If soul and body are absolutely opposed to one another as is maintained by the abstractive intellectual consciousness,. The community was, however, recognized by ancient metaphysics as an undeniable fact. The Seele of Anthropology should therefore not be confused with the modern subjective conception of mind, as exemplified by Descartes and other early modern philosophers.
Aristotle had conceived of the soul as the form of the body, not as a substance separate from that of the body, and had attributed lesser souls to animals and even plants. Concomitantly, in this section Hegel describes spirit as sunk in nature, and treats consciousness as largely limited to what now might be described as sentient or phenomenal consciousness alone—the feeling soul. Consciousness in the sense of the modern subject—object opposition only makes its appearance in the following second section, Phenomenology of Spirit, which, reprising key moments from the earlier book of that name, raises a problem for how we are to understand the relation of phenomenology and systematic philosophy: is it a path to it or part of it?
Given that the recognitive approach to self-consciousness presupposes that potential self-consciousnesses are in fact embodied and located in the world, we would expect the mind as treated in Psychology to be no less embodied as the way in which it is conceived in Anthropology. What in fact distinguishes the mind of Psychology from that of Anthropology is its rational capacities, considered in terms that would now be described as normative rather than simply naturalistic, and this for Hegel clearly signals a difference in the way in which an actual psychological subject relates to his or her own body.
The type of abstractive thinking found in Psychology does not, of course, as in mythical images of metempsychosis—a favorite trope of Platonists—involve the mind leaving the body. This would count for Hegel as a piece of mythical picture thinking—a Vorstellung.
Rather, it involves a certain capacity of the psychological subject to suspend unreflected-upon endorsement of the claims made on behalf of his or her body, for example, to subject the evidence given by the senses to rational scrutiny. In this sense, we are witnessing within another mode, the type of progression seen in the movement in Phenomenology from shapes of consciousness to shapes of spirit.
The internal Phenomenology of Spirit seems to play an important role in setting up this transition from Psychology to Objective Spirit Williams , but it might also be seen as crucial in relating the more cognitive dimensions of Psychology back to the theme of embodiment prominent in Anthropology Nuzzo a. Thus any naturalistic analysis is ultimately surpassed by a social and historical one, which itself cannot be understood as anti -naturalistic.
The philosophy of subjective spirit passes over into that of objective spirit , which concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which spirit is objectified. The Philosophy of Right as it is more commonly called can be read as a political philosophy that stands independently of the system Tunick , despite the fact that Hegel intended it to be read against the background of the developing conceptual determinations of the Logic. The text proper starts from the conception of a singular willing subject grasped from the point of view of its individual self-consciousness as the bearer of abstract right.
While this conception of the individual willing subject possessing some kind of fundamental rights was in fact the starting point of many modern political philosophies such as that of Locke, for example the fact that Hegel commences here does not testify to any ontological assumption that the consciously willing and right-bearing individual is the basic atom from which all society can be understood as constructed—an idea at the heart of standard social contract theories.
Just as the categories of the Logic develop in a way meant to demonstrate that what had at the start been conceived as simple is in fact only made determinate in virtue of its being a functional part of some larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and ultimately historical, structure or process.
Thus, even a contractual exchange the minimal social interaction for contract theorists is not to be thought simply as an occurrence consequent upon the existence of two beings with natural animal wants and some natural calculative rationality, as in Hobbes, say; rather, the system of interaction within which individual exchanges take place the economy will be treated holistically as a culturally-shaped form of social life within which the actual wants of individuals as well as their reasoning powers are given determinate forms.
Hegel is well aware of the distinctive modernity of this form of social-life. Here too it becomes apparent that Hegel, taking up themes from the Phenomenology, follows Fichte in treating property in terms of a recognitive analysis of the nature of such a right.
Such an interactive constitution of the common will means that for Hegel that the identity among wills is achieved because of not in spite of co-existing differences between the particular wills of the subjects involved: while contracting individuals both will the same exchange, at a more concrete level, they do so with different ends in mind.
Each wants something different from the exchange. This dependence shows how anthropological determinations do not simply disappear with the development of more psychological ones—they are preserved as well as negated as in the pattern of what is aufgehoben.
It also shows the mutual dependence of the determinations of the singularity of the atomistic subjects of civil society and their particularity as members parts of holistically conceived families.
These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of the modern state are articulated and understood.
