The Organism of the State and Its Limit

§9. Spirit and the Organic Becoming of the Externalized

In the introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel states, “The state is the Idea of Spirit in the externalized form of human will and its freedom.”8 The Idea is distinguished from the Concept, for the former is the life of the latter. A living (lebendig) concept is one that is able to reflect into itself, to be conscious of itself. How can the Concept of State be conscious of itself? Or, in general, what does it mean when a concept is conscious of itself? We might say that the concept, when reflecting on itself, complexifies and concretizes itself while at the same time eliminates what is merely contingent. However, not all concepts concretize in time; it is only possible when the concept is dialectical in nature. The state as an idea of the spirit is modeled on an organicity or an organismic logic. There are two key terms here that we need to explore in order to shed light on the notion of planetary freedom: externalization and organicity. As Hegel writes in Philosophy of Mind: “In the philosophical vision of spirit as such, spirit is studied as self-instruction and self-cultivation in its very essence, and its exteriorizations [seine Äußerungen] are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself [seines Sich-zu-sich-selbst-Hervorbringens], links it to unity with itself [seines Zusammenschließens mit sich], and so makes it actual spirit.”9 Externalization is the essence of the objective spirit, in which the spirit no longer maintains an intimate relation to nature in terms of dependence in all aspects, but rather the spirit is able to intervene in and transform nature. Spirit is objectifying nature, but at the same time, it is also objectified as the externalized being, and it is only under this condition that the spirit marches toward its historical moment of being Absolute. Here, we shall focus on the question of externalization rather than that of normalization, as Hegel scholars Robert Pippin10 and Christoph Menke have done excellently. In their way of dealing with normalities and normalization, they see praxis or social participation as the fundamental medium that articulates the historicity of freedom. The reason why we take externalization as our point of departure is that the discussion concerning praxis often undermines the question of technology, without underlining that social participation as a phenomenon is constantly produced by technological advancement. In contrast to Karatani’s reading of Hegel through the concept of exchange, which was based on his critique of Marx since Marxists tend to reduce economy to modes of production and consequently ignore the modes of exchange,11 we aim to show that there is a much more sophisticated concept of externalization in Hegel’s theory of the state. If Hegel was able to grasp the trinity of capital-nation-state through the dialectical method, it is precisely because, first, organicity is the aim of dialectics, and second, the modern state as the logical consequence of the development of family and civil society sublates both sentiment and interest, both of which are not yet objective and rational.

For Alexandre Kojève, the concept of work is at the core of Hegel’s dialectics. But Kojève did not use the word externalization; instead, he uses travail, a word that can mean both labor and work. Travail is a technical activity since it externalizes through negation (for example, in cooking, one negates the raw materials) and, at the same time, exercises through tools (which is also a product of externalization). For Kojève, work also means Bildung in a double sense:

Work [travail] is Bildung, in the double meaning of the word: on the one hand, it forms, transforms the World, humanizes it by making it more adapted [plus conforme] to Man; on the other, it transforms, forms, educates man, it humanizes him by bringing him into greater conformity with the idea that he has of himself [l’idée qu’il se fait de lui-même], an idea that—in the beginning—is only an abstract idea, an ideal.12

The key to the dialectics between the lord and the bondsman is externalization. Though it must be said that one can read it in many different ways—for example, as a type of psychological play. As a play, it starts with extreme intensity, which Hegel calls absolute fear (absolute Furcht).13 While Hegel only discusses absolute fear in the last paragraph of the section on the lord and bondsman, it nonetheless constitutes the ultimate condition of the becoming independent of the self-consciousness of the bondsman. There is a necessity for this extremity to trigger a transformation within the self-consciousness of the bondsman. What exactly does this mean? This absolute fear is directly associated with the Bildung of the bondsman, who is the true laborer. The bondsman was able to transform his fear of the lord into the love of the object. The object is that which establishes a link between the lord and the bondsman, and outside of this setting—for example, in the form of a commodity—it is also that which relates the factory worker and the consumer. Through the perfection of his own creation, the bondsman transforms the relation between him and the lord. The lord’s relation to the object is only one of satisfaction, in which the object is merely consumed, purely negated. The bondsman is able to establish a fundamentally different relation to the object: to make use of that which is externalized (organon) and to externalize, to produce ergon (work). This relation between work in the form of product and reason was clearly stated in his early lectures, the so-called Jenaer Realphilosophie (1803–4) or the Jena Writings: “Reason, after all, can exist only in its work; it comes into being only in its product, apprehends itself immediately as another as well as itself.”14

Externalization (as both negation and production) and Internalization (as both recollection and integration), travail and Bildung, consist of the recursive process of the spirit and the possibility of progress. In the words of Kojève, it is due to the “creative education of Man by work (Bildung)” that history is created.15 Modern states correspond to a particular moment of externalization (e.g., institutionalization) and internalization of the spirit (e.g., education).16 That is to say, it is a historical-social accumulation of the Idea’s externalization and the Idea’s self-knowledge. The state is one of the most advanced forms of externalization of the spirit, following the perpetual dialectical movement of the Idea. The state, for Hegel, stands as the highest form of the realization of the objective spirit after its basic constituent components, such as family and civil society:

The transition from a family, a horde, a clan, a multitude, etc., to political conditions is the formal realization of the Idea as such in that people. Without this form, a people, as an ethical substance—which is what it is in itself—lacks the objectivity of possessing for itself and for others a universal and universally valid existence in laws, i.e., in determinate thoughts, and as a result it fails to secure recognition from others. So long as it lacks objective law and a firm rationality for itself, its independence is formal only and is not sovereignty.17

