Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

of political unity, and thrown itself on the goodwill of its members. What then, it may be asked, is, in Hegel's view, the indispensable minimum essential to a state? And the answer will be, organised strength,—a central and united force. “The strength of a country lies neither in the multitude of its inhabitants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its size, but solely in the way its parts are by reasonable combination made a single political force enabling everything to be used for the common defence.” Hegel speaks scornfully of “the philanthropists and moralists who decry politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private utility at the cost of right”: he tells them that “it is foolish to oppose the interest or (as it is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the utility of the state to its right”: that the “rights of a state are the utility of the state as established and recognised by compacts”: and that “war” (which they [pg clxxxii] would fain abolish or moralise) “has to decide not which of the rights asserted by either party is the true right (—for both parties have a true right), but which right has to give way to the other.”

It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of political supremacy which has been associated with the name of Hobbes. But his views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, “who can rule and dare not lie.” “All states,” he declares, “are founded by the sublime force of great men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his features which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against their will. Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is otherwise.... This is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to express the absolute will. All gather round his banner. He is their God.” “The state,” he says again, “is the self-certain absolute mind which recognises no definite authority but its own: which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception.” So also Hobbes describes the prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But the Hegelian God immanent in the state is a higher power than Hobbes knows: he is no mortal, but in his truth an immortal God. He speaks by (what in this early essay is called) the Absolute Government97: the government of the Law—the true impersonal sovereign,—distinct alike from the single ruler and the multitude of the ruled. “It is absolutely only universality as against particular. As this absolute, ideal, universal, compared to which everything else is a particular, it is the phenomenon of God. Its words are his decision, and it can appear [pg clxxxiii] and exist under no other form.... The Absolute government is divine, self-sanctioned and not made98.” The real strength—the real connecting-mean which gives life to sovereign and to subject—is intelligence free and entire, independent both of what individuals feel and believe and of the quality of the ruler. “The spiritual bond,” he says in a lower form of speech, “is public opinion: it is the true legislative body, national assembly, declaration of the universal will which lives in the execution of all commands.” This still small voice of public opinion is the true and real parliament: not literally making laws, but revealing them. If we ask, where does this public opinion appear and how does it disengage itself from the masses of partisan judgment? Hegel answers,—and to the surprise of those who have not entered into the spirit of his age99—it is embodied in the Aged and the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in the real world: they are by nature and function disengaged from the struggles of particular existence, have risen above the divergencies of social classes. They breathe the ether of pure contemplation. “The sunset of life gives them mystical lore,” or at least removes from old age the distraction of selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions of human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel's view is that the real voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained indifference to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see life steadily and whole.

If this utterance shows the little belief Hegel had in the ordinary methods of legislation through “representative” bodies, and hints that the real substance of political [pg clxxxiv] life is deeper than the overt machinery of political operation, it is evident that this theory of “divine right” is of a different stamp from what used to go under that name. And, again, though the power of the central state is indispensable, he is far from agreeing with the so-called bureaucratic view that “a state is a machine with a single spring which sets in motion all the rest of the machinery.” “Everything,” he says, “which is not directly required to organise and maintain the force for giving security without and within must be left by the central government to the freedom of the citizens. Nothing ought to be so sacred in the eyes of a government as to leave alone and to protect, without regard to utilities, the free action of the citizens in such matters as do not affect its fundamental aim: for this freedom is itself sacred100.” He is no friend of paternal bureaucracy. “The pedantic craving to settle every detail, the mean jealousy against estates and corporations administrating and directing their own affairs, the base fault-finding with all independent action on the part of the citizens, even when it has no immediate bearing on the main political interest, has been decked out with reasons to show that no penny of public expenditure, made for a country of twenty or thirty millions' population, can be laid out, without first being, not permitted, but commanded, controlled and revised by the supreme government.” You can see, he remarks, in the first village after you enter Prussian territory the lifeless and wooden routine which prevails. The whole country suffers also from the way religion has been mixed up with political rights, and a particular creed pronounced by law indispensable both for sovereign and full-privileged subject. In a word, the unity and vigour of the state is quite compatible with considerable latitude [pg clxxxv] and divergence in laws and judicature, in the imposition and levying of taxes, in language, manners, civilisation and religion. Equality in all these points is desirable for social unity: but it is not indispensable for political strength.

This decided preference for the unity of the state against the system of checks and counterchecks, which sometimes goes by the name of a constitution, came out clearly in Hegel's attitude in discussing the dispute between the Würtembergers and their sovereign in 1815-16. Würtemberg, with its complicated aggregation of local laws, had always been a paradise of lawyers, and the feudal rights or privileges of the local oligarchies—the so-called “good old law”—were the boast of the country. All this had however been aggravated by the increase of territory received in 1805: and the king, following the examples set by France and even by Bavaria, promulgated of his own grace a “constitution” remodelling the electoral system of the country. Immediately an outcry burst out against the attempt to destroy the ancient liberties. Uhland tuned his lyre to the popular cry: Rückert sang on the king's side. To Hegel the contest presented itself as a struggle between the attachment to traditional rights, merely because they are old, and the resolution to carry out reasonable reform whether it be agreeable to the reformed or not: or rather he saw in it resistance of particularism, of separation, clinging to use and wont, and basing itself on formal pettifogging objections, against the spirit of organisation. Anything more he declined to see. And probably he was right in ascribing a large part of the opposition to inertia, to vanity and self-interest, combined with the want of political perception of the needs of Würtemberg and Germany. But on the other hand, he failed to remember the insecurity and danger of such [pg clxxxvi] “gifts of the Danai”: he forgot the sense of free-born men that a constitution is not something to be granted (octroyé) as a grace, but something that must come by the spontaneous act of the innermost self of the community. He dealt rather with the formal arguments which were used to refuse progress, than with the underlying spirit which prompted the opposition101.

The philosopher lives (as Plato has well reminded us) too exclusively within the ideal. Bent on the essential nucleus of institutions, he attaches but slight importance to the variety of externals, and fails to realise the practice of the law-courts. He forgets that what weighs lightly in logic, may turn the scale in real life and experience. For feeling and sentiment he has but scant respect: he is brusque and uncompromising: and cannot realise all the difficulties and dangers that beset the Idea in the mazes of the world, and may ultimately quite alter a plan which at first seemed independent of petty details. Better than other men perhaps he recognises in theory how the mere universal only exists complete in an individual shape: but more than other men he forgets these truths of insight, when the business of life calls for action or for judgment. He cannot at a moment's notice remember that he is, if not, as Cicero says, in faece Romuli, the member of a degenerate commonwealth, at least living in a world where good and evil are not, as logic presupposes, sharply divided but intricately intertwined.

[pg clxxxvii]