As both contribute particular characteristics to the subjects involved in them, part of the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of these two principles mediates the other, each thereby mitigating the one-sidedness of the other. Thus, individuals who encounter each other in the external relations of the market place and who have their subjectivity shaped by such relations also belong to families where they are subject to opposed influences.
As the estates of civil society group their members according to their common interests, and as the deputies elected from the estates to the legislative bodies give voice to those interests within the deliberative processes of legislation, the outcome of this process might give expression to the general interest.
To declare that for Hegel the monarch plays only a symbolic role here is to miss the fundamentally idealist complexion of his political philosophy. The expression of the general will in legislation cannot be thought of as an outcome of some quasi-mechanical process: it must be willed. If legislation is to express the general will, citizens must recognize it as expressing their wills; and this means, recognising it as willed.
Thus while Hegel is critical of standard social contract theories, his own conception of the state is still clearly a complicated transformation of those of Rousseau and Kant. From within the type of consciousness generated within civil society, in which individuals are grasped as bearers of rights abstracted from the particular concrete relationships to which they belong, Smithean optimism may seem justified.
But this simply attests to the one-sidedness of this type of abstract thought, and the need for it to be mediated by the type of consciousness based in the family in which individuals are grasped in terms of the way they belong to the social body. In fact, the unfettered operation of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Hegel, however, did not draw this conclusion. Rather, the economy was to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist intervention.
The final 20 paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right and the final 5 paragraphs of objective spirit section of the Encyclopaedia are devoted to world history die Weltgeschichte , and they also coincide with the point of transition from objective to absolute spirit. We have already seen the relevance of historical issues for Hegel in the context of the Phenomenology of Spirit , such that a series of different forms of objective spirit can be grasped in terms of the degree to which they enable the development of a universalizable self-consciousness capable of rationality and freedom.
Just the same dialectic that we have first seen operative among shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology and among categories or thought-determinations in the Logic can be observed here.
An historical community acts on the principle that informs its social life, the experience and memory of this action and the consequences it brings—a memory encoded in the stories that circulate in the community—results in this principle becoming available for the self-consciousness of the community, thus breaking the immediacy of its operation.
This loss of immediacy brings about the decline of that community but gives rise to the principle of a new community:. PWH: It is a dialectic, however, which only passes through some communities. The actual world is full of contingencies from which empirical historians will have already abstracted in constructing their narratives, for example, when writing from particular national perspectives.
Hegel clearly thinks that there is a way of cognitively relating to history in a way that goes beyond the standpoint of consciousness and the understanding—the standpoint of what we now think of as informing scientific history.
From the perspective of consciousness history is something that stands over against me qua something known, but from the standpoint of self -consciousness I grasp this history as the history of that which contributes to me , qua rational and free being. Assembled and published in the years immediately following his death, these were the works through which Hegel was to become known as perhaps the most significant synoptic theorist of these cultural phenomena.
Rather than to attempt to capture the richness of his thought here in a few paragraphs, which would be bound to be futile, I will simply try to allude to how this material is meant to draw upon the conceptual resources noted so far.
Hegel was writing in a time of intense development of ideas about the arts. Kant had treated aesthetic experience largely in relation to the experience of the beauty of nature, but for Hegel aesthetics becomes primarily about art. The reason for this is simple: art is an objective medium in which a community collectively reflects upon itself, and the art of historical peoples is to be understood as the attempt to bring before the consciousnesses of its members the totality of what is.
The peculiarity of art lie in the sensuousness of the medium in which its content is objectified. Again, the romantic or modern here will be characterized by the depth of a form of individual subjective consciousness that is largely missing in antiquity. But those in Greek antiquity, where psychological determinations were closer to anthropological ones, had lived with a comfortable felt unity between spirit and body and between the individual and society.
A characteristic of the Greeks was their Heimatlichkeit —their collective feeling of being at home in the world as they were each at home in their bodies. Modern subjectivity is thereby purchased as the expense of a sense of abstraction and alienation from the actual world and from the self—a consequence of the way the modern subject has become related to his or her body in a different way.
The symbolic art of pantheistic religions of the East used natural elements to symbolize the gods of their cultures: Zoroastrianism had taken light, for example, to symbolize the divine Aes I: , and animal worship was found in the Egyptians Aes I: A new form of art will be needed to resolve these contradictions, and this is provided by romantic art.