The formal corresponds to the objective spirit, which could only come into being through externalization. The political form exists as an externalization qua objectification without which there is no sovereignty; for example, the polis would not be possible without the nomos in its written form and without institutions. We might want to consider it as a first criteria of Hegel’s concept of sovereignty. Hegel uses the word Entäusserung, normally rendered as “alienation”; it is sometimes confused with the term Entfremdung, which is often translated as “alienation” in Marx’s writings. Entäusserung is a term that has been used in the German language since the fourteenth century to translate the Latin legal term alientio, the right to transfer (übertragen) a property from one person to another. It is also translated, for example, by Roger Garaudy, as “externalization,” understood as the actualization of the Idea as a material being, an objective spirit.18 The meaning of the term Entäusserung, therefore, falls into two different, converging domains: alienation in relation to labor and private property, and technical objects that are the other of the Idea and which give objectiveness to the Idea understood as a necessary element of the dialectics. Externalization is part of the life of the Idea, without which the Idea cannot be realized and cannot maintain its liveliness (Lebendigkeit). Through its externalization, which could also be interpreted as the cunning of reason, the Idea dialectically moves toward the Absolute, the true universal. Truth for Hegel means the identification of concept and existence—that is to say, when the concept of the Idea (as Marx writes, the Idea to the concept is like the father to son) is proved to be effective in outer reality.

The theory of externalization in Hegel’s thought allows the development of a theory of technology and civilization.19 The externalization in the form of different institutions and powers (executive, legislating, and the Crown) would not give rise to the modern state if they did not exhibit the maturity of the Spirit, namely, an organic mode of organization. This is what Mumford missed in his The Myth of the Machine, where the megamachine of the state is only seen from the lens of mechanism and absolutism. That is also why it is necessary to look at different political forms from the perspective of political epistemology. In comparison with the polis that Aristotle talks about in Politics, which consists of a population of 10,000 people, by 1816, the Prussian state already had a population of 10,349,031 people, which then doubled by 1871.20 This means that the political form of the Greek polis is no longer applicable to the organization of the Prussian state. Hegel’s concept of the state is the realization of an organization that is able to effectively correct itself and resolve polar conflicts, which, following Catherine Malabou, could be called speculative automatism.21 In Hegel, the term organization functions as the synonym of organism. Mechanism is immediate since it lacks reflection. It is like a given phenomenon—one accepts it as it is; we take the here and now as the universal since the here and now remains always the same, no matter which moment it refers to. In this sense, the here and now is only an abstract universal, without content. Speculative reason sets off from the doubt of sense perception, but unlike the Cartesian reason, which retreats to the ego itself and finds the absolute there, the Hegelian reason confronts the immediacy in order to make it conscious of itself as Concept. Reason, the other name for self-consciousness, is here open to contingency and contradiction. Organism provides a model for explicating self-consciousness, but it is not any old living being one may find in nature; it is a mechano-organism, which Hegel also calls “absolute mechanism.” The section titled “Observing the Organic” in Phenomenology of Spirit reveals the “astonishing” similarity between self-consciousness and organism. Hegel writes: “This is just how self-consciousness is constituted; it likewise distinguishes itself from itself without producing any distinction. Hence it finds in the observation of organic Nature nothing else than a being of this kind.”22

§10. Organism of the State versus Organism of the Animal

If freedom is realized in the state, it is because the state is compatible with freedom, that it possesses an organic form instead of a mechanical force that merely enforces laws and dominates the people. Axel Honneth calls it “social freedom,” in the sense that for such freedom to be possible, it has to be based on a mutual recognition (wechselseitige Anerkennung) between the self and the other via an institutionalized medium, be that a family or a market.23 This means that my purpose and the other’s purpose could be mutually compatible through the mediation of our social status (or estates [Stände], in Hegel’s terms, meaning “particular systems of needs”) as well as institutional constraints. Here lies the fundamental difference between Hegel and Kant, in the sense that in Kant, we do not see the significance of institutions,24 namely, the externalization of the spirit, while in Hegel, institutions are indispensable. However, not all institutions are equal. For example, the prison as an institution is different from a family (though in certain cases, they might be similar); therefore, not all institutions can serve the purpose of mutual recognition. The question that then arises is: What kind of institution could be considered ethical according to this logic? Honneth speculates that in an ethical institution, its relation to its participants moves in the form of a spiral, which has no point of rest: “[That] the moral institutions first make individual autonomy possible, whose activities can then, in turn, lead to a revision of these institutions, in such a prefigured spiral movement, it is no longer possible to find the point of rest which should exist in a firmly established system of ethical institutions.”25 Honneth admits that he is uncertain whether this is the precise image that Hegel had in his mind when discussing institutions.26 We would also agree that both reciprocity and the spiral movement are, to a certain degree, essential properties of the organic form that we have been attempting to sketch and that we take to be fundamental to Hegel’s conceptualization of an ethical institution, especially in the case of the political state. However, the “negative feedback” that Honneth describes sounds rather simplistic from today’s perspective, especially when we consider that most public services provide feedback channels for citizens. The essential question to be raised, then, is, How did Hegel demonstrate that the state is the ultimate ethical institution?

