A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  Hegel’s politics have their roots in his conception of the individual self. It is a presupposition of all contractarian theories of the state that the rational being in a state of nature has autonomous choice. How else can he enter into a bargain of such a momentous kind? Hegel denied this autonomy, not because of its historical impossibility, but because of its logical impossibility. He regarded autonomy as a kind of artifact. It is not, and cannot be, given to the subject in a state of nature, but is, rather, acquired by him through that process of dialectical interaction with his kind, a part of which we have already seen in the parable of the master and the slave. In the state of nature the subject exists as pure subject. He has will of a kind, but neither self-consciousness nor the freedom which expresses it. He emerges from this darkness at the end of a struggle (and since the contractarian allows himself an historical myth, so much the more can Hegel, who regarded history as ‘the unfolding of the concept’). Only then, in the light of mutuality, when he recognises himself as a social being, bound by a moral law which constrains him to recognise the selfhood of others, and to see them as ends and not as means, does the individual acquire his freedom. By then society already exists. Society could not, therefore, have been based in any contract, since the individual autonomy, without which no contract can be made, presupposes the society which is supposedly formed through it.

  The objection is a profound one. It makes clear that political philosophy cannot proceed independently of the philosophy of mind, and that the notion of individual autonomy which is assumed in social contract theory (and which still has its advocates in modern liberalism) may in fact beg all the political questions that it is supposed to answer. But if we accept the Hegelian conception of the subject, what can we say about the concept of legitimacy? Again in Roman spirit, Hegel draws our attention to the concept of piety (pietas). This is the ability to recognise and act on obligations which are not the product of individual choice. Such obligations surround the individual at birth, forming his self-consciousness, and invading his freedom, even before he has fully acquired either. These obligations are those of the household. (Hegel refers to the Roman domestic gods, or penates.) Disloyalty to the household is disloyalty to self, since it involves the rejection of the force without which freedom, will and reason would be empty gestures in a moral void. Hence it is an essential part of rationality to recognise obligations which are not self-imposed, or ‘contracted’. All the arguments for thinking that a rational being must recognise a legitimacy in contractual rights are therefore arguments for saying that he must also recognise legitimacy in something else. It is this ‘something else’ which it is the business of political philosophy to describe.

  Having introduced a concept of legitimacy which transcends individual contract, the way is open for Hegel to expound and defend the conception of the state as an entity, the authority of which transcends anything that might have been conferred on it by ‘tacit consent’, much as its historical reality transcends the life of any individual subject. This great ‘person’ clearly has rights that no small person could have (for example, the right to demand the death of an individual citizen). Hegel has reversed, in one stroke, the whole doctrine of the ‘natural right’, and replaced it by one of ‘artificial obligation’. The individual has no natural rights which transcend his obligation to be ruled by the state which has determined his autonomy. This thought may be attacked as a tyrant’s charter: Hegel thought that it was not, and he based his rejection of the charge in an account of the nature of individual freedom.

  The individual finds his freedom only in the process of self-discovery. This process implicates every institution by which the individual is surrounded. The first of these institutions (both historically and conceptually) is the family. It is one of the important advances of Hegel’s political thought that he recognised, what until then had so seldom been acknowledged, that the political being derives his social sense from an arrangement which is private. It is private in the sense of depending on obligations of piety, and these could never have been contracted. (Could I have contracted with my parents that they conceive and nurture me in return for my later love and protection? The very suggestion is nonsense.) The family and its obligations are therefore deeply implicated in the individual’s initial rise to freedom. But his freedom cannot be completed in these relations of ‘natural piety’. The individual requires a sphere of free action in which he can try out his will against others and achieve a resolution in just relations. This sphere is the sphere of consent, and hence of contract. Hegel calls it ‘civil society’: it is the nexus of unformed association which surrounds and gives identity to the family. This unformed association can be described in contractual terms, since it has its essence in the mutual recognition of obligations arising out of individual choice.

  However, no social contract can fulfil the freedom which it generates. It will always remain vulnerable to the tyranny of individual will, and so can break down at any moment. It adds to the agent only an imperfect sense of the objective reality of social order. It is an association of subjects, but not yet an independent objective being. The individual rises to full self-consciousness only in confronting the social object. Only then does he have a conception of the limits of his action. When he perceives these limits, he will see how to express his freedom within them. In short, civil society stands in need of institutions which protect and foster it, and which enshrine the objective reality of the body politic. The sum of these institutions is the state, and if the state is to have the objective reality which individual freedom requires, it must have the status of a person, with rights, obligations, reason and will. Hence the full flourishing of individual freedom is only possible if the individual can ‘realise’ himself in institutions which circumscribe his rights. What seemed like tyranny is nothing but freedom in its highest, most selfknowing, form.