But the material for this form will not come from within art itself. While Greek art can be understood as simultaneously belonging to aesthetic and religious realms, romantic art results from a fission within the symbolic realm of what in the Phenomenology Hegel had treated as a single category, Art-Religion. The transition from classical art to romantic art represents both a liberation of art from religion and of religion from art and the sensuous.
Thus Christianity, whose rituals centered around the myth of God becoming man in the person of Jesus, had avoided the type of reliance on the beautiful productions of art in the way that characterized Greek religions. The shift from classical to romantic art, then, represents a broader shift between a culture whose final authority was an aesthetic one and a culture in which this authority was handed over to religion, and thus represents a shift in the authoritativeness of different cognitive forms.
While officially declaring that philosophy and religion had the same content —God—Hegel claimed that the conceptual form of philosophy dealt with this concept in a more developed way than that which was achievable in the imagistic representational form of religion. The limitations of Greek at-homeness in the world had to do with the inability of Greek life and thought to sustain that dimension of human existence that is reflected in the category of singularity of the subject.
The fate of Socrates had thus represented the ultimate incompatibility with the Greek form of life itself of the type of individual, reflective individual who could reflectively bring any belief into question and take a stand against convention. Similar incompatibilities could be seen reflected in Greek tragedies such as Antigone.
With the decline of the Greek world and the rise of the Roman one, movements such as Stoicism and Christianity would come to give expression to an individual point of view, but under the social conditions of Rome or the Middle Ages such a subjective point of view could only be an alienated one attracted to what, in contrast to Greek concreteness, would be seen as abstractions.
Prior to the modern world there would be no real place in either everyday life or in philosophical culture for any non -alienated versions of the reflective or subjective position that had first emerged with Socrates—no form of life in which this individual dimension of human subjectivity could be at home.
But Christianity marked a type of advance over Stoicism in that its doctrines of the nature of a good life had a this worldly exemplar. In this sense Christianity marked a definite advance over the more intuitively based religious cults to which Hegel had been attracted in his youth, but it would only be in the modern world that the content of the core ideas of Christianity could be given proper expression.
These need to become conceptualized, and this happens under modern Protestantism, and this, for Hegel, requires a type of demythologization of the religious content handed down from the past. Christ must somehow come to stand as an example of the human kind in general, which is the ultimate bearer of the status of being the son of God. Once more, it is the purported singularity of the category son of God that must be brought back into relation to the universality of the human genus.
The understanding of what Hegel means by the concept religion in turn becomes tied to understanding what he means by philosophy. The mere six paragraphs devoted to this science in the Encyclopaedia and dealing almost exclusively with the relation of philosophy to religion were to be expanded into the massive posthumously published three volumes on the philosophical history of philosophy based on various sources including student transcripts for his lecture series given in Berlin.
Tennemann, who presupposed a type of Kantian framework. There is an important caveat to add here, however. Philosophy is often identified with the capacity for abstract thought, and this is not confined to Europe and its history.
Rather, it is typical of eastern cultures like those of India and China. As we have seen in the context of art , Hegel identifies Greek culture with a type of at-homeness in the world—what we might think of as the opposite of a tendency to abstraction and its typical attraction to the transcendent or other-worldly. Greek philosophy, and so philosophy itself , starts with Thales and Ionian natural philosophy. In short, Socrates had added a subjective dimension to the otherwise natural moral lives of Athenian citizens, in that he had challenged them to find the principles not of worldly things but of their own actions , and challenged them to find these within the resources of their own individual consciousnesses.
In him we see pre-eminently the inwardness of consciousness that in an anthropological way existed in the first instance in him and became later on a usual thing. LHP I: Plato and, especially Aristotle, represent the pinnacle of ancient philosophy, but this philosophy, no matter how great, represents its time , that is, the time of the Greek form of spirit, raised to the level of thought.
Neither Plato nor Aristotle can break free in thought from the contradiction between the conception of autonomous subjectivity represented by Socrates and the essential collectivity of Greek culture. Classical Greek philosophy will succumb in the same way that the Greek polis succumbs to its own internal contradictions, and what will eventually replace it will be a type of philosophizing constrained within the doctrinal constraints of the new religion, Christianity.
But Christianity, as we have seen, gives representation to a solution to the problem of subjectivity encountered in the form of Socrates.
Philosophy proper only thrives under conditions of at-homeness in the world and such conditions obtained in neither the Roman nor medieval world. Hegel then sees both periods of philosophy as effectively marking time, and it is only in the modern world that once more develops. What modern philosophy will reflect is the universalization of the type of subjectivity we have seen represented by Socrates in the Greek polis and Jesus in the Christian religious community.