When we enter the third part of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right on the state, we have already sublated the arbitrariness of the individual will, of the self-interest of the family, and of civil society (in which, as Hegel rightly observes, the free market will lead to social injustice); in the end, the only nonarbitrary entity left to consider is the state. If freedom is only realized in the Hegelian state, it is because the state presents an organo-mechanism that effectively undermines arbitrariness and allows a mode of civic participation that prioritizes self-consciousness over self-interest. The state is spiritual in the sense that its own operative reflection is inseparable from that of the individuals. In an Aristotelian language, such operative reflection is phronesis, a virtue that is distinguished from the self-actualization of the individual citizen.27 At first glance, one might think that Hegel is rejecting all forms of contingency since he wants to overcome the arbitrariness of the individual, the family, and civil society; the truth is, however, that contingency functions as the test (épreuve) for necessity. Because the organism is a living being, insofar as it is vigorous (lebendig), it demands contingencies, without which life would be no different from a mechanical machine. If Hegel’s philosophy is characterized by a conceptual organicism, it is because the Idea is lebendig; it is the concept in dialectical movement. The dialectical movement involves contingency—otherwise, it would be preprogrammed and therefore repetitive. The concept, when it sets itself into movement, actively engages with contingency, be it out of its will or from the external environment, to make contingency a stepping stone toward the concrete universal, the necessity. It is also this organicity present in the state that differentiates the moral and the ethical, as Ernst Cassirer summarizes: “‘The State,’ says Hegel in his System der Sittlichkeit, in which he first introduces his sharp distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit, ‘is the self-certain absolute mind which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception.’”28 This is because, in the state, abstract rights and abstract rules are not only insufficient but also problematic because they are mechanical and, therefore, vulnerable to contingency. The state presents a different dynamic of self-consciousness, which is no longer mechanical but rather an organo-mechanism. This organicity can be identified with the following: first, the consciousness’s movement toward being in itself and for itself is modeled as an organic process, in the sense that the organic is posed as opposite to the mechanic; second, the universal, insofar as it exists, exists not as a static substance, as that which doesn’t change throughout eternity, but rather as that which is always in a state of permanent reflection, such as is the form of thinking; third, the reflective form does not exist only in mind alone, but rather the reflective structure is at the same time an exteriorization (Entäusserung) and an internalization (Er-innerung). It is through this organic form that the Spirit actualizes itself in laws and institutions as it moves toward a higher sphere. The political state is, therefore, the historical product and a milestone of this movement. It is a culmination because it presents itself as an objective and effective organic unity and totality:

The state in and for itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom; and it is an absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. The state is spirit on earth and consciously realizing itself there. In nature, on the other hand, spirit actualizes itself only as its own other, as spirit asleep. Only when it is present in consciousness, when it knows itself as a really existent object, is it the state.29

As I have tried to show in Recursivity and Contingency, Hegelian philosophy is an affirmation of an organic logic, which is intimate to nature, but at the same time, it overcomes nature since nature is its other while it sleeps! The state, which is the actualization of ethical life, is a different realm from nature; it is culture, the self-realization of the spirit, though the word culture only appears twice in Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. What does the organicity of the state consist of, and what might guarantee freedom in such an organicity? Below is the most direct and obvious passage from the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel explicitly describes the state as an organism:

The state is an organism, i.e., the development of the Idea into its differences [Der Staat ist Organismus, das heißt Entwicklung der Idee zu ihren Unterschieden]. Thus these different sides of the state are its various powers with their functions and spheres of action, by means of which the universal continually engenders itself in a necessary way; in this process it maintains its identity since it is presupposed even in its own production. This organism is the political constitution; it is produced perpetually by the state, while it is through it that the state maintains itself [Dieser Organismus ist die politische Verfassung; sie geht ewig aus dem Staate hervor, wie er sich durch sie erhält]. If the state and its constitution fall apart, if the different aspects of the organism break free, then the unity produced by the constitution is no longer established. . . . The nature of an organism is such that unless each of its parts is brought into identity with the others, unless each of them is prevented from achieving independence, the whole must perish.30

The state is an organism in the sense that all its parts form an organic whole; all parts are identified with the state as a unity; no part is independent from each other. This may sound rather vague today, and Hegel is not the first to have made such a claim. Rousseau before him had already made similar statements in a text published in the Encyclopedia with the title “Discours sur l’économie politique (1755).”31 The difference is that for Rousseau, this comparison remains a rhetorical metaphor, but for Hegel, it is a philosophical method. As an organism, the state is also a living being, but also more than a living being, because it is where “the universal continually engenders itself in a necessary way.” In other words, it does not generate “the particular,” like an animal that might grow a bit day by day, with more hair one day or darker skin the next; it is the self-generation of the universal in the sense that it is the actualization and concretization of reason. This organism is the political constitution: the various powers of the state are regulated and brought together into an organic unity by the political constitution. In his commentary on this paragraph, the young Marx made the following remark: “It is a great advance to consider the political state as an organism, and hence no longer to consider the diversity of powers as [in]organic. . . . Accordingly, the bridge to the political constitution does not go from the organism of the Idea and its differences, etc., but from the presupposed concept of the various powers or the organism of the state.”32 While “organic” is written in the manuscript available to us, this is most likely a typo, that is, the opposite of what Marx wanted to write, namely, inorganic. In what sense is it an advantage to consider the political state as an organism? Didn’t Adam Müller and many others also frame the state in terms of organisms? After his praise of this theoretical advancement, Marx asks what the differences are between the organism of the state and the organism of the animal (tierischer Organismus). If Hegel could not explain the differentia specifica between the organicity of a state and that of an animal, then such a difference would be without meaning. Marx further asks why then did Hegel not claim “This organism is a solar system”?33 Marx’s attack raises many questions regarding his own take on it, but his explanation certainly is not more satisfactory than Hegel’s: “In truth, Hegel has done nothing but resolve the constitution of the state into the universal, abstract idea of the organism; but in appearance and in his own opinion he has developed the determinate reality out of the universal Idea.”34

