God and the Absolute (talk given to Kingston Philosophy Cafe 20/11/13)

Why The Good needs God

This started out a couple of years ago when one of Feliz’ students, Yvonne Plowright, gave us a talk on whether it was possible to ground ethics without the concept of God,  concluding that you could.    Feliz commented that it was a shame that since we are mostly atheists – and a survey showed that about 80% of academic philosophers these days profess atheism – there was a rather one sided discussion and we could do with someone to express the opposite view.    It’s been on my conscience for some time and finally I decided to have a go at it.   The title isn’t quite right though.    I’m not going to argue that the good needs to be grounded in some religious concept, like the ten commandments, because that implies that we don’t know right from wrong ourselves and need to be told or instructed, and I don’t believe that.   It’s more that the good, and God turn out to be aspects of the same thing, and that the concept of the good leads you to the concept of God.

I used to think that belief in God was a personal choice.   When I did, for the record, I sided with the majority, the atheists.    And I wouldn’t have tackled a topic like this in a philosophy gathering because if it is just a matter of personal choice then philosophy has little to contribute.    And most people who do express an opinion do seem to see it as a matter of choice.   On the side of God, those who believe often stress the importance of faith, in other words that there is no compelling reason for it, it’s a leap in the dark, and can only be explained as given by God’s grace.    On the atheist side, militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, who may be firmly convinced of his atheism, sure that he is right and that his opponents are in the grip of a delusion, nevertheless when you get down to it clearly express a belief in atheism, materialism and so on rather than a sure knowledge of it.    For example, Dawkins belief that evolution can explain everything is not based on the fact that it can, but that it is the only materialist explanation he can think of so it must be right, because only a materialist explanation (I use that word uneasily, because I don’t really know what it means) is acceptable.    In other words belief in materialism is what guides Dawkins, it is a presupposition and not a result.

What I want to argue, and what I have come to conclude simply through study of philosophy, is that you can come to a proper knowledge of the concept of God.     It’s not strictly a proof, as in the medieval proofs of the existence of God.    If you take these strictly as proofs, they contain a fatal flaw, which you can see for example in Descartes’ version of the ontological proof.   I can conceive of a perfect being, says Descartes, and for a perfect being not to exist would consist in an imperfection, therefore perfect being must exist.   In other words, existence is part of the notion of perfection, so this is a deduction, a kind of syllogism.    The problem with this is that it makes God (perfection) a result of reason, and if God is a result of reason then he is also dependent on it, not independent, or to put it another way, he’s a figment of your imagination, and you have proved exactly the opposite of what you wanted to prove.    The absolute in Descartes is the cogito and God is dependent on and subordinate to that.   But there’s another way of looking at it.   Take the phrase “nobody’s perfect”, something we have probably all said at some time so presumably it has meaning.   But where does that notion of perfection come from?   It can’t be from experience, because we just said nobody’s perfect, so you can’t point to an example of perfection and say the rest of us are imperfect in relation to that one perfect being.   But for the notion of imperfection to make sense there must nevertheless be an idea of perfection, even though we have never experienced it.     That more platonic procedure is the one I’m going to follow here, and I’ll show you a proof of the existence of God that is not based on deductive reasoning but which neverthelsss is necessarily true.

I’ll say more about that later but first I wanted look at the notion of truth, which is of course central to philosophy.   It’s fashionable nowadays to say that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are good reasons for saying that if you work within the paradigms of modern philosophy.   At the same time though, it is logically absurd.    If you say there is no absolute truth, then what is there?    Either there is no truth at all, in which case there is certainly no point on doing philosophy and arguably no point in any kind of communication at all, or there is some truth but it is somehow less than absolute.    So does the notion of relative truth make any sense?    If we take relative to mean partial, then something that is partially true is also partially untrue, and something that is untrue, even partially, cannot be a truth, so that doesn’t seem to make any sense.    Or if you say that something is relatively true meaning that it is true in relation to something else, but not necessarily in its own right, then you have to ask what is the truth of the thing is it relative to.   Is that absolute, or is its truth in turn relative to something else?    And is there then an infinite chain of relatives, or does the chain stop somewhere when we reach an absolute?    If the chain is unending they you are back with the notion that there is no truth, but if it does stop then you have found the absolute.    There doesn’t seem to be any other option so either the truth is absolute, or there is no truth.   If there is no truth we might as well all go home, so I’ll stick with the notion that there is truth, and that it is absolute, so we need to look for the absolute.

The absolute may be unfashionable, but there are plenty of examples of it in modern philosophy.     One of the great divisions in modern thought is that between fact and value, the is and the ought – and never the twain shall meet, because you can’t derive an ought from an is.   And of the ought, you can say that it is not, because there is no point saying something ought to be if it already is.   It makes sense then to say that philosophy should deal only with what is, because if it is interested in truth, how can you have a truth of something that doesn’t exist, that is not?    So philosophy becomes centred on what is, the empirical, or what is purely logical, but not on what ought to be.