In the —6 lectures, from there Hegel traces the path of modern philosophy through three phases: a first period of metaphysics comprising Descartes, Spinoza and Malebranche; a second treating Locke, Leibniz and others; and the recent philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi and Schelling. Of course the perspective from which this narrative has been written is the absent final stage within this sequence—that represented by Hegel himself. The second way that Hegel differs from Kant is that he sees Spirit as evolving according to the same kind of pattern in which ideas might evolve in an argument—namely, the dialectic.
First, there is a thesis, an idea or proposition about the world and how we relate to it. Every thesis, or idea about the world, contains an inherent contradiction or flaw, which thus gives rise to its antithesis, a proposition that contradicts the thesis. Finally, the thesis and antithesis are reconciled into a synthesis, a new idea combining elements of both.
Essentially, Hegel sees human societies evolving in the same way that an argument might evolve. An entire society or culture begins with one idea about the world, which naturally and irresistibly evolves into a succession of different ideas through a dialectical pattern.
Since Hegel believes that this succession is logical, meaning that it could only happen one way, he thinks that we can figure out the entire course of human history without recourse to archaeology or other empirical data, but purely through logic.
Hegel uses it to refer to the collective consciousness of a society, in the sense that we might speak following Hegel of the spirit of the age. In both English and German, spirit can also mean a ghost, and it can be used to refer to religious phenomena as well. Spirit is located neither in objects nor in individual minds, but in a nonmaterial third realm that contains ideas that a whole society has in common.
Spirit does not exist from the earliest moments of human history but is instead a modern phenomenon toward which humanity had to evolve. The demand for justice as punishment rather than as revenge, with regard to wrong, implies the demand for a will which, though particular and subjective, also wills the universal as such.
In wrong the will has become aware of itself as particular and has opposed itself to and contradicted the universal embodied in rights. At this stage the universally right is abstract and one-sided and thus requires a move to a higher level of self-consciousness where the universally right is mediated by the particular convictions of the willing subject. The criminal is now viewed as breaking his own law, and his crime is a self-contradiction and not only a contradiction of a right outside him.
At the level of morality the right of the subjective will is embodied in immediate wills as opposed to immediate things like property.
The defect of this level, however, is that the subject is only for itself, i. The right of the moral will has three aspects.
First, there is the right of the will to act in its external environment, to recognize as its actions only those that it has consciously willed in light of an aim or purpose purpose and responsibility. Second, in my intention I ought to be aware not simply of my particular action but also of the universal which is conjoined with it. The universal is what I have willed and is my intention.
Moreover, the content of such a will is not only the right of the particular subject to be satisfied but is elevated to a universal end, the end of welfare or happiness intention and welfare.
The welfare of many unspecified persons is thus also an essential end and right of subjectivity. However, right as an abstract universal and welfare as abstract particularity, may collide, since both are contingent on circumstances for their satisfaction, e.
While true or authentic conscience is the disposition to will what is absolutely good, and thus correspond with what is objectively right, purely formal conscience lacks an objective system of principles and duties.
Although conscience is ideally supposed to mean the identity of subjective knowing and willing with the truly good, when it remains the subjective inner reflection of self-consciousness into itself its claim to this identity is deficient and one-sided. Moreover, when the determinate character of right and duty reduces to subjectivity, the mere inwardness of the will, there is the potentiality of elevating the self-will of particular individuals above the universal itself, i.
What makes a person evil is the choosing of natural desires in opposition to the good, i. When an individual attempts to pass off his or her action as good, and thus imposing it on others, while being aware of the discrepancy between its negative character and the objective universal good, the person falls into hypocrisy. The rationality of the ethical order of society is thus constituted in the synthesis of the concept of the will, both as universal and as particular, with its embodiment in institutional life.
The synthesis of ethical life means that individuals not only act in conformity with the ethical good but that they recognize the authority of ethical laws.
When individuals are simply identified with the actual ethical order such that their ethical practices are habitual and second nature, ethical life appears in their general mode of conduct as custom Sitten.
For when his character is ethical, he recognizes as the end which moves him to act the universal which is itself unmoved but is disclosed in its specific determinations as rationality actualized.
