Now, that's all very well, but when we read Plato today we have a problem. His major work, the Republic, describes an ideal state which looks like a cross between a hippy commune and a fascist boot camp, and I don't know of anyone who would seriously suggest that we should follow Plato's political advice today. The trouble is that in turning our backs on this we seem also to have turned our backs on Plato's great insights into the nature of truth and the foundation of philosophy itself. Modern philosophy seems to have started again from scratch with Descartes and arguably never again reaches the heights of classical thought, remaining stuck at the level of sophism and failing to grasp the basic principle of idealism. I know Whitehead famously described modern philosophy as merely a series of footnotes to Plato, but this really doesn't seem to me to be the case and Whitehead too does not seem to grasp the basic principals of classical idealism.
I know of only one philosopher who has tried to deal with the question of how we can avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater and retain the valid insights of classical idealism without taking on Plato's apparently totalitarian politics, and that is Hegel. There must be others, but I'm not aware of them. Hegel's criticism of Plato can be expressed very simply: in Plato, the principle of subjective freedom is absent. This is not so much because Plato neglected it, but because it hadn't yet come on to the historical scene. This in itself is an odd think for a philosopher to say, especially one who talks freely about the absolute. If there is such a thing as truth, then it must apply always, otherwise it is only true in certain situations which means that there are others in which it is not true, therefore it is not truth. Hegel's response to this is to say that Freedom, which he equates with Spirit, and hence with what we today might call the whole of humanity, is a kind of Platonic ideal and while it exists eternally, we are not necessarily aware of it and history is the process of us achieving this awareness. Like Meno's slave, who knew a geometric proof but was not aware of it until guided through it by Socrates, we have the same implicit knowledge of freedom but it takes history for us to become aware of it explicitly and for Hegel awareness of subjective freedom in the classical period had not yet become explicit.
So there is a simple formula for Hegel. Take the classical theory of forms, add the principle of subjective freedom, and you have a modern theory of form. The Platonic Ideal plus subjective freedom equals what Hegel calls simply The Idea, or The Concept. Classical idealism plus the subjective principle equals modern idealism.
This is all very well, but subjective freedom is scarcely a simple bolt-on. Properly understood, the subjective principle seems to be the opposite of idealism. There are two opposed views of what the truth is. The one says it is something real, to be found in the world of ideal form which exists independently. The other says that truth is a property of statements and that it is created by the human subject through reason or observation. The true for one is Substance, the platonic ideal, and for the other it is the human rational Subject. To illustrate this with an example, let's take a quick look at political theory. Aristotle, in the classical corner, says, with his usual economy, "It is clear that the state is both natural and prior to the individual". We may all be particular people, but we become individuals only by participating in the state or community, by being citizens. The community exists first and is absolute while we as individuals are secondary and relative. Modern political theory reverses this and sees the individual as absolute, the community relative. The state exists only as a result of relations between individuals who create it through a "social contract", which is the metaphor for almost all modern political theory. The state is both artificial and secondary to the individual, the exact opposite of the classical view. I don't want to get further into this debate though I will just comment that the social contract is explicitly fictional, and last time I checked philosophy was about truth not fiction, but the important point is that the classical view and the modern seem to be directly opposed to each other and it seems that you can't have it both ways. This however is exactly what Hegel sets out to do. He says in the preface to the Phenomenology that "everything depends on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject". It's a big ambition and what I want to do now is to show how he goes about this in the Phenomenology.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel's first major publication and is seen by almost everyone except perhaps Hegel himself as his great work. Whereas other writers who talk about phenomenology, Husserl for example, seem to be rather keen on phenomena and want to limit their discussion to them, Hegel's aim is the opposite, to prove that phenomena are not real and that the true reality is the Idea. He does this by taking a naive or common-sense figure he calls "natural consciousness" and guiding it through a process of directed questioning towards the realisation that its common-sense view is wrong and it's claim to truth inadequate in its own terms, that is using its own criteria rather that counterposing our own. It's just like a Socratic dialogue, except that where Plato could simply point to the ideal, Hegel, because he has adopted the enlightentment principal of subjective freedom, has to show its necessity, which means that the Hegelian dialectic is rather more structured and systematic than Plato's.
