Hegel and the Origins of Critical Theory: Aeschylus and Tragedy in the Natural Law Essay

Wes Furlotte, Ph.D Thompson Rivers University Department of Philosophy, History and Politics Department of English and Modern Languages “Hegel and the Origins of Critical Theory: Aeschylus and Tragedy in the Natural Law Essay” 0. An Introduction to The Problematic Ambiguity of Hegel’s Natural Law Essay Hegel’s Natural Law1 essay (1802-03) is best understood as an important yet often forgotten text in the history of critical social theory. It aims not only to evaluate the underlying causes of structural problems permeating the socio-politico-economic registers of Modern Enlightenment Europe as it found itself in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial, French, and Kantian Revolutions but also to reconfigure the conceptual schemes and methodology used to think through these problems with complex precision. First published in the Kritisches Journal in Jena, the essay announces Hegel’s definitive break with the abstract individualism undergirding the critical philosophies of Kant and Fichte, on the one hand, the metaphysical framework of Schelling’s Identity Philosophy, on the other. Here we discover exploratory blueprints of Hegel’s emergent dialectical method: the essay places the totality of a community in its historical unfolding at the forefront of the analysis, insisting that dialectical processes of internal differentiation and unity constitute the reality of social life. Hegel maintains that such a method is the only way to properly engage the real processes constituting a community’s moral-ethicaleconomical-cultural life. The Natural Law essay, therefore, reads as an embryonic manifesto of methodological principle and thematic motifs which will be systematically developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Natural Law trans. T.M. Knox (USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975); hereafter NL and page number (p.##). Where helpful original German terms are from Werke [in 20 Bänden auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832-45], eds. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970); hereafter W followed by volume number (#) and page number (p.##). Original German terms indicated with square brackets […]. 0 Analyzing the destabilizing effects of property exchange within the modern European nation state, Hegel enigmatically remarks that these processes constitute “…the performance, on the ethical plane, of the tragedy which the absolute eternally enacts with itself” [Es ist dies nichts anderes als die Aufführung der Tragödie im Sittlichen, welche das Absolute ewig mit sich selbst spielt].2 Elaborating, Hegel’s strikingly original interpretation proposes to illuminate the key elements and players involved in the processes of this “tragedy of the absolute” by way of Aeschylus’ The Eumenides. In what follows, I contend that Hegel’s utterly distinct use of The Eumenides is highly ambivalent and ultimately problematic to the precise degree that it advances a metaphysical-aesthetic justification of the institution of private property in the Modern European nation state thereby pronouncing it a “metaphysical necessity” that is crucial to the “tragic life of the absolute” and so too social life. Such a move, however, serves to deny the possibility of meaningful critique on this front, corresponding social change. That pronouncement, therefore, marks the point at which the text becomes antithetical to the demands of critical social theory, as developed in the works of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse et al., where metaphysical claims of this sort are consistently rejected for philosophical inquiry into the possibility of real social change where domination and barbarism are challenged, dethroned, and, ultimately, bypassed with the objective of realizing a higher order of social freedom. To begin, I here offer a preliminary sketch of the ambiguity at the centre of Hegel’s analysis. On the one hand, immediately preceding the introduction of The Eumenides, Hegel’s investigation prioritizes the method of historical development. Proceeding historically, Hegel generates an intense sense of the problem the unchecked expansion of property relations, their corresponding legal sphere, poses to the effective purchase of morality, and the living unity 2 NL, p.104; W2, p.495. Emphasis added. 1 binding a society in the modern European world. On the other hand, the analysis’ introduction of “the absolute” and tragedy, The Eumenides, and aesthetic categories as “instruments of reconciliation,” by which the problem of property is sublated, undermine its methodological commitment to developing these contradictory tensions, and the possibility of their resolution, historically. Indeed, appealing to aesthetic concepts with the objective of “resolving” the property question entails an untenable aestheticizing of the political wherein problematic forms of social marginalization gain traction, are reinforced, and ultimately framed as “metaphysically necessary.” In this precise sense, Hegel’s analysis relies on an aesthetic metaphysics for the “resolution” of this problem. The essay’s methodological breakthrough insists on the priority of historically developing a sense of the dialectical processes concerning the social totality but capitulates in the final analysis proposing resolution in terms of knowledge, aesthetic criteria, the atemporal perspective of “the absolute.” Hegel’s appeal to the absolute, tragedy, and The Eumenides, consequently, offers us a precise sense of what is most valuable and problematic in the Natural Law essay, revealing the utmost limits of what this exploratory essay offered in the advancement of what we have come to know as critical social analysis. Exploring this tension in detail, I will first reconstruct Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s system of natural law. Hegel argues that Fichte’s system is “self-cancelling” [sich selbst aufhebt]3 and so the demand for an alternative perspective from which to frame the question of the social realization of freedom. In a second moment, I will trace the constitutive features of Hegel’s category of “absolute ethical totality” [absolute sittliche Totalität; absoluten Sittlichkeit].4 I emphasize how it connects to the lexicon of organic process, insists on internal differentiation (class divisions) and relational movement (dialectal process) as critical to the dynamic life of the 3 4 NL, p.88; W2, p.475. NL, p.92; W2, p.480-81. 