Marx reproached Hegel for presenting a formalization without being able to give any concrete content—Hegel’s speculative thinking ended in a preformed schema.35 The reproach is harsh because it is difficult, if not impossible, for a philosopher to outline a complete theory of the state or of a revolution; not even Marx himself managed this. What Hegel claims about the organism of the state has to be further interpreted. Retrospectively, the work of Ernst Kapp seems to have responded to Marx’s question of Hegel’s claim regarding the organism of the state.36 Kapp was a geographer who was influenced by both Carl Ritter and Hegel. Kapp, in his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (1877), developed what he calls “organ projections.” The subtitle of the treatise is “for the history of development of culture from a new point of view.” This new point of view that Kapp proposed suggests that all the tools, instruments, and even institutions are projections of organs. This projection constitutes one of the most important parts of the self-consciousness of the human being. Human beings, through organ projection, transform and conquer nature.

There is an organology at play in Kapp’s concept of the tool, meaning that this or that tool or machine, no matter how mechanistic it is, presupposes an organicity without which it would not be invented and used. In other words, tools are the organized inorganic. Kapp uses the concept of organ projections to understand the emergence of technology and civilization, which range from simple tools to steam engines, railway systems, and finally, the state. In the spirit of Hegel, Kapp treats the state in the last chapter of the book as if it constitutes the highest form of organ projections. According to Kapp, the political state is “an organism unconsciously proceeding from the work of the human hand and the human spirit,” and “the bodily organism is the natural state.”37 In a sense, just as Schelling claims that the Geist is the invisible nature and nature is the visible Geist, Kapp suggests that the bodily organism is the visible state, and the state is the invisible bodily organism. In other words, the human body is the archetypal image of the state.38 In his Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit (Constituted despotism and constitutional liberty, 1849), a volume that led to his exile in Texas, Kapp compared despotism with mechanism and freedom with organism: “The more mechanically a state becomes governed, the more despotically it is governed; the more organically a state governs itself, the freer it is.”39 In his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (published twenty-eight years later), the state is opposed again to mechanism, and mechanism is described as the obstacle or even an illness to be overcome:

It is therefore the task of the state to ward off mechanical disruptions and to maintain overall organic activity in an uninhibited flux. Mechanism is a drain on the organism, just as illness is a drain on health; mechanical deterioration and organic revitalization exist in inverse proportion. In the state, healing is achieved through work, but only through the kind of work that preserves and enhances vital powers, just as medicaments that are at the same time nutriments promise to do the most for the ailing body.40

The preservation of the organic being of the state is where work is valued. The health of the state is measured by its resistance against mechanism. Though the bureaucracy of the modern state is often compared to a machine, thus the word state machine is contrasted to state reason, the state, according to Kapp, “no matter if it is still imperfect or even deteriorating, remains an organism and is never a machine.”41 Kapp’s characterization of the state as an organism from the point of view of anthropogeny is a justification of the state as the highest form of externalization. Kapp significantly developed the technological and the organological dimension implicit in Hegel’s thought. While Kapp’s speculative theory of the state affirms the superiority of organism over mechanism, he did not explain, at least not satisfactorily, the difference between the organism of the state and the organism of the animal.

In a sense, the Hegelian state still remains a mysticism and an abstraction. We will, therefore, have to go further into what Hegel was really aiming at when arguing that the state is an organism. This organism is the product of the Idea, and in the case of the organism of the state, it is the reciprocity between differentiated powers within the state and the individuals. However, these features could also be found in a mechanical state, in the differentiation of powers in different institutions regulated by the constitution. Organism, for Hegel, is the concept that passes syllogistically through three determinations: sensibility, irritability, and reproduction.42 But to what extent, then, is the organism of the state different from the organism of the animal? One can try to make analogies between the animal and the state in terms of these three determinations, but such an analogy will remain a mere metaphor and thus futile. Hegel had already made a comparison between the animal and the human in the Phenomenology of Spirit:

The animal finishes up with the feeling of self. The instinct of Reason, on the other hand, is at the same time self-consciousness; but because it is only instinct it is put on one side over against consciousness, in which it has its anti-thesis. Its satisfaction is, therefore, shattered by this antithesis; it does indeed find itself, viz. the End, and likewise this End as a Thing. . . . The organism shows itself to be a being that preserves itself, that returns and has returned into itself. But this observing consciousness does not recognize in this being the Notion of End, or that the Notion of End exists just here and in the form of a Thing, and not elsewhere in some other intelligence.43

The distinction between the organism of the state and the organism of the animal consists in the fact that the organism of the state contains the Notion of End not in the thing (for example, in its institutions) but rather in an End as the realization of freedom, which cannot exist as a thing. Marx was very clear that Hegel’s real interest was not the philosophy of right but rather logic. Hegel’s theory of the state is nothing but proof (Beweis) of the realization of his logic instead of the other way around.44 It is precisely the question of logic that distinguishes Hegel’s organism of the state from the organism of an animal, namely, the difference between logic and nature. This must be strictly distinguished from the analogy between the state and organism discussed by Kant and later explored by Ernst Haeckel from a biological perspective, since, for the latter, the complex multicellular organism was also compared to the federal states.45