However, this does not deny the right of subjectivity, i. In the realm of ethical life the logical syllogism of self-determination of the Idea is most clearly applied. The moments of universality, particularity, and individuality initially are represented respectively in the institutions of the family, civil society, and the state. Civil society, on the other hand, comprises an association of individuals considered as self-subsistent and who have no conscious sense of unity of membership but only pursue self-interest, e.
Thus, familial love implies a contradiction between, on the one hand, not wanting to be a self-subsistent and independent person if that means feeling incomplete and, on the other hand, wanting to be recognized in another person. Familial love is truly an ethical unity, but because it is nonetheless a subjective feeling it is limited in sustaining unity pars.
The union of man and woman in marriage is both natural and spiritual, i. Since this consent involves bringing two persons into a union, there is the mutual surrender of their natural individuality for the sake of union, which is both a self-restriction and also a liberation because in this way individuals attain a higher self-consciousness. This capital is the common property of all the family members, none of whom possess property of their own, but it is administered by the head of the family, the husband.
Children provide the external and objective basis for the unity of marriage. The love of the parents for their children is the explicit expression of their love for each other, while their immediate feelings of love for each other are only subjective. Children have the right to maintenance and education, and in this regard a claim upon the family capital, but parents have the right to provide this service to the children and to instill discipline over the wishes of their children.
The education of children has a twofold purpose: the positive aim of instilling ethical principles in them in the form of immediate feeling and the negative one of raising them out of the instinctive physical level. Marriage can be dissolved not by whim but by duly constituted authority when there is total estrangement of husband and wife. The ethical dissolution of the family results when the children have been educated to be free and responsible persons and they are of mature age under the law.
The natural dissolution of the family occurs with the death of the parents, the result of which is the passing of inheritance of property to the surviving family members. The disintegration of the family exhibits its immediacy and contingency as an expression of the ethical Idea pars. However, despite the pursuit of private or selfish ends in relatively unrestricted social and economic activity, universality is implicit in the differentiation of particular needs insofar as the welfare of an individual in society is intrinsically bound up with that of others, since each requires another in some way to effectively engage in reciprocal activities like commerce, trade, etc.
Because this system of interdependence is not self-conscious but exists only in abstraction from the individual pursuit of need satisfaction, here particularity and universality are only externally related. However, civil society is also a realm of mediation of particular wills through social interaction and a means whereby individuals are educated Bildung through their efforts and struggles toward a higher universal consciousness.
This dimension of civil society involves the pursuit of need satisfaction. Humans are different from animals in their ability to multiply needs and differentiate them in various ways, which leads to their refinement and luxury. Political economy discovers the necessary interconnections in the social and universalistic side of need. Work is the mode of acquisition and transformation of the means for satisfying needs as well as a mode of practical education in abilities and understanding.
Work also reveals the way in which people are dependent upon one another in their self-seeking and how each individual contributes to the need satisfaction of all others. Furthermore, labor undergoes a division according to the complexities of the system of production, which is reflected in social class divisions: the agricultural substantial or immediate ; the business reflecting or formal ; and the civil servants universal.
Membership in a class is important for gaining status and recognition in a civil society. In this class-system, the ethical frame of mind therefore is rectitude and esprit de corps , i. The main activities of the business class are craftsmanship, manufacture, and trade.
Members of this class are relieved from having to labor to support themselves and maintain their livelihood either from private resources such as inheritance or are paid a salary by the state as members of the bureaucracy. These individuals tend to be highly educated and must qualify for appointment to government positions on the basis of merit. The principle of rightness becomes civil law Gesetz when it is posited, and in order to have binding force it must be given determinate objective existence.
To be determinately existent, laws must be made universally known through a public legal code. Through a rational legal system, private property and personality are given legal recognition and validity in civil society, and wrongdoing now becomes an infringement, not merely of the subjective right of individuals but also of the larger universal will that exists in ethical life. The court of justice is the means whereby right is vindicated as something universal by addressing particular cases of violation or conflict without mere subjective feeling or private bias.
Moreover, court proceedings and legal processes must take place according to rights and rules of evidence; judicial proceedings as well as the laws themselves must be made public; trial should be by jury; and punishment should fit the crime. The Police Polizei for Hegel is understood broadly as the public authorities in civil society.
In addition to crime fighting organizations, it includes agencies that provide oversight over public utilities as well as regulation of and, when necessary, intervention into activities related to the production, distribution, and sale of goods and services, or with any of the contingencies that can affect the rights and welfare of individuals and society generally e.