Of course there is a big problem with this which is that if philosophy is restricted to the logical and the empirical it can’t say anything of any value, so it needs some connection to the “ought”.    It often does this through “premises” which are notions that are not logically necessary or observable facts, but which seem to be uncontroversial and serve as a starting point for philosophizing and enable it to make a connection with the real world.    There are many examples, happiness (Mill), life (Hobbes), Reasonableness (Kant), the self (Descartes).    These then function as the absolute, the premise of your philosophy which gives truth to the rest of it.   All the rest is true only in relation to the premise.

You can summarise it in a diagram, or rather a couple of lists:

Ought                                                                         Is

Value                                                                          Fact 

Good                                                                          Neutral

Non-being                                                                  Being

Metaphysics                                                               Facts and deductions

Absolutes:                                                                  Results:

Life (Hobbes)                                                             Social Contract

Happiness (Mill)                                                        Utilitarianism

Reason (Kant)                                                            Rationalism

Freedom (Sartre, Descartes)                                       Existentialism

DNA (Dawkins)                                                         Biological determinism

Now, there are four things I think worth noting about this picture.

Firstly, philosophy is done on the right hand side of the page, and the absolute lies outside of philosophy proper, on the left hand side, the side of non-being.   The absolute is just a premise, a starting point which doesn’t get examined, which is very odd because the absolute is the foundation of truth which surely ought to be the prime focus of philosophy.

Secondly, this absolute is very weak.   It’s just a premise or assumption and you can simply deny it.      For example, if you say to Hobbes, “I don’t care if I live or die” you take away his basic premise and his entire philosophy collapses.    All he can do is accuse you of lying, and maybe you are, but some people would make that claim in sincerity, and in the face of that Hobbes has no response and the whole edifice of his philosophy comes tumbling down.   It’s unsporting of course to do this and a good student accepts a philospher’s premises and focuses on the reasoning that follows, and attacking the premises is rightly seen as unproductive and negative;   but the fact remains that the philosophy cannot exist without them and they are the foundation of its claim to truth, the most important point in any philosophy worthy of the name (“love of truth") and if they are inadequate, then this is a very important and significant finding.

Thirdly, these versions are all abstractions, e.g life in general, happiness in general, and not any particular life or happiness.    Because of this it is axiomatic that they will end up in contradiction, and a Socrates would quickly show this.   Example?   Let's take Hobbes.    For Hobbes, life is the absolute and this means we all value life above all else.     This means we must want longer life and in order to achieve this we need security and rule of law to protect ourselves.   In order to have rule of law we have to have government and to have government there has to be a territory over which government can exert control, in other words the state.   In order to establish that you need men at arms who are willing to risk their lives to establish that rule of law.    But you said that life is the absolute, which means that nobody would risk it in defence of the state, so either the state couldn’t come into existence, or , because it does in fact exists, it proves that life is not the absolute.    QED.   I don’t say that because I want to pick a fight with Hobbes, but simply to illustrate with an example the notion that an abstract conception of the absolute will lead into contradiction

Fourthly, there are many absolutes, and of course that can’t be.     Because they all look as good or bad as each other it is tempting to conclude that there is no one absolute, which many and perhaps most students of modern philosophy do conclude, but as I have said that is problematic because it leaves you without any truth and with no basis for philosophy at all.

Now, let’s take a look at the right hand side of the page, and try to imagine a world where you have only what is, not what ought to be.    There is a strong element within analytical philosophy in particular that wants to do this.   Ayer for example says that only things that can be observed or things that can be deduced are capable of being true, and anything else that doesn’t come under either heading is “metaphysical” and meaningless.   He take this from Hume, of course, and Wittgenstein if I understand him rightly takes a similar view though instead of dismissing the left hand side as meaningless, he concedes that it does have meaning, but says that philosophy can’t say anything about it.    He’s a mystic in other words, rather than nihilistic like Ayer, but it’s really based on the same understanding.

The first question you can ask is what would a language that consisted only of expressions of matters of fact and relations of idea be like?    Don’t you think it would be rather dull?    If it can’t express anything of value, can it express anything at all?    Would there be any point in learning such a language?    I don’t think there would.  So, first point, without the notion of the good, of value, language itself would disappear, because there would be no point to it, nothing to express.

Second, a simple point, you can note that without the notion of the good, there could be no economy, because the things we trade are goods, things of value and without value there is no economy, so another key aspect of civilization would disappear.

Thirdly you can ask the empiricist who wants to ground truth in facts, how can you have facts without value?    Facts may look like neutral things, data, but they are much more than that, they are data that are interesting, or have value.    It may seem like a subtle distinction but it's not.    For example, if I say that 7% of the population of Scotland own 84% of the land, well, it looks like arithmetic, just numbers, objective data – but you immediately perceive that I have an agenda.   You don’t know what it is yet, probably some lefty notion to do with land reform (and in fact 7:84 was the name of a left wing theatre group in Scotland in the seventies), but you do know that I have marshaled the fact for a purpose.   Actually all facts are like this and the idea that you can study facts and proceed from the facts to conclusions is false.   You need to have some notion, something you want to investigate, some hypothesis, something of value, before any facts will exist for you and without that interest facts simply don’t exist.    Even science can't draw conclusions directly from data, it has first to propose a hypothesis and then look for facts that confirm or deny it.   So you can say to the hard-nosed empiricist that his beloved neutral objective facts themselves simply can’t exist without there first being some notion of value, without the good.    The notion that facts and deductions (Hume’s “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas”) are the only things that have meaning, and that anything else is metaphysical and meaningless is the exact opposite of the truth.   Actually deductions and data have no meaning of their own and any meaning they have is borrowed from the metaphysical:   only the metaphysical has meaning.    Deductions need premises if they are to lead to anything meaningful and the premises as we have seen lie on the side of metaphysics, and facts simply don’t exist unless someone shows an interest in them, thinks they are of value, and value also lies on the side of metaphysics.      