As we pointed out earlier, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel identifies a similarity between self-consciousness and an organic structure and operation,46 for self-consciousness is itself a logical form of life. However, self-consciousness is not the same as organic nature. Nature, as we know in the Encyclopaedia, is contrasted with the spirit in terms of their strength of Concept. The Concept in nature is feeble in general since it gives rise to monstrosities and fails to incorporate and rationalize contingencies. Therefore, it mutates into varieties of irregularities. The Concept in spirit is also alive; however, it is logical, and therefore it resists mutations: “Nature in itself, in its idea, is divine; but in its existence it does not conform to its Concept. . . . Nature has, therefore, been described as the defection of the Idea from itself—the idea being in this shape of externality inadequate to itself. . . . It gives away to accidentality and chance; it cannot in all its particular determination be penetrated by reason.”47 As we read here, the Idea and its externalization are different. Instead, we find in its externalization defects that deviate from the realization of the Idea. This discrepancy is due to the fact that nature, insofar as it is not logic, is vulnerable to contingency. Two paragraphs later in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel names this discrepancy the “feebleness of the Concept in nature”: “The feebleness of the Concept in nature in general, not only subjects the formation of individuals to external accidents, which in the developed animal, and particularly in man, give rise to monstrosities, but also makes the genera themselves completely subservient to the changes of the external universal life of nature.”48

In the Encyclopaedia, the Philosophy of Nature ends with the question of the soul, and then it proceeds to the Philosophy of Mind, which starts with the subject. That is to say, as Malabou proposes, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind is a treatise on second nature.49 The opening paragraphs of the Philosophy of Mind set off by clarifying the relation between spirit, nature, idea, and concept. Hegel writes: “External nature too, like the Spirit, is rational, divine, a presentation of the Idea. But in nature the Idea appears in the element of asunderness [im Elemente des Außereinander], is external not only to the Spirit but also to itself, precisely because it is external to the inwardness [Innerlichkeit] that is in and for itself and which constitutes the essence of the Spirit.”50 Nature is “the self-externality of the Idea” (das Außersichsein der Idee),51 while the essence of the spirit is the inwardness, tirelessly returning to itself, an Er-Innerung, that is, as both remembrance and internalization. The animal body, in comparison with plants, exhibits a higher potency of organization, a higher level of interdependence of different members of the body; it is still maintained by necessity but not freedom. The animal organism exhibits an ideal determinacy, and “nothing in it appears as independent.”52 This is to say, the organization of the animal is maintained by a necessity, while it is not capable of rendering this necessity contingent—for example, seasonal changes or mutation of the environment—because only the Spirit alone can do it; for example, instead of adapting itself to the environment and climate as animals do, it adopts them by building houses and farms. The spirit that responds too sensitively to the cosmic movement only exhibits a kind of illness: “Differences of climate involve a more solid and vigorous determinacy. But the response to changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only in feeble moods, which can become especially prominent only in illnesses (including derangement) and in the depression of self-conscious life.”53 The Spirit is in time and space in a cosmic sense, but it is also above them. The Spirit is a rational being that is not disturbed by thunder and lightning since the latter only appears to be something contingent. Nature is the Other, or a test, a detour, through which the Spirit returns to itself. It is now perhaps possible to answer Marx’s question regarding the difference between what Hegel calls organism of the state and organism of the animal. Taking into account the transition from the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit, we might say that Hegel’s state is a development of logic out of an inner necessity via its externalization. The state did not come out of nowhere, and neither is it a mutation of civil society; instead, the state arises out of the infinite actual spirit as necessity. Therefore, when Hegel claims that the state is an organism, he specifically means the organismic logic identified in the spirit. To return to the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, what then does it mean that “this organism is the constitution”? If this organism is the constitution, then it is not only because the constitution exhibits the reciprocal relations between different powers but also that the constitution is conscious of itself. But how is the constitution conscious of itself? Hegel’s statement seems to be even more mysterious than Marx had first thought.54

Hegel writes that the constitution is always already presupposed.55 Not only is the constitution presupposed, but the state is too—it is not that the state comes out as a product, but rather the state as an idea is already at work during the stage of the family and civil society.56 Family, civil society, and the political state are the three moments of the Idea, but it is only in the political state that the idea attains both in itself and for itself, and where we can conceive of an “organic unity of political life.”57 The state and its constitution cannot be separable. The constitution is, however, not something made by a modern state. Instead, the constitution has existed since the beginning. In §273, Hegel claims that questions such as who should have made the constitution (wer die Verfassung machen soll) are not valid. The realization of the state is the expression of the self-consciousness of the constitution. The constitution is the definition of the sovereign of the state and the relation between the different powers of the state and its people in a written (externalized) form: “In any case, however, it is absolutely essential that the constitution should not be regarded as something made, even though it has come into being in time. It must be treated rather as something simply existent in and for itself, as divine, therefore, and constant, and so as exalted above the sphere of things that are made.”58 The self-consciousness of the constitution first indicates the consistency between the “character and development of self-consciousness” and the constitution; second, it indicates the path toward the realization of the state as organism. In other words, the sovereignty doesn’t refer to any persona, but rather it is the organic unity that is limited to the modern state (or more precisely, in Hegel’s constitutional monarchy); we might consider this another criterion of Hegel’s sovereignty. When there is a change to a constitution, it is not that someone modifies it from without, but rather the constitution demands to update itself. We can understand why Hegel insisted that it is inappropriate to ask who invented the constitution, since the constitution came into being without birth. The state is organic because, with its constitution, it moves toward self-consciousness. Thus, Hegel claims in the Addition to §276, “Much the same thing as this ideality of the moments in the state occurs with life in the organic body.”