The truth, for Hegel is the Whole. I'm going to represent it as a circle ( see figure below). It's also the good, which for Plato is the highest object of knowledge, the point of philosophy. Plato divides the good into four parts, the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperence and justice. These are also linked to Aristotle's four causes. According to Aristotle, if we want to give a complete account of anything we need to include each of the four causes, material, efficient, formal and final. If we miss any of these out our account will be incomplete. In the case of the good, these are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. Without wisdom, or knowledge, there would be nothing, so it is the material cause, the building blocks the good is made from. Without courage there would be no energy, so courage is the efficient cause, which makes the good happen. Without temperence or discipline, the good would have no shape, so it is the formal cause. Without justice, there would be no point, so that is the final cause. Hegel follows the same scheme exactly, but because he needs to include the subjective element, he redefines them in terms of relations of subject and object. Wisdom becomes Consciousness, Courage Self-Consciousness, Temperence Reason, and Justice Spirit. Consciousness is a relation of subect to object, I:O; Selfconsciousness a relation of subject to subject, 1:1 or as Fichte had it, I=I; Reason is a relation of a self-conscious subject to otherness, (I:I):0; and Spirit is Reason grasped as real or as an object, I:((I:I):0). Now, to add a bit more detail to the sketch, for Hegel each of these quadrants is divided again into three parts. Consciousness divides into Sensation, Perception, and Understanding; Self-Consciousness into Desire, Master and Slave, and Freedom of Self-Consciousness; Reason into Observation, Passion, and Judgement; and Spirit into Ethics, Culture and Morality, to give the following picture:
There isn't time tonight to go through each of these, you will probably be relieved to hear, but I do want to spend some time talking about each of the four quadrants.
Consciousness it the stuff of which Spirit (or the good) is made. In a sense as well as being one quarter of the picture, it is also all of it, because the other three quadrants are also shapes of consciousness, types of awareness, and all knowledge is consciousness. When we look at Consciousness as a part, we are abstracting from the whole and imagining it as awareness without self awareness, reason or spirit, a passive and uncritical reception of external data. Hegel begins at the beginning, with a "natural consciousness" that not unreasonably believes that the truth is what is immediately apparent to his senses, and it's worth summarising the argument briefly because it's quite simple and shows the procedure Hegel follows throughout the Phenomenology. Without importing any criteria of our own, we ("we" in the phenomenology means we the philosophers who are already initiated into idealism, in contrast to the natural consciousness which has yet to make this discovery) say, OK so write it down, What is immediately present to you in its simplest form is This, Here, and Now. Now turn around. What is true now? Also This, Here, and Now. In fact every experience is This, Here and Now. The immediate experience seems inexpressible, and the words we use to describe it are the most univeral of all and apply at some point to every experience. We have discovered the universal, and sensation mediated through the universal is Perception, the domain of Locke and Berkely in particular. So we have shown a necessary connection from Sensation to Perception. It's important to understand that this is not the necessity of a Cartesian deduction, a purely rational necessity. We haven't deduced Perception, we have discovered it, or to put it another way, we didn't create it; it already existed and we just became aware of it. As always in Hegel (and Plato) we don't create the truth, it exists independently of us and we simply discover it.
The last part of Consciousness is Understanding and in some ways this is the paradigm for all consciousness and Hegel often uses the terms Understanding and Consciousness interchangeably. It is the attitude of natural science, which explains things by showing us their cause. Where something is caused by external forces, it will always be so and there is no point in us having an opinion about it, so it is appropriate that the scientist represses his opinions and wishes and confines himself to reporting the results of his experiments and theories. "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" (to understand is to forgive), but actually the understanding doesn't so much forgive as it refrains from judgement.
Moving on to the second quadrant, this is the area of efficient cause, the drives and motivations of Spirit. The first of these is, obviously enough, desire. Hegel has little to say about this and after all while desire is clearly a prime mover for us, very little of what we do can really be explained as the result of desire alone. And when a desire is satisfied, we are no longer motivated to action. But what if we desire something that can not be consumed? Not an object, but it's opposite, a subject? This for Hegel is the desire for recognition, a kind of sublimated desire that is also found in Freud playing a similar role. It's the basis of the virtue of courage, which by the way is itself a problem for enlightenment moral theories which ground the good in reason, because courage, which we use loosely to mean risk taking but which really means risking ones life in battle, and which we all agree is a virtue - nobody wants to be a coward - seems irrational. If the absolute for enlightenment is the Subject, Courage involves the destruction of the absolute which is supposed to be the measure of all things, the basis of reason itself, and it is very hard to see how you could give a rational ground for this.
The desire for recognition fuels the second part of self-consciousness and perhaps the most famous passage in all of Hegel's writing, Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness, Master and Slave. In consciouness, I am constrained to be conscious of what is present to me, but in reflecting on myself I depend only on myself, so I have independence, which is not quite yet freedom, but is a step on the way to it. But what if I come across another self-consciousness? This is also independent and therefore could limit my independence, and this in Hegel's account leads to a life or death struggle which if it does not end in death, ends in the enslavement of one by the other (Hegel is clearly thinking of actual practice in warfare in the ancient world). Courage, which for Plato was simply a virtue we should aspire to, becomes in this way a necessity derived from the nature of self-consciousness itself. The winner in the battle becomes master and retains his independence while the other, who has shown by his submission that he "feared death more than slavery" (to paraphrase Plato who defined a free man as one who feared slavery more than death, neatly summarising objective but not subjective freedom) loses his and devotes his life to ensuring the master's independence by providing for his needs. But there is a catch, because the master wanted recognition from another independent being, and what he has achieved is recognition from a being that is no longer independent.