I don’t want to labour the point.   If you try to imagine a world without the notion of the good, you can discern what actually depends on the good and can only exist because of it, and the answer turns out to be everything, certainly everything to do with what we think of as civilization, and arguably literally everything.    Without the good, without value, nothing exists, not even a simple fact, let alone the trappings of civilization, language, art, government, a cup of tea….  Everything depends on the notion of the good.

So you may ask where does this notion of the good come from and in particular can if come from nature?    Can it somehow evolve?    Well, if it evolved from nature it would be the same kind of entity as nature.   If nature is being, what it gives rise to must also be being, but the good is really its opposite, because as we have seen value is non-being and sits on the metaphysical side of the page.    Civilization is the opposite of nature and the things that distinguish it can only exist because of the notion of the good.     The good is the cause of civilization, and if it is its cause, it can’t also be its result, and it can’t be a result of nature because it is its opposite.     It can no more evolve from nature than consciousness itself can be a product of matter – the neuroscientist’s dream – because as a subject it is the very opposite the object and is its ground, so it can’t also be its result.

If the good is not produced by nature, we must say then that it exists independently of it, and this means that it is real.    It is also absolute, as we have seen, because everything else results from it.    Hegel calls it the Absolute Idea, or simply The Concept, not any particular concept but conceptual thought in general.   Hegel’s use of terms like Idea, Concept, Notion and the like can be confusing – certainly confuses me – but one thing that he is clear about is that the key term The Concept is the same as the Greek notion of the Logos, which means something like reasoned thought in general but is usually translated simply as The Word, so when John writes “in the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God” this is the Logos, and is the same as the concept of the Absolute Idea, the Notion that allows our culture to exist.    The Logos is divine, it is God Himself, and it is God in this sense who makes civilization possible, who accounts for the remarkable fact that we all take for granted, because it comes so naturally to us, that we can actually communicate with each other at all.   The Logos is the power of discrimination in general, the basis of conceptual thought, the knowledge (if you want to speak allegorically) that Adam gained when he ate the apple, of good and evil.    And because atheists generally think of God as a being, or a concept, that you can choose to believe in or not as you prefer, it is worth stressing that the Divine Logos is not itself a being or a concept, but something much more,  the ground of all being, that which makes it possible for individual beings and concepts to exist, and is not an optional idea but a necessity.

Now, the good has a structure.    Because it exists, it must have four causes, because everything that exists must have a material, efficient, formal and final cause.     This is Aristotle’s theory of causality, which you are probably all familiar with but perhaps it’s worth just going over it again.    I like to think of the example of a building.    According to Aristotle, if the building exists all four causes must also exist.     The material cause is the building materials, bricks, mortar, wood, whatever, the stuff it is made of.    The efficient cause is the builders, because the materials don’t arrange themselves and there has to be an input of energy before they can come together to make the building.      The formal cause is the architect, because the builders can’t work without a plan, something that defines the shape of the building.    The final cause is the user, because you wouldn’t build a building without a purpose.     Each of these four is essential and if any one is missing, the building couldn’t exist.    If you have builders, materials and a plan, but no purpose, then no building, because there wouldn’t be any point… and so on for the others;  but if you have all four then nothing else is needed so they are both necessary and sufficient conditions.

In the case of the good, these causes are the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice in that order.    We can represent the good as a circle, and the virtues/causes as its quarters.    It’s critical to understand the relation of these parts to the whole, and two points in particular.   Firstly, the cardinal virtues are independent of each other and cannot be expressed in terms of each other, just because each is a different type of cause.     But, secondly, while they are independent of each other, each is entirely dependent on the whole.    It’s not as if you could collect say wisdom, courage, and temperance, and then say you only need justice and you will have the whole set and will have created the good.    It’s the other way around.    Each virtue or cause exists only as a moment (to coin a Hegelian term) of the absolute and has no existence independently of it.    As Aristotle said, a hand cut off from a body still looks like a hand, but without its relation to the body it used to be part of it no longer has meaning.    The cardinal virtues only have meaning as part of the good as a whole.   So for example, risking your life looks like courage, but it only has that meaning if it is done for the sake of the good and if it is done for some other reason – showing off for example – its really foolhardiness, and not a virtue.