One might wonder if the state is really organic since this claim seems to be at odds with Hegel’s endorsement of the crown as the sovereignty of the monarchy. The constitutional monarchy that Hegel endorsed may be the Achilles heel of the self-consciousness of the constitution. One might consider that there is a hiatus between his political epistemology and the megamachine of his time, namely, the megamachine still retains some essential mechanistic features. Marx was relentless on this point in his critique of Hegel because the crown is the arbitrary will that is above the executive and legislative powers.59 In his commentary to §302, Marx pointed out sharply that “the power of the crown exists only as an extreme, a one-sidedness because it is not an organic principle.”60

It might be interesting to recall Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the circularity of sovereignty in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. We have been calling this circularity recursivity since we have been emphasizing that recursivity has to be distinguished from the circularity of pure repetition. This recursivity is the operation of the organicity of the state—though both the terms recursivity and organicity are not employed by Derrida or Tocqueville. Instead, Tocqueville emphasizes a circularity he identified in the people, who are the “cause and the end of all things.”61 Derrida claimed that Tocqueville “presents this circularity as the effective fulfilment of a democracy that, up until then, had been presented only as a project, an opinion, a claim or allegation, a deferral to later, a utopia, indeed the fiction of a democracy to come.”62 It is not our intention to equate the Hegelian state and the Tocquevillian sovereignty of the people; it serves here as an example of how the question of recursivity is fundamental to the concept of sovereignty that we will look into in more detail in the following chapters.

Finally, we may say that freedom is realized in Hegel’s state because the state is organic, and freedom here doesn’t mean whatever might be allowed by law since, in this sense, it is still an abstract right—one follows mechanistically rules and instructions, just as is described in John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment.63 Freedom is what sustains the organicity and reflectivity of the state. It is also that which allows the individual to act according to reason and the internal necessity of reason. Reciprocally, the different powers (the crown, legislating power, and executive power) are what allow such a freedom to flourish by politicizing the estates (Stände). It is in this sense that we can understand that Hegel is called a philosopher of freedom as Klaus Vieweg claimed; however, such claim is conditional.64 Hegel provided an updated concept of freedom, and like the Greek’s freedom, which was inseparable from the polis and was considered an apparatus preventative to the formation of tyranny, Hegel’s freedom also has to be strictly contextualized in the modern state. The crown is not the real sovereign; the real sovereign constitutes the overlap between the organic unity of the governing and the governed as experienced from the inside and the territorial unity seen from the outside. In other words, when the political form exceeds that of the political state, the notion of freedom has to be revaluated.

§11. The Impasse from the State to Planetary Freedom

After the construction of a theory of the state, Hegel had to confront a world that consisted of different states; that is to say, he had to confront the exteriority of the state. This confrontation can be seen at work in the last paragraphs of his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Given the different interests of states, states enter into conflicts, wars, and coalitions. Does, then, the planet need a global governing body like the League of Nations or the United Nations? For Hegel, the answer is no, and he rejects such a governing body. This raises the rather interesting question regarding why Hegel might have rejected and, further, how different states might maintain stable international relations without falling into such disasters as the two world wars, tragedies the size of which Hegel did not see. In Addition to §259, “The Idea of the State,” Hegel states:

The state in its actuality is essentially an individual state, and beyond that a particular state. Individuality [Individualität] is to be distinguished from particularity [Besonderheit]. The former is a moment in the very Idea of the state, while the latter belongs to history. States as such are independent of one another, and therefore their relation to one another can only be an external one, so that there must be a third thing standing above them to bind them together. Now this third thing is the spirit which gives itself actuality in world-history and is the absolute judge of states. Several states may form an alliance to be a sort of court with jurisdiction over others, and there may be confederations of states, like the Holy Alliance for example, but these are always relative only and restricted, like any “perpetual peace.” The one and only absolute judge, which makes itself authoritative against the particular and at all times, is the spirit in and for itself which manifests itself in the history of the world as the universal and as the genus there operative.

Hegel makes a difference between individuality and particularity (and this is probably also the misunderstanding of Marx, but unfortunately, Marx didn’t leave us his commentaries on the passages before §260). The state’s individuality—becoming an individual, an adult, departing from the infancy of the Greek polis founded by the hero—is the temporal and logical consequence of the Idea of the state. A particular state, such as Prussia and France, is only one particular case belonging to history. Hegel rejected any international governing body, such as the Holy Alliance created in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon to maintain peace in Europe, but more fundamentally, its target was Kantian cosmopolitanism.65 Hegel affirms the independence of the state and that its relation to other states can only be external. This means that, for Hegel, there is an organicity of the state but no organicity among the states. Therefore, the relation between the states risks being purely unorganized. Why does Hegel insist on this point?

