Superfluous Thought Piece: A Real Left Turn(?)
In Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, we find a completely different attitude towards individuality from what we have recently encountered in the Eastern classics. There is a similar base line to the Eastern works, however almost immediately Hegel steers in the opposite direction.
On page 17 of the introduction, Hegel reveals that the “essence of Spirit is Freedom,” and Spirit and Freedom become his topics for the first half of the introduction. He continues, and explains that Spirit is self-contained existence–self-consciousness. This evokes the emphasis on the individual that was so prominent in the Eastern works, although for the East it was not an indulgence of the individual but rather a disconnect from everything not the individual, including passions, etc. He discounts this similarity, however, when on 18 he asserts, “The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit–Man as such–is free; and because they do not know this they are not free.” From there, the similarities cease and the disparities increase as Hegel takes his individuality in a completely new direction in terms of the course readings.
On 20, Hegel discusses the means of Freedom’s development, contending that action is the drive. Action is produced by the things that the Eastern philosophies strove to deny: passions and desires. This selfish action is the groundwork for all action, betterment, and eventually freedom, in dire contrast with the East, which only achieves freedom by denying passion and desire, thereby escaping the grasp of life and reincarnation, and reaching sublime nirvana in the soul through death.
Hegel propounds on 25 that when individual passions and actions come together in the naturally forming societies of humanity, they combine to create not private but social desires, such as Reason, Justice, and Liberty, all which hold much more weight than the individual claims. This union of individual passions forms the basis of the State, and likewise forms Law. He further insists that the State and Law are the only channels through which self-consciousness, Spirit, and Freedom can truly be attained.
On 39, Hegel explains “Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws.” The Universal is the objective will, due to forming through the combination of multiple individual wills resulting in the majority (therefore subjective, hypothetically) will’s expression. True Freedom, Spirit, and self-consciousness are reached by following these laws because in doing so the individual is being true to itself and its personal passions and desires. These passions and desires expressed in the majority will are also supposedly the best, concerning Reason, Justice, and Liberty due to the human propensity, especially when acting as a society, towards the betterment of that society, i.e. towards the greater good.
This seems to be in stark contrast to everything discussed in the Eastern classics. The duty of the individual is transformed from one of self-purification to universal betterment, and simultaneously self-betterment. A shift from concentration on the soul in the afterlife to the soul in the present life is also seen. These differences, or apparent differences, raise two questions in my mind. First, can we see the disparities as results of utterly different eras and consequently different thought? Second, is the disparity really as great as it seems? Or, can we conclude that the explicit social benefits resulting from Hegel’s system were in fact, at least in part, implicit in one or all of the Eastern philosophies that we read?
547
0 comments:
Post a Comment