                                                                   THE GOOD

 

Now there are a few features of this model that are worth pointing out.   Firstly, the notions of cause and necessity it contains are rather different from those you more commonly encounter in philosophy.    If a modern philosopher says something is necessarily the case, he is usually referring to deductive necessity, the kind of logic you find in mathematics, and if he talks of cause he means force, like a billiard ball forcing another to move in a certain way by imparting its momentum, a kind of bottom-up pressure, pushing from behind.   Here both cause and necessity have a different sense, although one quite in accord with normal language.     The four causes of the good are essential.    The good cannot exist without them and because it does exist the four causes must necessarily exist, but this is not a deduction in the mathematical or purely logical sense.    It has to do with the relationship of the parts to the whole, which is a necessary one and therefore causal, but the causes are not bottom-up forces working together to force the good into existence from below or behind, but elements that must be present.    Because the good can’t exist without them you can say that they are the necessary causes of the good, but it is a different and more subtle notion of causality than the modern one.

You can also say that if the truth is the whole, as this model implies, then you can only express the truth in a systematic way, because you have to show how the parts and the whole relate to each other.   That means philosophy must be systematic.   That's another unfashionable idea - so 19th century - but if the truth is the whole, it is unavoidable.

This simple picture is the beating heart of what I call real philosophy, to distinguish it from modern philosophy which is called philosophy but which doesn’t actually contain any truth, something you will surely have noticed at some level if you have studied it, and certainly doesn't love it.   Hegel has another name for real philosophy and calls it "speculative", a potentially misleading term which has nothing to do with speculation in the ordinary sense.    A better name perhaps would be Idealism, recognition of the logical primacy of ideas, because all true philosophy is idealism, and materialist philosophy is a contradiction in terms.

Now, that will do for now as a summary of the positive side of the absolute.   Let’s look at it from a negative point of view.    If you want to defend atheism you need to show why this picture is wrong.   Specifically you need to show

1   .     That the good is not real

2   .     That the cardinal virues are not independent but can be derived from eachother or from something else.

If you can do that you will have given atheism a philosophical grounding which it doesn’t have at the moment, so there’s a big opportunity, and I’ll follow you gladly if you can do it.   I don’t much want to be a believer and may aspects of religion (human sacrifice? cannibalism?) sit uneasily with me.    But it has never been done and I don’t think it ever will be.

Modern philosophy does in fact and quite consistently argue that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues can be derived from each other, but not because it has a thought-out critique of these ideas, but because it is unaware of them.   Like Descartes in his stove, it starts from scratch and with scant reference to the philosophy that came before it.

The basic idea of modern philosophy is that the good can be “explained” or “defined” (it amounts to the same thing).    After all if you can’t define something then it looks like you don’t know what it is, and that is anathema to a modern thinker.     We explain things by showing what causes them, so to explain or define the good is to show that it is caused by something else, for example happiness.   If the explanation succeeds then the notion of the good becomes redundant, because you can always replace it with what it really means, happiness.   The good is just an epiphenomenon, a shorthand, but the true reality is its deeper cause, whatever you think that is.     This is what is meant by “explaining something away”.   In explaining the good, you make it disappear.   It’s a kind of vanishing trick.     By implication, the good isn’t real, it’s more like an illusion, and this view is held implicitly by virtually all modern philosophy.

So modern philosophy is reductionist in terms of the good in general and you can further divide it in terms of which of the four causes the various practitioners reduce it to.     Take John Rawls for example.    The good is barely mentioned at all in his A Theory of Justice, and where it is it is immediately reduced to (meaning replaced with) the just, its final cause.   This is then immediately reduced to fairness, which replaces the concept of justice for the rest of the book.   Fairness is a category that belongs to reason (because of its appeal to universality, reason being the faculty of the universal) and reason with its virtue of temperance is formal cause.    This means that by implication Rawls is arguing that the notion of the cardinal virtues is wrong because he thinks that you can derive one, Justice, from another, Temperance.    But has he proved it?   Not at all, and in fact it is obvious that justice and fairness are by no means the same thing.    Justice is meted out by the state and involves vengeance and punishment, neither of which have anything to do with fairness.    You might as well say of a building that the people who use it (its final cause) are produced by the architect (its formal cause).    They aren’t and the architect can’t do anything without a client who wants a building for a purpose.    Both are essential to the process and play their separate part, and to say that only one matters is ridiculous and the simple response to Rawls’ identification of justice with fairness is that it is wrong.    You can’t derive justice from reason and if Rawls had paid attention to classical philosophy he would know that.   His entire "Theory of Justice" is in fact nothing of the sort, it's a theory of fairness, and justice is completely absent from the book, replaced everywhere by fairness.    Actually it’s not just justice which is reduced to reason by Rawls.   The other virtues also disappear and Reason becomes the only virtue, the only truth.   Rawls in other words, in common with most modern thinkers, is a rationalist, meaning that he thinks that the truth is to be found in reason, or that reason is the absolute.    It’s as if the architect said “you don’t need the client, you don’t need the builders and the materials – you just need me”.    I know some of them are a bit like that, but you can see the problem.

The majority of modern philosophers make the same mistake as Rawls.    They are rationalists, because they believe in Reason and think that everything else is derived from it.   Certainly Kant would fit into this (Rawls is really just Kant minus the interesting bits) as would Mill.     The problem with this view is not that reason is wrong, but that it is wrong to take it as the absolute, because that is to abstract from the three other causes of the good each of which is equally essential.