Kant sees establishing universal and lasting peace as the “entire final end of the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason.”66 In order to achieve this goal, there is only one way, and that is when the states leave the “lawless condition,” as individuals did by adapting themselves to public laws, and “so form an (always growing) state of nations (civitas gentium) that would finally encompass all the nations of the earth.”67 Kant is not proposing a universal international law, such as mechanical laws that all members have to subsume themselves to, but rather we have to recognize that Kantian cosmopolitanism is based essentially on two concepts, both of which are fundamental to any form of organicity: community (Gemeinschaft) and reciprocity (Wechselwirkung). First, the surface of the earth is communally possessed by everyone (des Rechts des gemeinschaftlichen Besitzes der Oberfläche der Erde), and since this limited surface is owned by everyone, it follows that the rights of visiting a foreign country should be recognized as a natural law because the borders are only artificial.68 Kant’s argument resonates with some contemporary thinkers, such as Bruno Latour, who proposed to think of the planet as that which is shared by everyone and that everyone has to take care of. The ecological crisis is a call for such consciousness, one that should transcend the interests of individual states, especially in view of politicians like Donald Trump and their denial of the urgency of climate change. Second, in contrast to those who tend to make the above-mentioned call a moral necessity, Kant suggests a pragmatic and concrete algorithm: international trade. Trading establishes interactions between different people, and those people who behave poorly will be discredited and refused commercial activities, just as China and Japan did against the colonizers.69 Since it would be highly surprising that Hegel didn’t detect this political organicism in Kant’s 1795 “Treatise on Perpetual Peace” or his 1797 Metaphysics of Morality, why then did Hegel ignore or reject the potential of developing it further?

Hegel has recourse to the world spirit and reason as the authority that could make juridical decisions upon the states. The aspiration to reason as the “highest court of appeal” is already something we find in Kant and Fichte in regard to the possibility of perpetual peace.70 The world spirit is not a hidden spirit observing from behind and intervening whenever injustice happens. The world spirit is not a substance, and it is also not something to which one can pray. Is not naming the World Spirit the ultimate judge the same type of mysticism that Marx had already accused Hegel of? Toward the end of the third part on the state, Hegel writes of “the spirit of the world, free from all restriction, producing itself as that which exercises its right—and its right is the highest right of all—over these finite spirits in world history as the world’s court of judgement.”71 If all states should be considered independent, and if all states claim to embody the world spirit, who is going to sit on the court other than time itself? Again, we read in §324:

With that end in view, Kant proposed a league of monarchs to settle differences between states, and the Holy Alliance was meant to be an institution of much the same kind. But the state is an individual, and individuality essentially implies negation. Hence even if a number of states make themselves into a family, this group as an individual must engender an opposite and create an enemy. As a result of war, peoples are strengthened, but nations involved in civil strife also acquire peace at home through making wars abroad. To be sure, war produces insecurity of property, but this real insecurity is nothing other than a necessary movement.

It seems that here Hegel cannot think of world peace, or more decisively, Hegel rejects the possibility of perpetual peace, not only because, as a true Heraclitean, wars are necessary, but also because Hegel’s political thought was born as individualism awakened: Hegel wants to overcome individualism through the state, but he also endowed the state with individualism, in the sense that each state is firmly considered as an individual or a persona. Kant understands universal international law as the desire of reason, while Hegel sees confrontation or conflict as inevitable between individual states. On the one hand, one can say that Hegel is drawn to political realism, in which the play of friend and enemy is inevitable. The state as an individual must have its enemy, and a group of states forming an alliance must also have their enemies. Therefore, to speak about perpetual peace is only an alluring moral abstraction, if not an illusion, which Hegel refuses.72 Here Hegel anticipates Schmitt since his refusal of an international governing body is later mirrored by Schmitt’s own rejection of the League of Nations. Schmitt rejects any planetary governance that is said to exist in the name of humanity because, for Schmitt, whoever talks about humanity essentially cheats73 since humanity is abstract and empty, and as he mocks, since it is empty, it is able to fill itself with hypocrisy.

Having said this, one could argue that Hegel is, in fact, proposing an idealism through and through since instead of an international governing body, Hegel has recourse to the world spirit as the guarantee of justice and not nature, as is the case in Kant.74 The world spirit is not present in the same way as an institution like the League of Nations or the United Nations because the world spirit is always in becoming. And indeed, it is only reason that can judge the progress of history, not history as seen by an individual. Historians provide factual evidence, which then allows the philosopher to reconstruct a history of reason, but not all historians would see the world spirit as Hegel did. In this sense, we encounter an epistemological problem because the world spirit is always known afterward, as an après coup; it is for this reason that we always risk being late, sometimes perhaps too late, namely, as a catastrophe. How could we address this ontological dilemma, one where the judge is absent or appears only after the suspects are already sentenced? More significantly, does not the refusal of a world organization equally contain a contradiction since, according to Hegel, reason cannot be separated from its externalization? Here, there seems to be a logical defect that must be addressed. The way to resolve this defect is to rethink the concept of externalization beyond the forms of state institutions, which we will address again in the later chapters of this work. For now, we will stick to Hegel’s arguments.