Also, the public authority superintends education and organizes the relief of poverty. Society looks to colonization to increase its wealth but poverty remains a problem with no apparent solution. The corporation Korporation applies especially to the business class, since this class is concentrated on the particularities of social existence and the corporation has the function of bringing implicit similarities between various private interests into explicit existence in forms of association.
This is not the same as our contemporary business corporation but rather is a voluntary association of persons based on occupational or various social interests such as professional and trade guilds, educational clubs, religious societies, townships, etc.
Because of the integrating function of the corporation, especially in regard to the social and economic division of labor, what appear as selfish purposes in civil society are shown to be at the same time universal through the formation of concretely recognized commonalities. Furthermore, the family is assured greater stability of livelihood insofar as its providers are corporation members who command the respect due to them in their social positions. Because individual self-seeking is raised to a higher level of common pursuits, albeit restricted to the interest of a sectional group, individual self-consciousness is raised to relative universality.
The political State, as the third moment of Ethical Life, provides a synthesis between the principles governing the Family and those governing Civil Society. The rationality of the state is located in the realization of the universal substantial will in the self-consciousness of particular individuals elevated to consciousness of universality. Freedom becomes explicit and objective in this sphere.
Rationality is concrete in the state in so far as its content is comprised in the unity of objective freedom freedom of the universal or substantial will and subjective freedom freedom of everyone in knowing and willing of particular ends ; and in its form rationality is in self-determining action or laws and principles which are logical universal thoughts as in the logical syllogism.
The Idea of the State is itself divided into three moments: a the immediate actuality of the state as a self-dependent organism, or Constitutional Law; b the relation of states to other states in International Law; c the universal Idea as Mind or Spirit which gives itself actuality in the process of World-History.
Only through the political constitution of the State can universality and particularity be welded together into a real unity. As was indicated in the introduction to the concept of Ethical Life above, the higher authority of the laws and institutions of society requires a doctrine of duties. From the vantage point of the political State, this means that there must be a correlation between rights and duties.
According to Hegel, the political state is rational in so far as it inwardly differentiates itself according to the nature of the Concept Begriff. The principle of the division of powers expresses inner differentiation, but while these powers are distinguished they must also be built into an organic whole such that each contains in itself the other moments so that the political constitution is a concrete unity in difference.
Despite the syllogistic sequence of universality, particularity, and individuality in these three constitutional powers, Hegel discusses the Crown first followed by the Executive and the Legislature respectively. Hegel understands the concept of the Crown in terms of constitutional monarchy. The third moment is what gives expression to the sovereignty of the state, i. The monarch is the bearer of the individuality of the state and its sovereignty is the ideality in unity in which the particular functions and powers of the state subsist.
The monarch is not a despot but rather a constitutional monarch, and he does not act in a capricious manner but is bound by a decision-making process, in particular to the recommendations and decisions of his cabinet supreme advisory council. The monarch functions solely to give agency to the state, and so his personal traits are irrelevant and his ascending to the throne is based on hereditary succession, and thus on the accident of birth.
The executive has the task of executing and applying the decisions formally made by the monarch. Also, the executive is the higher authority that oversees the filling of positions of responsibilities in corporations. The executive is comprised of the civil servants proper and the higher advisory officials organized into committees, both of which are connected to the monarch through their supreme departmental heads. Overall, government has its division of labor into various centers of administration managed by special officials.
Individuals are appointed to executive functions on the basis of their knowledgibility and proof of ability and tenure is conditional on the fulfillment of duties, with the offices in the civil service being open to all citizens. The executive is not an unchecked bureaucratic authority. Civil servants and the members of the executive make up the largest section of the middle class, the class with a highly developed intelligence and consciousness of right.
Legislative activity focuses on both providing well-being and happiness for citizens as well as exacting services from them largely in the form of monetary taxes. The proper function of legislation is distinguished from the function of administration and state regulation in that the content of the former are determinate laws that are wholly universal whereas in administration it is application of the law to particulars, along with enforcing the law.
Hegel also says that the other two moments of the political constitution, the monarchy and the executive, are the first two moments of the legislature, i. Not only do the estates guarantee the general welfare and public freedom, but they are also the means by which the state as a whole enters the subjective consciousness of the people through their participation in the state. Thus, the estates incorporate the private judgment and will of individuals in civil society and give it political significance.