There’s another group though that goes further and reduces the good to efficient cause.   Thinkers like Sartre notice reasonably enough that reason can’t produce any particular virtue because it depends on generalisation, and also again reasonably enough react against the proscriptive, dry moralizing of the rationalist which is all about self denial and self control – because of course this is the virtue of reason – and says that actually the absolute is just the individual who is free by nature.     This comes from Descartes and the notion that self- consciousness is the one thing that is independent of the outside world and depends only on itself, but it is developed into the philosophy of existentialism by Sartre and others.    What matters for this way of thinking is not what I do but whether I do it freely or not and that is the only real virtue.     Rationalist morality is seen as a way of drawing comfort from the presence of rules and regularity, which means denying the essential and scary Angst-inducing fact of your existential freedom, and so you see a connection between this way of thinking and the cardinal virtue of courage.    The connection is also there at a deeper level because here we are delving into efficient cause, the question of what motivates us, and the existential answer is our freedom, and, subtext, our constant struggle for recognition.    The good in simple terms is reduced one more phase, from the rational to the free.    And this is wrong, not because we are not free, but because this freedom is only one of four moments of the good and because it is false to say that this freedom is itself the absolute.

And finally there is one more group of thinkers, not really philosophers but very popular, who go the final stage and reduce the good to the material cause, which they understand to be DNA.     All other virtues for such thinkers are results of impulses generated by our (selfish) genes.     This is the notion that the good is a result of nature, and that any virtuous behavior can be understood as a result of pressure on the organism to do that which favours the survival of the species.     This is like saying that the materials a building is made from cause its design.    Materialists really believe this and think that DNA causes us to have the shape we do, but this is impossible because DNA is the same in every cell in the body, so it can’t explain why one cell differs from another.    Biologists counter that genes within dna are switched on and off by other factors, which may be true, but if so then the other factors are not the DNA so you cannot say that it is the DNA that causes the shape and you need to understand how the other factors are operating independently of the DNA.   Of course, if you could demonstrate that DNA creates and accounts for not only our shape but our culture, wants, language, ethics and so on you would have done something that effectively demolished the classical model and would show that only material cause matters, but the truth is that this certainly has not been done, and it would seem for logical reasons that it never could be done.    It is still a belief powerfully held by many.

So the arguments of modern philosophy do rest on the notion that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues are not independent, but only as assumptions and not because they have been able to prove this is true, or even are aware of the implied criticism they are making of the classical model.    It’s worth reflecting a bit more on the notion of reality implied by this.   What is real?    The sense being used here is that what is real is self-subsistent.    Something that is real is not a result of something else, but stands on its own as an independent being.    If the good is real in this sense, we can ask what else is real?    The answer is profoundly counterintuitive:   nothing.    Why?    Because everything is a result of the absolute, everything owes its existence to the Logos, and without the Logos nothing would exist.   It seems strange;  after all, the objects we encounter every day seem to be self-subsistent, to have an independent reality.    I’m pretty sure this table in front of me will still be the same if I come back next week, so its self-subsistence seems OK.   But its being depends on someone understanding it as a table, and everything we know about it is conceptual, therefore without the Concept, it doesn’t exist.     This strange result was well understood by Plato, who famously argued that phenomena are not real and that the forms – the concepts by which we apprehend them – are the true reality.    One of Hegel’s more puzzling pronouncements in the Phenomenology, that  “reason is the certainty that it is all reality” also makes sense in this context, because not only is reason (in the sense of the Logos, rather than logic, the Kantian faculty of reason) the absolute, but also everything else is a result of it, is dependent on it, so has its reality only in relation to that absolute.   That is just what the notion of the absolute means:    everything else is relative to it.    The Logos actually is all reality, the only reality, and what goes for the Logos also goes for God, because they are the same thing.

Because this conclusion is so counterintuitive it is easy to brush it aside, and you can view modern philosophy as a kind of a conspiracy to ignore this inconvenient conclusion.   Prior to Descartes the notion that phenomena are not real was a defining feature of philosophy in general and it was understood that this mystery was at the centre of philosophical thought.     Since then there has been instead a dogged holding on to the common sense idea that appearance is reality, an idea which is hubristically called “enlightenment” when it is actually the opposite, a return to prephilosophical darkness.     It’s a kind of tyranny of the majority, a fingers-in-the-ears-singing-la-la-la group denial, a hope that by sheer force of numbers we can make the inconvenient truth that appearance is not the same as reality go away, if we only wish it so with enough conviction.   Instead we should face up to the fact that it is our common sense that it at fault and that actually without the metaphysical we are nothing, quite literally:  we don’t exist.    The metaphysical, the Logos, is not only real, it is the ground of all reality and anything else that exists does so only as a result of the Logos, or, if you like, by His Grace.

The Social Contract (talk given to Kingston Philosophy Cafe 2nd April 2013)

The Social Contract

The idea of the Social Contract is as old as philosophy itself.   It can be summarised as the idea that the state is the result of a contract between its citizens, who realise that though living under the rule of law may not be in their short term interest, as it restricts and controls them, it is very much in their long term interest and so they decide to sacrifice short term interest for long term gain and contrive to create rule of law, the state.    We can imagine a “state of nature” in which there is no rule of law, prior to the social contract, and the post-contract political society we actually live in.   Notice that this means that the state we all live in is an artificial one, against nature.

