phase in the development of intellectuality. Civilization he conceives not as something ethical, but only as something intellectual.
For proof that the ethical is nothing in itself but only a phenomenon of the intellectual, Hegel appeals to French usage. “The moral,” he says, “must be taken in the wider sense in which it signifies not the morally good alone. ‘Le moral’ is in French opposed to the physical and means the spiritual, the intellectual, or the non-material in general.”_(_48_)_
The notion of the ethical with which Hegel works is extraordinarily wide. It consists in “the will having for its objects not subjective, _i.e._, selfish, interests, but a universal content.”_(_49_)_ It is the business of thought to define this universal content in particular instances.
If Hegel had fully explored the fact that the individual will comes to assign itself universal objects, and had felt this fact to be the mysterious one that it is, he could not have passed so lightly as he does over the ethical problem. He would have had to admit to himself that the spiritual element which manifests itself in it is unique in character, and cannot be included in any higher one, or classified under any other at all. The problem of the mutual relationship between the spiritual and the moral would have been clearly posed.
But Hegel is so anxious to find some sort of shelter for his speculative optimistic world-view that he estimates the birth of the ethical in man not by and for itself, but simply [pg 144] as a phenomenon of the rise of the supra-individual spirit. Instead of directing his thought to the question of how the individual spirit in each several person can be at the same time supra-individual and conscious of its oneness with the Absolute, Hegel sets out to make intelligible the higher experience of the individual by means of the mutual relations between it and the universal spirit of the collective body to which it belongs. He says it is presumption for the individual spirit as such to seek, as it does in Indian thought, to comprehend its relation to the Absolute. Becoming one with the Absolute is an experience of the universal spirit of collective humanity when it has reached its loftiest height. Only when it stands in connection with this, as a river with the waters of a lake through which it had flowed, can the individual spirit obtain experience of the Absolute. This is the fatal turning towards the general and supra-personal at which the Hegelian philosophy makes itself superficial.
Ethics, then, for Hegel have at bottom only the significance that they make possible the growth of a society in the collective spirit of which the absolute spirit can come to a consciousness of itself. Man becomes moral by submitting voluntarily to the demands which society recognizes as expedient with a view to the creation of the higher spirituality.
Hegel has no ethic for the individual. The deep problems of ethical self-perfecting and of the relations between man and man do not concern him. When he does come to talk about ethics his subject is the family, society, and the State.
With Bentham ethics complete law. Hegel works the two in together. It is significant that he wrote no treatise on ethics. All that he does publish about ethics is to be found in his philosophy of law.
His first concern is to show that the State, correctly conceived, is not merely a legal, but a legal-ethical body. Fichte had made it the ethical educator of the individual. For Hegel it is the essential element in all moral happenings, [pg 145] “the self-conscious moral substance,” as he expresses it. What is most valuable in the moral comes to actuality in it and through it. This overvaluing of the State is a natural consequence of his low valuation of the spiritual significance of individuality as such.
Hegel’s supra-ethical world-view. His belief in progress
With Fichte’s idea, which he found it impossible to work out completely, of giving ethics a cosmic foundation in such a way that its content might be the bringing of the world under the sovereignty of reason, Hegel can have nothing to do. His feeling for the real debars him from anything so fantastic. But that he altogether gives up the cosmic notion of ethics is fatal. Instead of allowing ethics and nature-philosophy to come to an understanding together in his speculative thought, he makes a sacrifice of ethics from the start. He refuses them the liberty (which they enjoyed with Spinoza, Fichte, and Schleiermacher), of trying to get themselves conceived as the relation of the individual to the universe. They are forbidden, further, to try (as they can do with the Chinese monists), to get accepted as a relation which forms part of the meaning of the universe. They are restricted to being a standard for the regulation of the relations between individuals and society. They may not be active as a formative idea in the creation of a world-view upon a foundation of nature-philosophy. They are simply built into the edifice as an already shaped and dressed stone.
In consequence of Hegel’s allowing ethics no significance beyond that of a preparatory motive to realizing the spiritual meaning of the world, his teaching becomes remarkably analogous to the Brahmanic. Hegel and the Brahmans are akin because, as consistent thinkers, they venture to admit that thought about the world and the Absolute which lies behind it can reach only an intellectual, never an ethical meaning in the union of the finite spirit [pg 146] with the infinite, and therefore value ethics only as a preparatory motive thereto. With the Brahmans ethics prepare the individual for the intellectual act in which he experiences the Absolute in himself and himself dies in it. With Hegel they help in the formation of society, in the communal spirit of which the Absolute first becomes capable of experiencing itself.