2 whole community which unfolds historically. In a final moment, I develop the contradictory tensions that Hegel attributes to the modern European nation state, particularly the conundrum of the “second class” and its exclusive concern with property relations. I then reconstruct Hegel’s account of the “tragedy on the ethical plane,” which he connects with the necessary processes of “the absolute” itself, and detail how The Eumenides exemplifies what he categorizes as the “tragedy of the ethical”: it demonstrates the key players in that process, their respective fates. I contend that the dramatic shift in the analysis’ focus from the historical to the atemporal and aesthetic counteracts the real advance it simultaneously marks in methodology in terms of developing distinct social tensions historically. Before concluding, I explode the real risks that this appeal to the aesthetic entails. In aestheticizing the political one potentially justifies the social destabilization and marginalization of individuals and groups on the weak side of the power imbalances that the property relation entails. Again, these symptomatic phenomena ultimately reveal the real problem resident in Hegel’s appeal to the aesthetic in this context. Despite this setback, in concluding, I outline important lasting advantages for critical social theory that follow from Hegel’s underappreciated Natural Law essay. 1. Immanent Critique: Fichte and the System of Coercion Hegel’s essay constitutes a systematic challenge to Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Law (1796). It develops penetrating criticisms concerning abstraction, first formulated in the Differenzschrift (1801) but now redeployed to address the subjects of natural law and morality. Hegel’s wager is that a reconstruction of Fichte’s analysis will reveal its intrinsic limitations therefore introducing the demand for an alternative perspective from which to consider the problematical relationship 3 between law and morality, and their respective sciences, thereby clearing the way for his own position. Fichte, says Hegel, begins from within the individualistic standpoint of personhood where one has “…a body which is subject to the laws of physical nature.”5 Human action is unthinkable except in terms of material bodies in space x, time y etc. This material aspect of personhood is separate from the domain of morality, viz. concerns of intentionality and good will and so they are distinct fields of inquiry, the one having nothing to do with the other. Society, on the Fichtean model, concerns the legal sphere, and its purpose is to provide the space for each and every free individual to exercise his/her freedom as expressed physically. This objective is achieved negatively, in the libertarian sense, each individual’s sphere of freedom is restricted such that each and every person is accorded their respective space of self-determination. Fichte writes: “each is to limit his freedom through the concept of the possibility of the other’s freedom.”6 Members of civil society must reciprocally recognize one another as autonomous agents and so devise a mechanism for mutual security. Security cannot hold only for one but must be applicable to all. However, there is no way to be certain that each will respect others’ claims to freedom. This comprehensive uncertainty introduces the demand for a third party—overseeing the intersubjective register so as to enforce the respective boundaries allotted to all individuals involved and one avoids transgression to avoid pains of punishment meted out by the Hobbesian authority. There are no guarantees: one can always resist such forces and establish themselves as beyond concerns of security and material comfort. But, an omnipresent surveillance and H.B. Acton, “Introduction,” NL, p.28. J. G. Fichte Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.49 (§4.111). 5 6 4 enforcement apparatus would ensure a high-rate of punishment for infractions and so deter the populace more generally. Hegel argues that Fichte’s conception of the state emphasizes the physical dimension of persons, their rights in property etc., and so their physical security. This makes sense given Fichte’s claim that it is only in the physical sphere that human agency finds reality. Such a framework results, however, in what Hegel characterizes as a “universal system of compulsion” [diesem allgemeinen Systeme des Zwangs].7 The state manifests itself as a force which imposes respect for the legal prescripts that the society has agreed on concerning the exercise of individual freedom. The emphasis Fichte places on the restriction of self-interested activity entails a multiplicity of restrictive legal prescripts. Yet, Hegel maintains that such a system of compulsion is “self-cancelling,” [sich selbst aufhebt].8 Hegel argues that the threat of compulsion cannot, in the final analysis, force an individual into submissive identification with the dictates of the legal regime. One retains the possibility of absolute resistance. Hegel writes: “…by his ability to die the subject proves himself free and entirely above all coercion. Death is the absolute subjugator.”9 For Hegel, this example demonstrates a lacuna within the Ficthean explanatory matrix, accounting for legal freedom strictly in restrictive terms of individuals’ physical security, protection in terms of external force. For Fichte, there is a multiplicity of restrictive legal prescripts which enforce such security. However, Hegel argues that the case of absolute resistance demonstrates a level of freedom which is entirely unaccounted for and yet 7 NL, p.85; W2, p.472. NL, p.88; W2, p.475. 9 NL, p.91; W2, p.479. 8 5 demands explanation if the Fichtean analysis of the social realization of freedom is to be “absolute.”10 Hegel’s critique operates on two interconnected planes. One the one hand, Fichte’s framework does not offer a sense of the dynamical unity that must, for Hegel, connect members of a given society over and above ‘legal prescripts’: it perpetually dirempts the universal sphere of legality from the flux of individual’s self-interested activities, problematically accounting for their unity in terms of fear and intimidation. Hegel characterizes such divisions as “abstractions without substance”, “creatures of imagination, without reality.” […daß sie wesenlose Abstraktionen, Gedankendinge oder Wesen der Einbildung, ohne Realität sind…].11 On the other hand, Fichte’s model treats legal violations as arithmetic transactions where one might exchange a “unit” of security violation for one of retribution. However, for Hegel, this model cannot account for the most important kind of freedom—that which outstrips concerns of physical security and which, nevertheless, appears crucial to the foundation and maintenance of a real society and so too the sciences of social organization. Hegel’s critique unfolds immanently because tracking the conceptual commitments of the Fichtean standpoint leads to the unresolvable problems of dynamical unity and the mode of freedom at the core of “absolute resistance.” This impasse therefore demonstrates the system’s “self-cancelation”, the nullity of its claims to comprehensiveness concerning social freedom.12 10 NL, p.90-91. NL, p.88; W2, p.476. 