That’s all there is to it really.    The theory was considered and rejected in classical times and it is only in the sixteenth century with the beginning of the modern era that it comes back into fashion, and indeed becomes entirely dominant in political theory.    First Hobbes, then Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and then John Rawls, whose theory of Justice is considered by many the most important work of political theory of the twentieth century, all use the metaphor of the social contract in some way and it is hard to find any criticism of it.   Politicians and ordinary people who have never heard of the political theory also talk freely of our “contract with society” and in other ways that show that they too endorse the notion that we have an implied contract with each other that ought to govern or at least influence our behaviour.

The first problem with the theory is an empirical one.   There is not the slightest evidence that a state or proto-state has ever been founded by a contract between its citizens.    History teaches us that really without exception states are founded by acts of war, which seem to be the very opposite of contracts.     We can also ask ourselves at an individual level, how do we come by our nationality, our membership of and allegiance to a state?    The answer is by birth.    There is no act of consent and we have absolutely no choice in the matter.    We are citizens of a state just by being born, by simply existing, and choice, consent, or contract never, ever come in to play.

So I’m not going to talk about finer points of social contract theory, because there’s no point, it’s not true, and as philosophers we are only interested in truth .    The interesting question is how come the great minds of modern political theory, philosophers of the stature of Hobbes or Kant, come to believe almost universally and without question in a theory which is so evidently untrue?   Are they perhaps under the influence of some illusion, some ideology that prevents them from seeing the truth?    You bet they are.    It’s called the Enlightenment, and there are two aspects of it I want to look at tonight which are Individualism and Rationalism,  two sides of the same coin really which always go together, but which I think it will be useful to distinguish here.   They are views about the nature of the Absolute, the ground of truth, and they hold that the individual, and his reason, are the absolute standard against which everything must be assessed.

Individualism.

The Enlightenment holds that the “man is the measure of all things”, which is a statement about the nature of the Absolute.   Many modern philosophers will say that they no longer believe in “Absolutes” which they see as old-fashioned and archaic and inappropriate in our pluralistic age, but if they hold that man is the measure of all things, indisputably they do believe in an absolute.   In any case you can’t do philosophy if you reject the notion of absolute truth.   If truth is not absolute, but only relative, then as well as being relatively true it is also relatively untrue, and you can’t have a truth that is untrue, so rejection of the Absolute is rejection of philosophy itself.   Now, if man, the individual, is the absolute, then it follows that all cultural life is his creation and is relative to him, the result of his efforts.     From this it follows that if the state exists it too must be a result of something done by the individual, so individuals must at some time have realised the benefits of living in a political community and contrived to create it through some kind of contract.  In other words the idea of the contract is a result of the premise that man is the measure of all things, which is an aspiration of the enlightenment, and not a result of observation of reality at all.

So what about that aspiration?    It seems fine and unobjectionable really, doesn’t it?    But the thinking that gave rise to it grew out of the development of science, and it’s reasonable to apply scientific method to it.    We can say that the hypothesis of individualism (more strictly atomism, but I’m going to stick with the broader term individualism tonight) predicts that the state must be the result of agreement between its citizens, and we can see if the evidence supports it or not.   We have already seen that it doesn’t, so the hypothesis must be wrong.    But if this means that the individual is not the absolute what then is?     We are so used to thinking of ourselves as independent individuals, the building blocks of society, that it can be hard to imagine an alternative view, but one was given by Aristotle, who said for example that “man is by nature a political animal” and “it is clear the state is both natural and prior to the individual.

Aristotle would not say such things if he wasn’t aware of an opposite view (i.e. that the state is artificial and subsequent to the individual) , and we can take his comments to be criticism of some kind of social contract theory.   By saying that man is by nature a political animal,  he implies that there is no state of nature, in which we might exist as some kind of “noble savage”, and this means that the way we live is not artificial, as it is for the contractarians, but normal and natural, something that I personally feel more comfortable with.    And by saying that the state is prior to the individual he gives a clear alternative to individualism which says that actually the state comes first, the individual second.    This might seem counterintuitive, but it points to a fundamental problem with contract theory, which is this:    how can you make contracts, if you don’t first have rule of law?    Contracts are in general about exchange, and to have exchange you must first have private property, and if you have private property you must have a state which guarantees and protects it (that’s the difference between property and mere possession), so it makes no sense to say that you contract to create the state because it must have existed in the first place so that you could make a contract.   The very thing you are trying to explain by the social contract is presupposed.    And it is not just a circular argument, which would be defective but not necessarily false.   It’s worse than that, it's back to front.   It says that the individual is the cause of the state but actually the state is the cause of the individual.    The individual is not the same as the particular, the “specimen of humanity”, and properly understood the individual is both particular and universal united, and a very important aspect of individuality is the rights conferred (universally) on particular people by the state such as the right to own property, to be protected from assault, physical abuse and so on.

So individualism, the belief that the individual is the absolute or that man is the measure of all things, while it may seem natural to us, is problematic and there is an alternative expressed in classical philosophy which sees the individual as created by the state, not vice versa.    So here’s a question for discussion.     Is there such thing as society?    If you are an individualist the answer has to be yes, because the individual is absolute and anything else cultural that exists must be made up of relations between individuals, because there is nothing else, and these relations are what we mean when we speak of society.    But what is society actually?     Can you point to it?   Does it exist at all?    For my part I’d say no, it doesn’t,  it’s just an abstraction, and whenever I hear someone using the word society or social (as in “social contract” or “social relation”) or, worst of all,  “intersubjective”, it puts me on my guard because I know I am dealing with an individualist and that I am not going to  agree with them.    What do you think?