It is only a relative difference between Hegel and the Brahmans that the latter make their intellectualist mysticism individualist and world- and life-denying, while Hegel carries his through as world- and life-affirming, and makes the intellectual act take place only when a society has produced the requisite spirituality. The inner similarity in character of the two world-views is not affected thereby. One is the complement of the other. Both give value to ethics only as a phase of intellectuality.
With Hegel, as with the Brahmans, ethics are indeed given a shelter, but they are not shown to be necessary. For the production of the consciousness of oneness with the Absolute the decisive element for the Brahmans is, in the last resort, only a sufficient advance in world- and life-denial, and depth of meditation. With Hegel, society, which has to produce the spirituality in which the absolute spirit experiences itself in the finite, could come into existence just as well by means of law alone, as by means of ethics and law together. His ethic is, in truth, only a species of law.
With the Brahmans ethics are a colouring which their world- and life-denial takes on for a certain distance; with Hegel they are a similar mode of self-manifestation of his world- and life-affirmation. Hegel’s world-view is in and by itself supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-affirmation, just as that of the Brahmans is supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-denial.
That his world-view is this and nothing else Hegel admits in the fit of brutal frankness under the influence of which he wrote on June 25th, 1820, the famous Preface to his _Philosophy of Law_. Our task (he there explains,) is not to [pg 147] re-fashion reality in accordance with ideals which have arisen in our spirit, but we have to listen to the way in which the real world affirms itself, and us within itself, in its own immanent impulse to progress. “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” The eternal which is present under the form of the temporal and transient and is developing within this, it is worth our while to recognize and thereby to become reconciled with reality. It is not for philosophy to set up ideas about what is to be. Her task is to understand what is. She does not produce any new age, but is only “her own age comprehended in thought.” She always arrives too late to be an instructor as to what the world ought to be, and she begins to speak only when reality has completed its process of construction. “Minerva’s owl does not begin her flight till darkness is closing in.” Beneficent peace will be brought us by the sincere recognition of reality.
Rationalism is an ethical belief in progress combined with an ethical will-to-progress. It was as such that Kant and Fichte had undertaken to deepen it. After passing through Hegel’s mind it is only a belief in progress . . . belief in a progress which is immanent in things. It is this alone that this powerful speculative thinker believes himself able to place upon a cosmic foundation, and in this he is in contact with Schleiermacher. On the whole, and reduced to the simplest possible expression, his world-view and Schleiermacher’s lie not very far apart. The secret feud in which the two thinkers lived with one another had in reality no objective justification.
The extent of the strategical retreat on which Hegel enters remains hidden from his contemporaries. They rejoice unreservedly at the magnificent energy which his system displays, and with the less reservation because he himself only once, viz. in the Preface to his _Philosophy of Law_, expresses himself freely about the final results of his thinking. The fact that with him the moon of ethics is obscured does not evoke the excitement that might [pg 148] normally have been expected, because, in compensation, he allows the sun of the cosmically founded belief in progress to shine all the brighter. Being still under the influences of rationalism, the men of that time are so accustomed to regard ethics and belief in progress as organically connected that they look on the strengthening of optimism effected by Hegel as being also a strengthening of ethics.
Hegel’s formal assumption that progress comes about through a succession of antitheses which are always finally reconciled in valuable syntheses has kept optimism alive through most critical times right on to the present day. Hegel is the creator of that confident feeling for reality with which Europe staggered into the second half of the nineteenth century without becoming aware that ethics have at some point or other been left behind. And that being so, he is able to hold his optimistic philosophy of history out of which his world-view grows, only because he lives in a period when a general temper which works with ethical energies of extraordinary strength is carrying Humanity forward in an extraordinary way. Whence the progress comes, which he experiences all around him, the great philosophic historian does not recognize. He explains as produced through natural forces what has originated from ethical ones.
In Hegel’s world-view the connexion between ethics and belief in progress, in which the spiritual energy of modern times has always rested, is broken, and with the separation both are ruined. Ethics languish, and the belief in progress, now left to itself, becomes spiritless and powerless because it is now only a belief in immanent progress, and no longer a belief in progress of all kinds which is produced by enthusiasm. With Hegel there rises the spirit which borrows its ideals empirically from reality and believes in the progress of Humanity more than it labours to promote it. Hegel stands on the bridge of an ocean liner and explains to the passengers the wonders of the machinery in the vessel that is carrying them, and the mysteries of the [pg 149] calculation of its course. But he gives no thought to the necessary maintenance as before of the fires under the boilers. Hence the speed gradually diminishes until the vessel comes at last to a standstill. It no longer obeys the helm, and becomes a plaything of storms.
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