We should desire to have in the state nothing except what is an expression of rationality. The state is the world which mind has made for itself; its march, therefore, is on lines that are fixed and absolute. How often we talk of the wisdom of God in nature! But we are not to assume for that reason that the physical world of nature is a loftier thing than the world of mind. As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity, and observe that if it is difficult to comprehend nature, it is infinitely harder to understand the stateIt is not too much to say that the more I understand Hegel, the more I understand how we got in this mess. The problem is more with those who followed him than with the man himself, but the errors of our age grew out of ground he cultivated.
Hegel on the State
A striking quote in a section of the Philosophy of Right.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
It's all about control.
What I think I finally grasped today is just how the control is supposed to function. Hegel's system is rooted on self-determination, which ought to produce a relatively free society. However, just after this bit he praises Napoleon for having written a more rational constitution for the Spanish, but says the Spanish weren't cultivated enough to appreciate it.
What turns out to be the case is that "self-determination" is not a synonym for "choice." It's not that the Spanish were morally free to self-determine themselves to be Catholic and to defend their favored mores; it is that self-determination has to follow rationality as defined in the paragraph I quoted. The state is supposed to be a clean expression of rationality, which not just can but ought to destroy any form inherited by tradition. It may take a while, but the hope is to sweep the world clean of everything we inherited from our ancestors -- except, of course, reason.
The reason this is a terrible idea is of course the one Tex mentioned recently: a culture encodes a massive amount of information that we don't have access to otherwise. All those lessons are lost with the forms that, however much you didn't understand the purpose for them, each came to be for a reason.
This is, of course, the fallacy of Chesterton's fence.
Rose Wilder Lane, who would become a pioneering Libertarian writer, was still a Communist when she visited the Soviet Union in 1919. In Russian Georgia, the villager who was her host complained about the growing bureaucracy that was taking more and more men from productive work, and predicted chaos and suffering from the centralizing of economic power in Moscow. At first she saw his attitude as merely “the opposition of the peasant mind to new ideas,” and undertook to convince him of the benefits of central planning. He shook his head sadly.
"It is too big – he said – too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.”
This insight seems to be incomprehensible to many people.
Venerate my a**.
This isn't even good smoke and mirrors.
A basic principle that judges use in the US to cut through the bull in the courtroom is to interrupt counsel and ask directly: "What relief do you seek?" It is an amazingly clarifying question. What Hegel wants people to do is submit to the state, whether or not the state operates for their good.
The method Hegel wants to use is substitute the State for God, so that people cannot think clearly about what the state really is. He rejects the notion that governments are instituted among men to serve the interests of men, and that their just powers are derived from the consent of the governed.
This man is a slave-maker.
Valerie
@Grim: Ah, Chesterton's fence -- I was using it just last week in reference to the "gay marriage' debate.
Anything to keep Chesterton alive in our minds is a good reference.
Chesterton is always worth remembering.
Valerie:
I'm sure Hegel didn't intend to enslave anyone. But as the saying goes, you know a tree by its fruit. Some say that the battle of Stalingrad was fought between the Hegelian Left and the Hegelian Right, although that may not be quite fair given that the National Socialists might not really be properly described as "Right," and it is not a sure thing that Hegel would have approved of any of them. But he approved of Napoleon, who was in some ways the first of that breed.
The ones we have today seem genuinely to think of themselves as liberators, but what they often want to liberate us from are things we think we have some reasons to love or to trust -- or else, as often, they want to liberate us from Nature. I hear them say that this is done in the service of rationality, but I can't think of much that is more irrational given what we know about mankind.
Something interesting from my studies of Marx is that he hated Hegel. His version of communism was an intentional inversion of Hegelian beliefs. However, it still seems to have resulted in a Hegelian state; the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible to maintain.
Post a Comment