12 NL, p.88. 11 6 2. Absolute Ethical Totality: Internal Class Divisions, Dialectical Process, and Historical Development As a result of the the intractable problems emanating from Fichte’s framework Hegel proposes to reorient the analysis in terms of the category of “absolute ethical life”, “absolute ethical totality” [absolute sittliche Totalität; absoluten Sittlichkeit].13 “Absolute ethical totality” signifies, unlike Fichte’s starting-point of the Ich—positing the individual contra society—a unified people (Volk), i.e., a nation in relation to others. Hegel’s wager with the category of “absolute ethical totality” is that it is able to account for the living unity of a social community (people) in a way that is impossible from within the coordinates of the abstract individualism of the (Kantian-) Fichtean standpoints and so functions as a significant advance beyond the latter’s shortcomings concerning the social realization of freedom, its scientific treatment. This is not to suggest that Hegel sees no domain of validity for the Ficthean standpoint. To the contrary, it constitutes a “system of reality”14 with the caveat that it applies exclusively to the domain of possession, property, “physical necessity,” and “enjoyment” and so to only one dimension of human activity such that legal prescripts alone are unable to account for the dynamical unity which Hegel sees as crucial to the formation of a people. Such a system cannot therefore claim to offer an exhaustive account of what social freedom ultimately signifies. Hegel writes: “our treatment of the system of reality has shown that absolute ethical life must take a negative attitude to that system.”15 Concentrating on the unifying bond of a people Hegel writes that: “The individual proves his unity with the people unmistakably through the danger of death 13 NL, p.92; W2, p.480-81. NL, p.98. 15 NL, p.98. 14 7 alone.”16 Foreshadowing the master-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology, it is in the risk of death that the real unity of a people is discovered. Just as for Fichte self-consciousness only has meaning in reference to other self-consciousness subjects so too a nation can only exist in a multiplicity of nations with the consequence that they may coexist or they may conflict. War raises the prospect that an entire way of life might be negated (not just individuals within it). Contra Kant and Schelling, Hegel soberly maintains that “perpetual peace” is chimerical whereas the possibility of “annihilation” is real. Yet, in a conclusion entirely in accord with Rousseau,17 Hegel maintains that such a threat is, in a sense, crucial to statehood. It prevents a people’s institutions from calcification, contributing to their “ethical health,” an unthinkable move within the stasis of perpetual peace.18 For Hegel, consequently, the absolute ethical totality of a people constitutes their living identity, permeating the whole. Undermining abstraction, it is a process with which the people livingly identify such that a significant portion could not maintain their identity apart from it. This process of (trans-)formative identification between the “absolute ethical totality” and the individual who is “permeated” by that totality is critical to unpacking the full signification of Hegel’s position. Hegel maintains that such a vital unity needs to be thought not only in terms of relation, as in Fichte’s system, but in terms of shape [Gestalt]19 while retaining the quality of relation. But, what does this mean? Hegel writes that shape is: “…a relation of organic to 16 NL, p.93. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The State of War,” in Basic Political Writings. 2nd Edition. Ed. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2011), pp. 255–265. Consider the incessant activity that Rousseau assigns to the state, “the essence of society consists in the activity of its members and…a state without movement would be nothing but a dead body” (261). The necessary consequence of this incessant movement is conflict. In this sense, war is crucial to statehood. Rousseau writes: “I therefore call war between one power and another the effect of a mutual, steady, and manifest inclination to destroy the enemy state, or at least to weaken it, by all means possible” (264). 18 NL, p.93. 19 NL, p.98; W2, p.487. 17 8 inorganic nature.”20 Consequently, Hegel proposes to frame the dynamical identity between the “absolute ethical totality” and the individual in terms of organics such that internal moments of difference (individuals as organs) are preserved and annulled within the unified totality of the whole (totality as body politic). This reorientation of the conceptual schematic on the question of social freedom is highly significant. It expresses Hegel’s attempt to reconstruct it in conceptual terms of holistic process which he associates with the dialecticity of reason with a view to overcoming what he believes are the rigid distinctions of the understanding propelling Fichte’s analysis, preventing it from adequately accessing the life of the “absolute ethical totality.” In this sense, Hegel rejects the Kantian/Ficthean methodological principle which situates the individual over and against universal laws and maxims. Such an approach elides the living communities that ultimately generate and shape individual agents and so his demand for an alternative viewpoint. Consequently, his line of advance completely reorients the discussion. For Fichte, morality had been entirely bracketed from science of the legal, the former being a matter of conscience and the latter being a question of the state enforcing respect for the law and individuals’ freedom. By contrast, Hegel argues that it is the totality of the community and the laws which makes possible the emergence of morality, ethical conduct. The members (organs) of the unified body politic of a nation, for Hegel, internally differentiate into a “relative ethical life”, consisting in a tripartite class structure. Hegel takes this model from Plato and Aristotle although he will significantly rewrite it in light of developments stemming from industrial modes of production and modern conceptions of property, on the one hand, and their respective levels of freedom, on the other, which he gauges by the criterion of death. Hegel’s analysis displays therefore an historical sensitivity to fundamental differences 20 NL, p.98. 