  To give the full philosophical content of those ideas is hard. They become a little clearer if related to the idea of ‘self-realisation’ described in chapter 12. But it is perhaps worth mentioning the fact that they are not the sum of Hegel’s political thought, but rather the framework within which he conducts arguments of great interest and complexity, all designed to overthrow the simplifications of Enlightenment politics. Hegel replaced the theories of ‘natural right’ and ‘social contract’ with something more plausible as a description of political reality, less murderous as an ideology, and above all more able to take account of the fact that man is an historical being, who creates himself and his institutions through a continuous process, the legitimacies associated with which can be fully understood only in historical terms.

  Among Hegel’s arguments there is a complex defence of private property as an indispensable instrument of freedom. The right to property is indeed a genuine right. It is created by institutions which, as it were, instil the world with the relations of ownership, and so make objects into the focal points of rights and obligations. Ownership humanises the world. It makes it intelligible, by imprinting on it the distinctive features of personality. It is a part of the stage-setting for that individual autonomy which is the end of politics. Hegel showed some disposition to be moved by Locke’s conception of the ‘mixing of labour’. However, this process creates, not property rights, but a kind of self-image in the labourer (a ‘Bildung’), and a self-striving of which property is the natural fulfilment. The institution of property thereby becomes integral to the process of politics, even though there may be no ‘natural right’ to its benefits.

  The Philosophy of Right, perhaps the most succinct work of political philosophy ever written, contains many such arguments, and succeeds, if not in answering, at least in asking almost all the important questions of modern political philosophy. It therefore set the stage for the flowering of political interest among philosophers which was to reach early expression in the writings of Karl Marx.

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  Hegel would have been less influential had he not answered to the spirit
ual needs of his generation. He offered absolute truth to an age divested of religious faith; his style is at once abstract—and therefore seemingly unpolluted by parochial trivialities—and yet vividly imagistic, descending to the concrete details of politics, art and the moral life with a grace and an air of profundity that have never ceased to be aweinspiring. The spirit of late romanticism inhabits Hegel’s system, and even his most abstruse utterances have a kind of melancholy poignancy. To his contemporaries this characteristic, and the authority that was acquired through it, were most evident in the philosophy of history. This was the part of the Hegelian system which seemed best to explain the peculiar position of the new nineteenth-century man. History had replaced eternity as the key to our salvation, and a philosophy which accorded to history and the human all those dignities which had previously been conferred on the timeless and the divine, recommended itself instinctively to the disorientated conscience of the German romantics. The ‘Young Hegelians’ were philosophers many of whom, like Hegel, had begun their careers in the study of theology. They brought to philosophy all the seriousness of religion, and lost their innocence one by one in the varying ways towards which Hegel enticed them. (Nietzsche was later to characterise the entire post-Kantian philosophy as ‘concealed theology’, thinking of it as an attempt to keep the religious spirit alive in secular clothing.) Some sought to extend the philosophy of history into areas of thought that had yet to be assimilated into it; others tried to restate it without the religious and metaphysical theories that they found in Hegel. All attempted, in one way or another, to hold on to the new notion of history as a distinctive philosophical idea, while in various ways and to varying degrees abandoning the idealist metaphysics which had created it. The most important philosopher to emerge from this Hegelian aftermath, and perhaps the most influential philosopher of modern times, was Karl Marx (1818-1883), several of whose early works consist in vituperative criticisms of the Young Hegelians to whose circle he at first belonged.

  Marx was a man of prodigious intellect, but to a great extent selfeducated. As a result of being forced into exile, first in France, and then in England, by his support for revolutionary activity, his works were neither written nor published in the conditions of serenity or intellectual recognition that would have imposed upon them a satisfactory discipline. His masterpiece, Capital (vol. 1, 1867), was never completed, and some of his most suggestive and important writings remained unpublished at his death. His deep commitment to the cause of social revolution led him to read and write at length about subjects that would not now be considered philosophical, and his polemical attacks on the philosophy of his day—such as The Holy Family1 and The Poverty of Philosophy— often suggest that he would have preferred to be remembered as a social scientist rather than as a philosopher. Nevertheless, so great has his philosophical influence been, and so interesting in themselves are his conceptions, that the underlying philosophy which guided him deserves detailed attention. We find in Marx an attempt to synthesise the German philosophy of human nature—that philosophy of the ‘rational agent’ which arose from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and passed through Schiller and Hegel to the minor figures of Marx’s student days— with the common sense of the English political economists, to the critique of whose work Marx eventually addressed himself. Out of this mixture of Hegelian philosophy of mind and empiricist economics, to which was added an influential theory of history, arose the school of contemporary thought which we now know as Marxism.