Rationalism

Now, moving on to rationalism, well, you can say that there is an obvious problem with individualism which is that there are seven billion or so of us on the planet, and we are all different, so that’s seven billion absolutes and clearly that is not much use.   But enlightenment gets round this by saying that it is one aspect only of the individual that is absolute which is his reason, which is the same for everyone and common to all (this is why strictly it is atomism rather than individualism).    So let’s have a quick look at this idea that it is Reason that is the Absolute.    After all this seems like something it would be unreasonable to disagree with, because if reason doesn’t ground knowledge, what is left?    It seems irrational to disagree with this, and like going back to more primitive, prescientific, superstitious times. 

There is actually a reasonable objection to the notion that reason is the absolute, the yardstick against which everything should be measured and assessed, and you can find it in ancient political theory in the concept of the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, discipline, and justice).    Now, why are there four cardinal virtues?    Why not three or five, or twenty seven?    The reason is that everything that exists, at least according to Aristotle, must have four causes:   material, efficient, formal and final;   and these are essential to its existence, which means that if any one is missing the thing can’t exist, or, turning that round, if it does exist then it follows that each of the four causes must also exist.    The four causes are all-encompassing, nothing else is needed so they are also sufficient.   In the case of philosophy, the thing we want most to know is the nature of the good.    Now the good exists.    This is a proposition modern philosophy has trouble with, but intuitively we all know it to be true, so it follows that it must have material efficient formal and final causes.    These are the cardinal virtues.     Material cause is wisdom, because knowledge is the stuff of which the good is made, and if there were no knowledge clearly also there would be no good.      Efficient cause is courage, because that is the energy that makes the good happen and without that energy, that willingness to risk life for the sake of the good, it couldn’t exist.    Formal cause is reason and its virtue of control, discipline, temperance, whatever you want to call it, because the good isn’t just an abstract notion, it has shape, and the shape or form is given to it by restraint and control.    The final cause is Justice, which is the purpose, the telos or end of the good, and without this too the good couldn’t exist, because there wouldn’t be any point.    The virtues are cardinal because they stand on their own, they are quite different things and cannot be expressed in terms of each other.

Now let’s take a look at what Enlightenment does with this.    There is no direct Enlightenment criticism of the notion of the four cardinal virtues and it is hard to see how there could be because you can’t be an Enlightenment philosopher if you understand them, and in practice the Enlightement isn’t built on a criticism of classical philosophy, but on ignoring it and starting again from scratch;   but there is clear implied criticism of it in the notion of the social contract.

Let’s start with the notion of Justice, the concept political theory most wants to understand.     According to social contract theory, Justice is a result of reason.   This means that justice is no longer a cardinal virtue, because you can’t be a cardinal virtue if you are the result of something else, you are relative to and subordinate to that thing.     Justice becomes a part of reason, and you are now down to three cardinal virtues.    In some cases, Rawls being the best example, Justice isn’t just subordinated to reason.   It actually disappears.    Rawls’ book is based on the notion that “justice is fairness”.    If this is correct, then you no longer need the word justice at all because you can replace it in every instance with the word “fairness” and “justice” simply disappears.    It isn’t correct, because fairness and justice are quite different concepts.    Modern philosophers have a habit of using the term “justice” as a high-falutin’ term for moral rectitude, or just fairness, but actually that is not what it means.   If you doubt this, just pick up a tabloid newspaper.   They are always calling for justice, and when they do what they mean is that they want someone to suffer.   They are calling for blood, for vengeance, for something do be done by the state to someone they think has transgressed.   You can’t “do” fairness which is just a passive standard, and the fact of vengeance is enough to see that justice and fairness  or moral rectitude aren’t the same thing.    Rawls’ book is called “A Theory of Justice” but actually it is nothing of the sort, it is just a theory of fairness.   Rawls has done that classic thing which as Daniel Kahneman points out in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow we all do when faced with a difficult question, which is to substitute an easier one.    "What is Justice?" is certainly a difficult question, so it comes naturally to us to substitute an easier one, "what is fairness" and this is just what Rawls has done.    His answer can be expressed in four words, a simple rule of the playground for fair division:   you half, I choose.    And we can ask, who knows more about justice, us, or John Rawls?    You might think the answer is John Rawls, who is after all considered the leading 20th century authority on the subject.   But actually, he is not aware of the substitution he has made, and if we are aware of the that and understand that justice is not the same as fairness, we can say we know more than him because we at least know one thing about justice, whereas Rawls knows precisely nothing, because all his thinking and writing on the matter is actually about another subject.

Now what about courage?    Courage is the efficient cause of the state, because before you can have any kind of government, you first have to control a territory in which you can enforce the rule of law, and this means you have to have armed forces, people who are willing to risk their lives in order to establish and maintain the rule of law.   Power is the essence of politics.   If you don’t have power, it’s not politics and politics cannot exist without power, without the instruments of repression and control, the armed forces, the penal system, the courts and so on.   Without courage, the state and the rule of law could not exist, that is how important it is.   In a word, it is essential, and you can’t get any more important than that.