9 distinguishing modern Europe from Antiquity: processes of production, conceptions of property and modalities of freedom. For each class there is an internal dynamical process involving an organic and inorganic moment therefore reflecting and expressing processual structures permeating the entirety of the “absolute ethical totality.” The first class is “the living movement and the Divine self-enjoyment of this whole in its organs and members.”21 Composed of “single individuals” they are nevertheless unified in a “universal” project. They engage the “inorganic” register of different nations and work together to preserve the nation as an “absolute ethical totality.” Hegel says that they must be willing to engage “nullifying death” for “the preservation of the entirety of the ethical organization.”22 Simultaneously, they are committed to the public interest, “the totality” (which Plato connects with philosophy), and the development of the country’s political institutions and so their status as free. My point, here, however, is not to romanticize such “universality.” Rather, it is to indicate that such universality must be real for the functioning of the ethical totality itself. Indeed, as we will see, it is this very immanent universality that the second class puts in question. The second class consists of individuals who Hegel explicitly characterizes as “not free” […Stand der nicht Freien…]. 23 Their work relates to the domain of transactions: the “inorganic” objects of possession and property, concerns of physical need. The second class is proficient in law and has a sound understanding of the nature of transactions but, because they do not risk their lives in relation to the preservation of the ethical totality, and such a risk is the criterion of freedom, they are unfree. The third class consists of those individuals who are not versed in the laws of property and are determined by the “crudity of its uneducative work”, those who deal 21 NL, p.99. NL, p.99-100. 23 NL, p.100; W2, p.489. 22 10 with the “earth as an element.”24 Nevertheless, in entering the standing army “in their elemental being” they are connected to the freedom of the first class, they risk “violent death” insofar as they are subjected to the violence of war in the preservation of the “totality.” The social classes’ systolic and diastolic movements constitute the dynamical unity grounding the category of “absolute ethical totality.” While their unique movements and processes constitute the moments of internal differentiation (organs) within the body politic they are constantly deployed and aligned within the immanent unity of the “ethical totality.” 3. Contradictions of Modernity: (Absolute) Tragedy and Its Perpetual Re-enactment, The Eumenides In a highly condensed section of Hegel’s analysis he pays particular attention to the evolutionary transformations this tripartite class structure has undergone in distinct historical epochs, specifically Greece, the Roman World and emergent Modern Europe. This reveals the priority Hegel assigns historical development and comparison in his analysis of the social. While extremely challenging due its level of abstraction it is nonetheless important to track Hegel’s account of the historical emergence and evolution of the second class. Doing so will bring us into the very centre of his conclusions concerning the “tragedy of the ethical plane” and the ambiguous implications of his interpretation of Aeschylus’ The Eumenides. Hegel’s analysis emphasizes the historical emergence of “the specializing species amongst modern nations”, “the class of earners” [die erwerbende Klasse],25 i.e. the second class. Hegel starts in Greece and contends that the class which risks nothing courts the contempt of leadership and in so doing risks “punishment by exile”, going so far as to connect the absence of 24 25 NL, p.100. NL, p.100; W2, p.490. 11 virtue in particular individuals or groups with servitude. Insofar as the threat of death constitutes the criterion by which identity with the “ethical totality” is achieved those who do not undergo such a risk serve to destabilize the community’s immanent unity. Hegel’s analysis of the signification of slavery in the ancient world is a sobering refusal to edify. Slavery was crucial to the structure of the Greek “ethical totality” to the precise degree that the freedom of the nobility was intrinsically connected to a class of serfs. With, as Hegel puts it, “the loss of absolute ethical life and the degradation of the class of the nobility, the two formerly separate classes became equals; and, with the loss of freedom, slavery ceased of necessity.”26 This claim is important in several regards not least of which is that it connects the decline of Greek culture with the dissolution of the class distinctions constituting their unifying life blood. The emergence of “the Roman Empire” consequently poses anew the question concerning the unity of the “absolute ethical totality.” Hegel claims that in contradistinction to the dynamism of Greece the unifying bond crucial to the identity of the Roman world is one of externality. He writes: “when the principle of formal unity and equality had to be imposed, it generally cancelled the inner true difference of the classes.”27 This external imposition of “formal equality” functions paradoxically in that it signals the dissolution of servitude even though it, simultaneously, presupposes the imposition of unity. Hegel revealingly writes: “…these classes are [i.e. nobility and servitude], under the form of universality, in the relation of domination and dependence only as whole class to whole class, so that even in this relation the two in their bearing on one another remain universal; while in the relation of slavery the form of particularity determines the relation.”28 This indicates that the real structure of slavery, as in 26 NL, p.101. NL, p.101. Emphasis added. 28 NL, p.101. Emphasis added. 27 12 Greece, is grounded in particular differences, i.e. the features that are particular to the noble class in contrast to those constituting the class of servitude. That is to say, domination cannot function without these real qualitative differences. However, for Hegel, the Roman Empire, as shaped in part by the ascension of Christianity (an element which remains decidedly muted in his analysis), marks an increased emphasis on formal unity and, concomitantly, the imposition of universal form. It is, ultimately, the application of universal form which “generally cancelled the inner true difference of the classes.”29 Once the principle of universality “mastered the whole”, “the first class is in truth entirely cancelled, and the second alone becomes the people.”30 Consequently, the Roman Empire’s imposition of formal unity and equality on its citizenry marks the appearance of “universal private life” [allgemeinen Privatleben].31 Hegel writes: “This universal private life…immediately establishes the formal legal relationship which fixes, and posits absolutely, individual separate existence.”32 Correspondingly, it signifies the proliferation of the “system of property and law”, addressing the legal basis of property and contract which includes “the whole endless expansion of legislation.”33 It would be an error, however, to read Hegel as arguing for a Romantic return to “Greek substance,” facilely moralizing against the Roman era. Hegel sees this development as highly significant and necessary, marking an irretrievable fissure between it and the Grecian world. Hegel writes: “This system has to develop …it is necessary that this system be consciously adopted, recognized in its rightfulness, excluded from the class of the nobility and given a class of its own realm, where it can make itself secure and develop its whole activity…”34 The integrity of Hegel’s analysis is 29 NL, p.101. NL, p.101. Emphasis added. 