  Among Marx’s writings, the most important from the philosophical point of view are, first, the Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology, both of which represent Marx’s early use and critique of Hegelianism; secondly the Preface to a Critique of Political Economy and the Grundrisse, both of which show the increasing dominance of the theory of history; and finally Capital (now supplemented by Theories of Surplus Value) in which the theory of history is united with an elaborate economics. The seeds of the theory of history were present in the Manuscripts of 1844, but it achieved its final form only after the research into the science of political economy which Marx undertook during his years of exile in England. In addition to these writings there are the more polemical utterances—such as the Communist Manifesto (1848) and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—some of which were written in conjunction with Marx’s lifelong friend and posthumous editor, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), himself a prolific and influential writer on social, political and philosophical themes.

  Marx inherited the familiar Hegelian picture of human destiny: history has a movement that in some way mirrors the development of the human soul. But from the beginning Marx wished to break with the idealist metaphysic in terms of which this vision had been expressed and so, in a famous phrase, to ‘set Hegel on his feet’. This desire led him, first, to a metaphysical materialism, and later, in the Preface and Capital, to a developed scientific theory. The later theory represents the progressive movement of history in terms which do not depend on the favourite Hegelian parallel, between the development of history and the development of consciousness. The best way to make sense of the synthesis of history, economics and philosophy which Marx attempted is to begin, from his early work, much of which remained unpublished in his lifetime.

  The early Marx

  For the young Marx, the Hegelian philosophy of history and Hegelian theory of self-consciousness were inextricable. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote that the ‘outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology is first, that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process...and that he, therefore, grasps the nature of labour, and conceives of objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his own labour.’ This idea of ‘human nature’ as an artifact is apt to seem puzzling, especially when detached from the great ‘drama of the spirit’ which idealist philosophy had presented.

  Hegel had spoken in terms of the necessary development of spirit towards the idea. While it is true that this spirit and this ‘idea’ were abstract things, and not to be confused with any individual consciousness, nevertheless it is impossible to conceive them in other than spiritual terms. Marx’s lifework consisted in the attempt to overcome the intellectual difficulties that stood in the way of expressing Hegel’s vision ‘materialistically’ (Marx’s philosophy was later to be called ‘dialectical materialism’). Initial encouragement in this task came from the work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), a Young Hegelian whose sophisticated iconoclasm was later to recommend him (through his translator, George Eliot) to a generation of sceptical and anti-authoritarian Englishmen. Feuerbach, Marx wrote, ‘founded genuine materialism and positive science by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of his theory.’ This social relationship Feuerbach called the ‘species-life’ of man (The Essence of Christianity, 1841). Only man has species-life, since only man finds his nature, through the recognition of himself as a social, and therefore socially determined, being. It is this conception of ‘species-life’ (Gattungswesen) that created a materialist version of Hegel’s philosophy of man.

  The theory of self-consciousness emerges in Marx in the following form: the self has three stages, or ‘moments’. (Marx makes it explicit that these ‘moments’ are not to be construed as historically sequential.) These are the stages, first, of primitive self-awareness, of man immersed in his ‘species-life’; secondly, of self-alienation, or alienation from species-life; and thirdly, of self-realisation, or fulfilment in free creative activity. As in Hegel, the theory is profoundly anti-individualistic: at every stage, the self is constituted only through its social activities, in which lies its essence. Marx wished to argue that the social essence was also, as it was for Feuerbach, a material and not a spiritual reality. He did not regard this social essence as residing in any Hegelian ‘idea’, or spiritual substance. It lies rather in the collective activity which Marx was to identify as ‘labour’. It is this ‘labour’ which generates the language, customs, and institutions—in particular the economic
institutions— through which consciousness arises.

  Corresponding to the three ‘moments’ of human consciousness, are the three stages of history, each manifesting a specific stance of man towards his world. These stages of history are constituted by the forms which social activities take. Now it is only in labour that man transforms the world and so defines himself in relation to it. Already, therefore, in his early philosophy, before he had developed his critique of political economy, Marx wished to describe the movement of history in economic terms. The first historical stage—that of natural man—is one in which nature dominates man, and the institutions of property, through which nature becomes an object for man, have not been developed. During the second stage, with the flourishing of private property, the separation between man and nature becomes dominant. But dominant along with it is the separation of man from man. Private property (which generates the institutions of exchange and therefore the mode of production which we know as capitalism) is the institution through which man’s selfalienation finds expression. This stage is due to be replaced by communism, in which man’s mastery of nature is so complete that the institution of private property, and the consequent separation of man from man, are transcended. Man will then be realised, free, in command of nature, and at one with his ‘species-life’.