So let’s have a look at how Social Contract theorists think about power.    At the modern and weakest extreme, thinkers like John Rawls ignore power altogether, and there is no mention of it at all in Rawls’  A Theory of Justice, which is another reason you can say it is not a work of political theory, because you can’t have a political theory that leaves out the most important aspect of the political, power.    Less wooly thinkers like Hobbes on the other hand do clearly understand the importance of political power, because for Hobbes “a covenant without the sword is of no force to bind a man”.    This is fairly typical of contractarian thinking.   In an ideal world where everyone was rational and negated their personal interests in favour of the general, so the thinking goes, you wouldn’t need power, or government at all really;  but that is a utopia we will never reach because people cannot be trusted to behave rationally all the time without some external encouragement, so power is an unfortunate necessity.    It’s there, but subordinate to reason and resulting from reason, and as to where it comes from, well this isn’t really addressed but the implication is that the people who put their lives on the line to create that power are just the hired help, and they do it because they are paid to.    This really isn’t good enough – would you risk your life in return for wages?    It doesn’t make sense.   And there is a logical fallacy here.   Just because you identify a “need” for something doesn’t mean that that thing exists or that that need is satisfied.    I need a helicopter and a yacht, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean that I have them.

Whatever way you look at it the virtue of courage has gone.   In Rawles it is totally absent, and in Hobbes, Rouseau and the rest, it is subordinate to reason, resulting from it, and therefore is no longer a cardinal virtue.   So in modern contractarian thinking both the efficient cause of the good, Courage, and it’s final cause, Justice, have either disappeared altogether, or have been so effectively subordinated to Reason that they no longer function as cardinal virtues.      So  can you see what has this means?    What is a philosophy like that has abandoned efficient and final cause?    Well the final cause is purpose, telos, so you can say that without this, philosophy has no purpose, and because purpose is also meaning you can say with some accuracy that this philosophy has become meaningless.   And efficient cause is power, so a philosophy that lacks efficient cause is impotent;  so modern contractarian thinking is pointless, meaningless, and impotent;   and that is in fact the general perception of modern philosophy, not just as seen from the outside but also the view of many of its practitioners most of whom have long abandoned the idea that philosophy has any purpose beyond academic exercise.  

So if you like the idea of philosophy that is pointless and impotent, modern philosophy with its contractarian views is for you.    If you think on the other hand that it ought to have a purpose, a meaning, and power, then you need to reject the notion that Reason is the absolute, that man is the measure of all things, and say instead that the Absolute is the Good, and that it has four pillars in the cardinal virtues which must be part of any political theory.    Reason is indeed one of them, but you need the rest as well.    And by the way there is a view these days that political theory is a kind of special interest in philosophy;   but if political theory is an account of justice, and justice is what gives meaning to the good, it’s pretty clear that it is essential and perhaps the most important  aspect of philosophy of all.     It’s a real problem then that the big hitters in modern philosophy all adopt the notion of the social contract, because it means their ideas are worthless and we really need to start all over again if we want to understand the political.   There is one philosopher in the modern era, and to my knowledge only one, who does try to build an account of the state that includes the cardinal virtues, and who rejects the notion of social contract out of hand, and that is Hegel in the Philosophy of Right.    There’s nothing else apart from the ancient classics, so I guess that is where you have to start.

How Hegel develops platonic idealism in the Phenomenology of Spirit (talk given to Kingston Philosophy group 21/9/11)

My last talk on the purpose of philosophy was in essence a defence of Platonic idealism.    To recap briefly, the question was where do our ideas come from?   For modern philosophy there are only two possibilities: reason, and experience.    As Hume said, all propositions are either relations of ideas, or matters of fact, and anything else is ultimately metaphysical and for him this means without meaning.    So take the idea of beauty for example.    Clearly you can't deduce beauty, so can it come from observation?   Do we see beautiful things, recognise that they have something in common, and through the process of learning language learn to give this shared property its conventional name, beauty?    Do we abstract the notion of beauty from experience?    This is the view of modern philosophy - Locke in particular - and is also the view of common sense.    There is however a simple problem with it.    How can I experience beauty, if I don't first have the notion of beauty?    Imagine if you can a being which has no concept of beauty.    That being will never experience beauty; and we will never be able to teach it what beauty is.    The truth is that far from abstracting beauty from experience, it is the concept of beauty that allows us to have the experience of beauty.     Locke's mistake is that he confuses sense-data with experience.     Sense data in fact are just that, data, numbers, readings from our sense organs.    In order to turn them into experience we have to apply ideas to them, and the ideas are not part of the data.   We cannot therefore say that we take the notion of beauty from experience.    This is why Plato said that appearance - in this case of beauty - is illusion, and that the truth of beauty is not the individual appearances of beauty, but the idea of beauty itself.   Beauty exists independently of experience and is what allows us to have experience of instances of beauty.    This is idealism, the notion that ideas are logically prior to experience, and it is the cornerstone of classical philosophy.

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.