31 NL, p.102; W2, p.492. 32 NL, p.102. Emphasis added. 33 NL, p.102. 34 NL, p.103. 30 13 that it soberly outlines the real significance of the advent of “universal private life” and the intensification of its concomitants property and property laws while simultaneously accentuating the problems for social life that necessarily arise out of such developments. Hegel is explicit in this latter regard: there are intrinsic limitations in terms of what “universal private life” can provide the “ethical totality” in terms of identity and unity and so a state risks radical volatility insofar as it is permitted unlimited reign and not confined within set, yet fluid, boundaries of the larger architectonics of the community. Recall that a system of formal unity “…consists not in anything absolute and eternal, but wholly in the finite” and so its inability to function as the source of unity within the polis. It offers little in this regard and also denotes why, amidst a cacophony of individuals of the second class making claims to possession, Hegel connects the Roman era in its decent with servitude. Quoting Gibbon’s History of the Roman Empire, Hegel dryly remarks that the uniformity of “private life”… “…introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,” and, continuing, states that, “They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign…The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects…and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life.”35 Therefore, a unique dimension of the Roman Empire’s ascension simultaneously announces its demise. Nevertheless, Hegel writes: “…the most complete structure of a system of law based on this relationship has formed and evolved out of such corruption and universal degradation.”36 I believe that Hegel connects the modern European state with this “most complete structure of a system.” The fitful development of the second class in Rome finds its complete articulation in the Modern European state’s property dynamics. If this supposition is 35 36 NL, p.102. NL, p.102. 14 correct it would indicate that the complete permeation of the second class by the relation of possession results in a situation where each individual is capable of possession (at least formally): each is related to all others in the social whole “as being a burgher in the sense of bourgeois”, i.e., one who owns property and its enjoyment.37 Hegel writes: “members of this class are private individuals, the burgher finds compensation in the fruits of the system; i.e., peace and gain and perfect security in their enjoyment individually and as a whole. The individual’s security as a whole is involved because he is exempt form courage and spared the necessity (laid on the first class) of exposing himself to the danger of violent death…”38 This acerbic assessment likely serves a twofold function: it denotes Hegel’s criticism of certain forms of material affluence and indifference that he found in the “Germany” of his time while also signifying the more universal phenomenon of the intensifying power of, and legal space accorded to, the bourgeoisie’s property concerns throughout modern European nation states. In this sense, Hegel’s nuanced analysis has isolated a potentially lethal scission within the “totality” of the Modern state, one which might serve to undermine the polis as in the example of the Roman Empire. In key ways the analysis here then anticipates key insights of young Marx and the destabilizing implications of private property. Hegel then writes: As a result of the supersession [aufgehobene] of this confusion of principles, and their established and conscious separation, each of them is done justice, and that alone which ought to be is brought into existence (i.e. the reality of ethical life as absolute indifference, and at the same time the reality of that indifference as real relation in persistent opposition) so that the second is overcome by the first and this compulsion itself is made identical and reconciled.39 The question becomes: how exactly is this supersession/sublation achieved? The opening qualification “As a result” indicates that the very supersession that demands demonstration has 37 NL, p.103. NL, p.103. 39 NL, p.101. Emphasis added. 38 15 already been achieved. Having systematically developed an acute sense of the threat the unrestrained expansion of the second class poses to the “ethical totality.” Hegel asserts its “supersession” by the sphere of the first class. But how, exactly, this is to be effected is passed over in silence. Simultaneously, the analysis’ methodological principle of the historical development of the class dynamics constituting the Modern European nation state appears to be jettisoned and an atemporal perspective adopted in its stead. Hegel writes: “This reconciliation lies precisely in the knowledge of necessity [Versöhnung eben in der Erkenntnis der Notwendigkeit], and in the right which ethical life concedes to its inorganic nature, and to the subterranean powers by making over and sacrificing to them one part of itself.”40 Therefore, reconciliation of a distinct historical tension becomes a question of epistemology. In the spirit of Spinoza, rational understanding of things as they are introduces real freedom. In truly comprehending the register of the second class, the inorganic domain of things and their exchange, as a necessary dimension of the social, the threat is supposedly dissolved. Hegel then reveals that this tension is “nothing else but the performance, on the ethical plane, of the tragedy which the Absolute eternally enacts with itself…” [Aufführung der Tragödie im Sittlichen, Aufführung der Tragödie im Sittlichen, welche das Absolute ewig mit sich selbst spielt] and states that it does so by, “eternally giving birth to itself into objectivity, submitting in this objective form to suffering and death, and rising from its ashes into glory.”41 Consequently, the distinctly modern European configuration of class relations is now framed atemporally in terms of the process which “the absolute enacts with itself.” On this account the perpetual re-enactment of these contradictory tendencies somehow constitutes their overcoming but, by the same token their reestablishment. Hegel indeed goes so far as to state that this 40 41 NL, p.104. Emphasis added; W2, p.494. NL, p.104; W2, p.495. 