This passage is seen by many as the centre piece of the Phenomenology. There is a whole branch of philosophy associated with self-consciousness, or rather with the reduction of Spirit to self-conscioiusness, called existentialism. There's a wonderful book on Hegel called Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojeve which begins with perhaps the shortest and most concise sentence of any work of philosophy: "Man is self-consiousness". It's entirely wrong about Hegel, who would reply that Spirit (rather than man) is consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and that reduction of Spirit to just one of these is exactly the kind of error that the Phenomenology is trying to protect us from; but it is a very neat encapsulation of the whole attitude of existentialism, which does make much of this passage, but not of other aspects of Hegel's work. If you want to learn about existentialism Kojeve is highly recommended, but unfortunately he is not a reliable commentator on Hegel who is most definitely not a closet existentialist.
Let's move on to the third quadrant, Reason. Rationalism, the belief that truth can be found in reason, is entirely dominant in modern philosophy. It's rarely a self-conscious belief chosen from many possibilities, and more an unquestioned assumption; and the question of what reason is is rarely raised. For most modern philosophers, and certainly Hume, Ayer, and the analytical tradition generally, it is equivalent to mathematics and its ideal expression is in number. The certainty of mathematics is equated with truth and the aim is to achieve that certainty in philosophy. The problem that mathematics gains its certainty by being abstract, and that truth is about the concrete, i.e. that truth and certainty are not at all the same thing in reality, is overlooked.
Hegel has an entirely different conception of Reason. Following Kant, he opposed it to Understanding. However where Kant sees reason as a tool, a faculty, in other words a thing, Hegel sees it as part of the nature of reality itself and defines it as a self-conscious attitude to objective reality. (He doesn't quite use those words. His actual formulation is that reason "is the certainty that it is all reality", but I would argue that it comes to the same thing). This means that it asks the question that the scientist could not - what does this mean for me? Where other thinkers see reason as to do with universals, generalisations and abstractions, for Hegel it is much more concrete and critical. For a Kantian, the very act of having an opinion or a personal desire is irrational and to be repressed or at least subordinated to the universal, where for Hegel, the act of having an opinion is what constitutes rational thought. There are two words that for Hegel encapsulate reason. One is Judgement (this follows Kant) and the other is Interest. What does this mean for me? Am I bothered? Is this interesting? This is the unifying theme of reason for Hegel.
I'm going to skip to the final section of Reason which is about Kant and the Categorical Imperative, the idea that reason alone can give the grounds for moral judgement. Or perhaps we could say can replace moral judgement with rational judgement. The good, in enlightenment moral theories, disappears and is replaced with something else, usually, as in this case, the rational. A lot has been said about the categorical imperative, which does seem to be rationalism's best shot at accounting for ethics, but Hegel makes short work of it along the lines that you can't get something from nothing, a concrete ethical position from abstractions and generalisations. He doesn't even buy the line that you can subject moral law to a rational testing, that whatever morals you have in practice they ought to conform to principles of reason. But remember it's not just a criticism of Kant, but a voyage of discovery, and what Hegel says natural consiousness discovers as a result of considering Kant is that moral law cannot be deduced from reason and therefore exists independently of it. He quotes Sophocles on moral laws: "They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, though where they come from none can tell". With this realisation we move from Reason into the fourth phase of Spirit, Spirit itself or Justice, where we intuit the rational - the moral law - as real and independent, not as a product of our subjective reason.
Spirit for Hegel divides into Ethics, Culture, and Morality. I'm going to leave out Culture and focus on Ethics and Morality. The difference between the last two is that morality includes the notion of conscience, while ethics, which in part refers to ancient greece, is immediate and lacks the principle of subjective freedom which is peculiar to the modern period. The Greeks, Hegel said, have no conscience. They do what is right because it is right, not because subjective reason tells them to.
For me, the Phenomenology really comes to life with Ethics. It's a discussion of Greek tragedy, centering on Sophocles Antigone, with a bit of Euripedes thrown in and Aristotle's Poetics firmly in the background. It begins with the notions of human and divine law. The human law is the law of the community and the divine law the law of the family (don't be put off by the word divine, it's not particularly about gods and both the human and the divine law have their specific deities) and its purest expression is in funeral rites. The main dramatis personae of the Antigone are Antigone, her sister Ismene, her brothers Eteocles and Polynices, all children of Oedipus and Jocasta, and Creon, their uncle and king of Thebes. Polynices has joined a neighbouring city state and made war on Thebes, and both he and his brother have fallen in battle. Creon decrees a military burial for Eteocles but that Polynices as a traitor must be left where he fell. Antigone decides to defy this ruling and to perform a proper burial ceremony for her brother, while Ismene decides to obey Creon. Both Antigone and Creon are acting from high moral principals and are in their own terms entirely right. Creon upholds the human law quite properly, and Antigone the divine. The two conflict. This conflict doesn't have to be tragic, and Aritophanes' Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on sex strike to persuade their husbands to stop going to war shows the same conflict in a comic light; but in Antigone fate takes over and pathos and catharsis result. The upshot is that both Antigone and to a greater extent Creon end up experiencing that while they were right in terms of their respective laws, they were wrong in terms of the other and experience this by the suffering they bring on themselves. Creon's family is destroyed, and in his suffering because of this he experiences the power and value of the divine law, while Antigone realises that a life without the community is not work living so she acknowledges the power and value of the human law.