The estates have an important integrating function in the state overall. Also, the organizing function of the estates prevents groups in society from becoming formless masses that could form anti-government feelings and rise up in blocs in opposition to the state. The three classes of civil society, the agricultural, the business, and the universal class of civil servants, are each given political voice in the Estates Assembly in accordance with their distinctiveness in the lower spheres of civil life.
The legislature is divided into two houses, an upper and lower. Landed gentry inherit their estates and so owe their position to birth primogeniture and thus are free from the exigencies and uncertainties of the life of business and state interference.
The relative independence of this class makes it particularly suited for public office as well as a mediating element between the crown and civil society. The deputies of civil society are selected by the various corporations, not on the basis of universal direct suffrage which Hegel believed inevitably leads to electoral indifference, and they adopt the point of view of society. The debates that take place in the Estates Assembly are to be open to the public, whereby citizens can become politically educated both about national affairs and the true character of their own interests.
Moreover, while there is freedom of public communication, freedom of the press is not totally unrestricted as freedom does not mean absence of all restriction, either in word or deed.
On the other hand, in order for the classes of civil society to actually sense this unity with the crown a mediation must occur from the other direction, so to speak, where the upper house of the estates, in virtue of certain likenesses to the Crown e. The interpenetration of the universal with the particular will through a complex system of social and political mediations is what produces the self-consciousness of the nation-state considered as an organic internally differentiated and interrelated totality or concrete individual.
In this system, particular individuals consciously pursue the universal ends of the State, not out of external or mechanical conformity to law, but in the free development of personal individuality and the expression of the unique subjectivity of each. However, individuality is not something possessed by particular persons alone, or even primarily by such persons.
The state as a whole, i. For any being to have self-conscious independence requires distinguishing the self from any of its contingent characteristics inner self-negation , which externally is a distinction from another being.
This consciousness of what one is not is for the nation-state its negative relation to itself embodied externally in the world as the relation of one state to another. Hegel's main philosophical project, then, was to take the contradictions and tensions he saw throughout modern philosophy, culture and society, and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge".
He believed that everything was interrelated and that the separation of reality into discrete parts as all philosophers since Aristotle had done was wrong. He advocated a kind of historically-minded Absolute Idealism developed out of the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant , in which the universe would realize its spiritual potential through the development of human society , and in which mind and nature can be seen as two abstractions of one indivisible whole Spirit.
However, the traditional triadic dialectical interpretation of Hegel's approach thesis - antithesis - synthesis is perhaps too simplistic. From Hegel's point of view, analysis of any apparently simple identity or unity reveals underlying inner contradictions , and it is these contradictions that lead to the dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which it presented itself, and its development into a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that more adequately incorporates the contradictions.
Hegel was the first major philosopher to regard history and the Philosophy of History as important. Hegel's Historicism is the position that all human societies and all human activities such as science, art or philosophy are defined by their history , and that their essence can be sought only through understanding that. According to Hegel, to understand why a person is the way he is, you must put that person in a society ; and to understand that society, you must understand its history , and the forces that shaped it.
He is famously quoted as claiming that "Philosophy is the history of philosophy". His system for understanding history, and the world itself, was developed from his famous dialectic teachings of thesis , antithesis and synthesis. He saw history as a progression , always moving forward, never static, in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement.
He believed that every complex situation contains within itself conflicting elements , which work to destabilize the situation, leading it to break down into a new situation in which the conflicts are resolved. For example, the French Revolution constituted the introduction of real individual political freedom , but carried with it the seeds of the brutal Reign of Terror which followed, and only then was there the possibility of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality.
Thus, the history of any human endeavor not only builds upon , but also reacts against , what has gone before. This process, though, is an ongoing one, because the resulting synthesis has itself inherent contradictions which need to be resolved so that the synthesis becomes the new thesis for another round of the dialectic. Crucially, however, Hegel believed that this dialectical process was not just random , but that it had a direction or a goal, and that goal was freedom and our consciousness and awareness of freedom and of the absolute knowledge of mind as the ultimate reality.
In political and social terms, Hegel saw the ultimate destination of this historical process as a conflict-free and totally rational society or state, although for Hegel this did not mean a society of dogmatic and abstract pure reason such as the French Revolution envisaged, but one which looks for what is rational within what is real and already existent. Some have argued that Hegel's vision of the state as an organic rational whole, leaves no room for individual dissent and choice, no room for the very freedom he was advocating.
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