16 “perpetual process” is tragedy herein introducing his truly striking interpretation of ancient tragedy as a sort of heuristic framework by which we might better understand the structure of this social phenomenon. He writes: “Tragedy consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature (in order not to become embroiled in it), as a fate [als ein Schicksal], and places it outside itself, and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as the unity of both.”42 The category of fate [Schiksal] implicates Hegel’s Berne-Frankfurt research concerning the history of Christianity though here it is redeployed in the exploration of an undoubtedly related, yet distinct, socio-economic problem. Simultaneously, this shift in perspective sterilizes the analysis of historical detail, introducing formal distinctions concerning the “tragedy of the ethical” which, ultimately, constitutes its identity with the movements of “the absolute.” The particulars of class dynamics disintegrate within the crucible of the atemporal: a formal residue remains and obliterates the specifics of early nineteenth century class dynamics. Tragic art renders these tensions immediately intelligible (Phantasie): it has purchase at both the cognitive and sensual levels and, in so doing, forcefully replicates the dynamical movements of the ethical and “the absolute.” Aesthetic sensibility, therefore, is crucial to rational comprehension. Comedy [die Komödie],43 by contrast, “…will generally come down on the side of absence of fate.”44 In this sense, it lacks a moment of real difference and so its inferiority. Modern comedy: “…falls within non-life and therefore presents only shadows of selfdetermination and absoluteness.”45 Modern comedy lacks the perspective of “the absolute,” real difference and fateful struggle, and so its distance from the dynamics of “the real,” its 42 NL, p.105; W2, p.496. NL, p.105; W2, p.496. 44 NL, p.105. 45 NL, p.105. 43 17 subordination to tragedy. Elaborating on this defect, Hegel scathingly writes that in modern comedy: “….the ethical urge…must…transmute the existent into the formal and negative absoluteness of law. And thereby it must give its anxious mind the impression that its possessions are secure, must lift all its belongings to safety and certainty by contracts and all imaginable varieties of clause and subclause in the formulary.”46 There is a distinct sense in which this verdict functions as a damning assessment of Fichte’s system of natural law. Fichte’s framework constitutes the completion of a “system of compulsion” which ultimately focuses exclusively on physical security, property relations, and the legal prescripts pertaining to both. In this precise sense, Fichte’s framework, for Hegel, constitutes the philosophical manifesto of that modern comedy. Continuing, Hegel provocative interpretation maintains that Aeschylus’s The Eumenides offers a forceful picture of this “tragedy on the ethical plane.” It consists, “…of that litigation between the Eumenides (as the powers of the law in the sphere of difference) and Apollo (the god of indifferenced light) over Orestes, conducted before the organized ethical order, the people of Athens.”47 Elaborating on how this conflict depicts the movement of the absolute itself and the tragedy of modern European socio-political life, Hegel states that in the human mode, “Athens, as the Areopagus, puts equal votes in the urn for each litigant and recognizes their coexistence; though it does not thereby…settle the relation between the powers or their bearing on one another.”48 Consequently, the contradictory tendencies that the analysis carefully developed concerning the second class’ destabilizing emphasis on property dynamics only finds reconciliation with the ethical totality in the “Divine mode.” It is Athena who “separates the 46 NL, p.107. NL, p.105. 48 NL, p.105. Emphasis added. 47 18 powers” of the two registers, each having legitimate claims against the criminal Orestes, and in so doing brings about a “…reconciliation in such a way that the Eumenides would be revered by this people as Divine powers, and would now have their place in the city, so that their savage nature would enjoy…the sight of Athene enthroned on high on the Acropolis, and thereby be pacified.”49 The originality of the interpretation, however, does not come without questions. Despite claiming “reconciliation” it is not clear how Hegel’s appeal to the Eumenides in any way resolves the distinct class tensions with which his analysis begins. It is not evident how recognizing the necessity of the second class is supposed to bypass the social instabilities which they themselves are essential in generating. Indeed, Hegel’s prior analysis demonstrated the real threat they pose to the unity of the ethical totality. Again, the analysis has already demonstrated what the unchecked expansion of the second class means for the “ethical totality”: the burgher finds “peace and gain and perfect security” insofar as one remains ensconced within the ebb and flow of material satisfactions and it is not clear that rational comprehension alone constitutes meaningful social transformation on this front.50 I contend that the very shift to the metaphysical standpoint of the absolute and appeal to aesthetic categories, which were meant to demonstrate the overcoming of such questions, instead serves to intensify them, expose the vulnerability of the very justification in question. While objective knowledge of real structural processes will always be paramount in critical-diagnostic social analysis, the absolute, tragedy, and the example of the Eumenides, while brilliantly deployed, do not adequately justify or resolve the distinctly modern European socio-political problems which the analysis had initially isolated. One could 49 NL, p.105. It is worth noting that within Aeschylus’ text the furies willfully handover authority to Athena. Consider lines 440450. Aeschylus writes: “Athena: And you are set on the name of justice rather than the act. / Leader: How? Teach us. You have a genius for refinements. / Athena: Injustice, I mean, should never triumph thanks to oaths. / Leader: Then examine him yourself, judge him fairly. / Athena: You would turn over responsibility to me, to reach the final verdict? / Leader: Certainly. We respect you. You show us respect.” (Emphasis added). See Aeschylus’s The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides ed. and trans. W.B. Stanford, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics, 1984). 