So two highly principled and moral people experience with complete certainly that they were wrong. We began this discussion with the notion that the moral law is real, not an abstraction. We end it with an additional discovery, that the good and the bad are real in all of us, and that no matter how moral we may try to be, we are going to do wrong. This is the notion of the fall, of original sin, and it is key to any moral view of the world because it is the fact that we have a real choice between good and bad that makes moral choice possible. This choice doesn't exist for enlightenment moral theory, which reduces the good to the rational and the bad to the irrational or selfish, so your only choice is to be rational, in which case you should be perfectly good, or to be selfish. Real moral choice doesn't exist.
Morality adds a third observation to this by introducing the notion of forgiveness. If we are asked for forgiveness, we have to respond positively because we know that we too are capable of wrong and that morality consists in aspiring to improve, not in being perfect. Forgiveness, which for understanding was just a suspension of judgement, becomes not only a real option but a commandment. The act of forgiveness, the sacrament actually of forgiveness, is the final event that closes the circle and at last makes it one. We achieve reconciliation or better, atonement, with the clear connotation of making something that was divided whole again. The book isn't finished, because we still have to consider certain things that belong to spirit as a whole, rather than any of its parts, which are art (beauty) religion (god) and philosophy (truth), but in a sense the phenomenology is over from this point. We have proved that the ideal, the good, is real and logically prior to phenomenal existence, and since we have done that we can leave phenomena behind and go on to pure philosophy. The Phenomenology was paired with Hegel's next great work, the Science of Logic, a study of the Idea as it is in and for itself and without any need for experience. Lest there should be any doubt about the depth of his idealism, Hegel described it as the thought of God, prior to the creation of the universe. I can't think of a stronger way of expressing the logical priority and independence of the Idea.
Now, that closes the circle, but there is just one more thing I wanted to say before I finish. There's a question about originality in philosophy. For a modern philosopher like Bertrand Russel for example, if you want to be anybody in philosophy you have to come up with something new. It's the same for a mathematician, as I think Russel was. It's no good just being good at sums: if you want to make a name for yourself you have to come up with a new theorem or proof to hang your name on. If on the other hand you are a philosopher in the classical mode and believe in the objective existence of the truth, originality is a bit embarrassing. It would be a poor truth that had never been thought of before. In this scheme of Hegel's you can certainly see the influence of other thinkers, Plato, Aristotle and Kant in particular, but nobody has put it together in anything like this way before. Or have they? Does the diagram I have draw look familiar to anyone? What if I add in this?:
If we put the signs of the Zodiac around the edge, it starts to look like a horoscope. Now, leaving aside the question of whether astrology has any predictive power, it is clear that like Hegel's Phenomenology, the Zodiac is an attempt to encapsulate all the possibilities of Spirit, and it is reassuring to an idealist that there are strong similarities between their descriptions. The correspondence in fact is extraordinarily precise, though we don't have time left to go into detail here. Was Hegel aware of it? It's possible, though I rather doubt it. I don't even know for sure that he consciously based his four main subdivisions of Spirit on Plato and the cardinal virtues. I'm not aware of anything he wrote that spelled this out. This may be because Hegel is a great thinker, but a poor communicator. It's certain that Plato was in the forefront of his mind when he wrote the Phenomenology, which is in good part a work of self-criticism of his own early romantic idealisation of classical culture, and it seems hard to believe that he would not have noticed such an obvious connection. But it could be just that both Hegel and Plato are portraying the same basic truth and that it is inevitable that their portraits will share features in common because of this and not because they influence each other. The same goes for the Zodiac although in this case it is much more likely that the confluence of ideas comes from the fact that they are both portraying the same object, Spirit, rather than from direct influence, and more reassuring too.
So there you have it. You can stick with modern philosophy, which does not believe in truth or think that philosophy can teach you anything about the deeper meaning of life and remains forever stuck in abstraction, or you can turn to real philosophy, idealism, which does believe in the truth, and which through pure speculative thinking can bring you to real, concrete revelations about the nature of truth, Spirit, God, and the rest. I know which I prefer.