50 19 legitimately argue that “fateful” concession to the “subterranean powers” [unterirdischen Mächten] only exacerbates the problem: hush money to a corrupt force does not constitute real reform. Appeal to “the absolute” in this regard becomes highly suspect. Consequently, I contend that while Hegel’s singular interpretation of Aeschylus provides a unique point of entrance into thinking this problem I also believe that the use of the Eumenides and tragedy to explain private property’s distinct socio-historical developments means that the analysis ultimately advances an aesthetic justification (tragedy of the ethical) of the phenomenon in question. This move is at bottom, I believe, untenable. Not only does it risk eliminating historical concreteness from the analysis, its mytho-poetical justificatory ground risks serious ideological misuse. This misuse is laid bare in critical social theory. By way of mytho-poetical appeals, private property is justified and schematized as timeless, inevitable, a “metaphysical power” to be endured by way of fateful concession. Therefore, one might legitimately argue that this aspect of the analysis “estheticizes the political.” That is to say, it seeks an atemporalaesthetic justification for a historical social problem that remains open to the real possibility of change. Yet, doing so effectively serves to obscure private property’s contradictory, destabilizing effect on the modern European nation state, leaves it untouched, categorizes it as a fateful necessity of the “tragic life of the absolute.” Critical social theorists have argued that when political and economic institutions seek to suppress the question of property dynamics and the possibility of social change dangerous social conditions emerge: in strategies of avoidance, the populace must instead be mobilized and deployed in the interests of conflict. Walter Benjamin writes: “all efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That point is war.”51 While Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media eds. 51 20 Hegel’s philosophy is not equivalent to politics, I believe Benjamin’s warning still has purchase concerning the Natural Law essay’s analysis of modern European society’s class dynamics. In other words, applying the essence of Benjamin’s evaluation to Hegel’s analysis would generate counsel worth careful consideration. Such an application would maintain that it is crucial to remain highly critical of Hegel’s analysis at the very point at which it introduces aesthetic categories to account for a socio-economic contradiction which it cannot further concretely conceptualize. This aestheticization of the problem initially isolated ultimately serves to conceal and obfuscate the real social tensions it cannot further track conceptually. The analysis’ appeal to aesthetic categories introduces a host of readily questionable metaphysical, ethical, sociopolitical presuppositions that atemporalize, and so preserve and perhaps even intensify, the very social phenomenon in question. This aestheticization of the analysis obliterates its historical and critical dimension, hijacks it, and in so doing, risks demarcating the entire schema as reactionary. The move, at least in principle, leaves the property dynamic unscathed, and in this sense leaves the analysis open to enlistment in the interests of force—powers active in the modern European nation state which it analyzes. Concomitantly, the anesthetization of modern class tensions risks reinforcing the marginalized status of individuals and groups on the weak side of the power imbalance which the property relation entails. It hazards marking property, and so inequality, as a metaphysical inevitability. Critical social theory, to the extent that it challenges inequality, especially when marked as metaphysically necessary and inevitable, must reject this move in toto. Micheal W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (London: Belknap Press, 2008), pp. 19-55. Here, p. 41. 21 In an attempt to counter this criticism, one might argue that Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821)52 abandons the organic, aesthetic metaphysics deployed in the early work and so functions as a break with the Natural Law essay’s rendering of the ethical totality, property relations of the second class. However, Elements of the Philosophy of Right does not consist in the overcoming of these problems, but instead functions as their (re-)formulation within Hegel’s mature thought, its conceptual milieu. In this sense, it constitutes a more sophisticated conceptual rendering of the problem, not its overcoming. More precisely, Elements of the Philosophy of Right still entails Hegel’s account of the “rabble class” which highlights nothing other than the recurrence, not the sublation, of key problems first explored in the Natural Law essay some twenty years earlier. We acquire a particularly vivid sense of the type of marginalization Hegel’s late analysis entails when we examine his characterization of economic overproduction, the resultant market saturation, mass layoffs. Hegel writes: “When the standard of living of a large mass of people falls below a certain subsistence level … and when there is a consequent loss of the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and self-respect which makes a man insist on maintaining himself by his own work and effort, the result is the creation of a rabble.”53 The problem only compounds when we consider the untenable “solutions” that Hegel proposes to overproduction, the rabble, civil society’s intrinsic volatility. Hegel writes: “This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it … to push beyond its own limits and seek markets … in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in industry, &c.”54 Similarly, he writes: “Civil society is … driven to found colonies … it is due in particular to the appearance of a number of people who cannot secure the Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958); hereafter given as PR followed by paragraph (§) and Zusatz references where relevant. 53 PR§244. 54 PR§246. 52 22 satisfaction of their needs by their own labour once production rises above the requirements of consumers.”55 Finally, this: “the colonizing activity … to which the mature civil society is driven and by which it supplies to a part of its population a return to life on the family basis in a new land and so also supplies itself with a new demand and field for its industry.”56 While Hegel’s later text offers a sophisticated sense of the internal working of civil society in the Modern European nation state it yet again stumbles on a key economic problem irretrievably connected to the question of private property—here overproduction and the social consequences of largescale unemployment. Consequently, even in acknowledging Elements of the Philosophy of Right’s advance in methodology and conceptual precision in its rendering of the key institutions of social life, including a definitive break with the Schellingian metaphysical/aesthetical overtones of the Natural Law essay, we are still required to critically engage the highly problematic consequences that permeate its account of economic overproduction and the genesis of a ‘rabble’ class, i.e. social marginalization, colonial-imperialistic market expansion.57 To the precise degree to which such problems remain at the very centre of Hegel’s late philosophical rendering of the economic-socio-political sphere, we are justified in concluding that the late work, while denoting a significant advance in methodology and terminology, in no way functions as an overcoming of the problem of the second class first explored in the Natural Law essay. In a special sense, the recurrence of this problem-set in Hegel’s later work actually points to the unique significance of the earlier essay. It is one of Hegel’s earliest investigations into a pressing social problem that would not only permeate the remainder of Hegel’s social philosophy 55 PR§248, Zusatz. PR§248. 57 For critical responses see, for instance, Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 56 23 but would steadily perplex theorists and activists alike throughout the nineteenth, twentieth centuries, and, indeed, twenty-first centuries. That he was able to access this problem, despite the difficulties of the Schellingian inflected terminology in which it was initially articulated, its brilliant appeal to metaphysical-aesthetic categories by way of Aeschylus to explain the social problem in question, speaks nevertheless to the acuity of his analysis of the social. This is a hidden yet important insight at the core of Hegel’s Natural Law essay. 4. Conclusion: Ethical Totality, the Priority of Historical (Dialectical) Development, and Promises for Critical Social Theory Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters (1794) are rightfully credited with diagnosing fundamental structural problems permeating the individual and the socio-political register of Modern Enlightenment Europe as configured in the general upheaval of the period. For Hegel, Schiller was crucial in advancing the principles of “unity and reconciliation as the truth,”58 but did so in terms of aesthetics and how they might meaningfully facilitate socio-political reform. It is important to place Hegel’s 1802/03 Natural Law essay firmly within the same coordinates of early critical social theory while simultaneously marking it as a significant advance beyond the intrinsic limitations of Schiller’s analysis. As we have seen, however, Hegel’s advance does not come devoid of its own intrinsic problems. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art Volume I trans. T.M Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p.61 58 24 Hegel’s essay expresses a distinct break with the critical frameworks of Kant and Fichte, a development that was impossible given the material/form drive distinction propelling Schiller’s analysis, limiting it in terms of its access to the social whole. Hegel’s emphasis on “totality” in its historical development expresses a significant advance in terms of the conceptualization and understanding of the forces constituting social life. Correspondingly, his early organic model of the polis allows the analysis to prioritize contradictory dialectical processes as constitutive of the dynamics of social life, demarcating property relations/legislation as crucial. The real advantage here is that Hegel transcribes all this conceptually by way of constant appeal to historical processes and developments. This method of advance was fast becoming the only way to comprehensively engage the real processes constituting a community’s moral-ethicaleconomical-cultural lives. The analysis, nevertheless, enters the domain of the untenable, especially from the privileged vantagepoint of the contemporary reader who takes seriously the insights of Marx and first generation critical theorists life Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, at the precise moment that it requires aesthetic categories to explain and justify social and economic developments which originate historically, economically, and socio-politically. Nevertheless, historically considered, the concept of “absolute ethical totality” [absolute sittliche Totalität] and its method of analysis in terms of socio-historical development introduce the possibility of thinking with precision the interconnections between individual liberty, social freedom, and the institutions necessary to both in strikingly new ways. Hence, these breakthroughs significance for critical social theory. By the same token, the ethical totality’s formative power in relation to communities and individuals raises a host of pressing problems not the least of which, as we have seen, concerns making consistent the realms of particularized self-interest and universal life. I might further suggest that Hegel’s Natural Law essay is an 25 often-forgotten text that anticipates Adorno’s famous indictment of advanced industrial society where “the whole is the false.”59 From the standpoint of conceptualization, in other words, it is in the aftermath of a text like Hegel’s that it becomes possible to theorize how the totality of a community might prove a corrupting force that actively torpedoes the freedoms of individuals and groups within its jurisdiction. The essay’s value for critical social theory is also evident in the value it assigns the principles of sublation [Aufhebung] and reconciliation [Versöhnung]. While the aesthetic metaphysics of “the absolute,” appeal to tragedy, the Eumenides prove insufficient in fully illuminating and overcoming the social malaise of “the tragedy of ethical,” the very analysis itself reveals the importance of such a methodology, the principle of sublation. It thereby maintains, at least in terms of its initial methodological principle, the possibility of really overcoming instabilities at the core of modern European social life. It marks a break with the romantic, despite its indebtedness to Goethe, Schiller, Weimer classicism and elements of Frühromantik, is of lasting historical significance, and is a valuable source of insight and inspiration for the ongoing project of real social critique, its corresponding praxis. 59 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 50. 26