The world spirit is not God, nor is it the mandate of heaven that oversees the world, punishing the injustices. We can only give authority to the world spirit when the past epochs of theology and metaphysics are already behind us. We should read here in parallel the historicism of Hegel and Auguste Comte.75 It is not without interest to note—though we cannot deal with it here—that, like Hegel, Comte’s philosophy also contains a strong organismic element. Comte tried to show how history passes from theology (fictitious state) to metaphysics (abstract state) and then arrives at positivism (positive state). Hegel suggests understanding the passage of the spirit as moving from art to religion and finally to philosophy. Modernity is characterized by this secular and positivist desire to get rid of theology and metaphysics. The world spirit, insofar as it merits the name of reason, can only be the reflection of the planet as an organized totality of which states are its members. This reflection is also a synchronization in which the externalization of the spirit becomes organically connected and balanced. These externalizations are institutions, but largely technologies and megamachines, which is often hidden in the discourse regarding institutions among Hegel scholars (for example, in Axel Honneth’s effort to emphasize the cruciality of institutions in mutual recognition). We may speculate that for Hegel, the question of technology is still obscured in the discourse of national economy. Therefore, institutions stand out as the most effective social, economic, and political units; in civil societies, these institutions—for example, functioning representatives of interest groups—have to be limited and balanced. The state, then, is the institution of institutions: it is able to construct an organic unity through its constitution. However, this raises the question: If the world spirit is not an institution, then how can it intervene in the cases of injustice among different individual states? We read in §331 regarding the relation between states:

A state is as little an actual individual without relations to other states (see §322) as an individual is actually a person without a relationship with other persons (see §71 and elsewhere). The legitimacy of a state and, more particularly, so far as its external relations are concerned, of its monarch also, is partly a purely internal matter (one state should not meddle with the domestic affairs of another). On the other hand, however, it is no less essential that this legitimacy should be rendered complete through its recognition by other states, although this recognition requires a guarantee that where a state is to be recognized by others, it shall likewise recognize them, i.e., respect their independence; and so it comes about that they cannot be indifferent to each other’s internal affairs.76

Here Hegel suggests not mixing up with the internal affairs of the other states because these other states are also individuals, and one shouldn’t intervene in the affair of another individual. One may want to ask: Should one recognize a terrorist regime once it has seized power in a country? Even though, in the name of tradition, and despite its promise to become respectable, it still maintains the death penalty, as well as unacceptable measures against females? Once it has been named as a tradition, it is then a part of its culture, part of its particularity. Should not the other states respect its particularity in the name of cultural diversity and sovereignty? While Hegel emphasizes the necessity of recognition—this also indicates the difficulty of the Monroe doctrine, which is regarded as the principle of noninterventionism77—if each state remains totally indifferent to each other’s internal affairs, values, and judgments, then there is only a set of Volksgeister. The court of world history would then be full of suspects while being without any judge. If one state were to seemingly go against reason, as in the case of the regime mentioned above, now for reason to claim its universality, something ought to happen. There is a necessity for intervention that justifies labeling oneself as a “just enemy.” The just enemy has morally already won since whoever fights against it is deemed unjust:

The European nations form a family in accordance with the universal principle underlying their legislation, their customs, and their civilization. Accordingly, this principle has modified their conduct under international law in a state of affairs [i.e., war] otherwise dominated by the mutual infliction of evils. The relations of state to state are uncertain, and there is no praetor available to adjust them. The only higher judge is the universal spirit in and for itself, the world spirit.78

According to Hegel, then, the world spirit is functioning behind the scenes, and so the process of colonization and modernization is precisely the world spirit at work. Nothing is more cunning than the cunning of reason! The planetary thinking of Hegel is a perpetual war of reason, insofar as reason is conceived as being universal and objective, in the sense that it perpetually transcends the constraints of internal milieus (for example, traditions and customs) precisely in the name of reason. The Hegelian planetary thinking reveals a politics of externalization. That is, what if the external reality that the local spirit confronts does not come from the spirit itself but from other spirits? Will this imported reality elevate the local spirit toward a concrete universal? Or, on the contrary, will it only produce an unhappy consciousness insofar as the self and the other always remain separable—as is the case with Western technology and Eastern thought? It is not easy to ignore Hegel’s aspiration to reason, which, we have to acknowledge, is the cornerstone of Western thought; after all, though Eurocentric, it is a theoretical advancement that renders the West necessary and the rest of the world contingent. However, the question of whether the reason that Hegel saw in Jena and Berlin is still sufficient for today is another matter. Hegel stands as a thinker of the planetary; however, this planetary thinking stopped tragically at the nation-state—the state as the limit of the reason, as seen from Berlin during the nineteenth century.79 Hegel’s philosophical construction of the modern state is a logical exercise that demonstrates its own necessity; however, history also seems to have ended in modern political states as per Hegel’s logic. Maybe we can blame those who came after Hegel for not being capable of pushing his dialectics any further. Though one may also argue that Marx, Lenin, and other historical materialists did precisely achieve this. If we look back at where we are today, historical materialism only realized Hegel’s Idea by criticizing it. Perhaps Marx and Lenin are, thus, only individual historical figures who followed the dialectical logic of Hegel. Thinking in this way, one may conclude that there is nothing new after Hegel, that Hegel culminates philosophical and historical thinking. This is precisely why Kojève claims that what Hegel saw in 1806 was already the end of history:

The end of the story was not Napoleon, it was Stalin and it was me who would be in charge of announcing it with the difference that I would not have the chance to see Stalin on horseback from my windows, but anyway. . . . Afterwards, there was the war and I understood. No, Hegel has not mistaken, he had given the exact date of the end of history, 1806. Since that date, what has happened? Nothing at all, the alignment of provinces [of the empire].80

Planetary freedom sets off in Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right and finds its realization in the modern state, seen as a milestone of the Spirit. If we can say, therefore, that the modern state is the limit of reason, it is equally the limit of freedom. It was among the Greeks that freedom became the constitutive force of the poleis; however, the poleis are also the limit of freedom since beyond that, it is the Persians, the Asians, and the barbarians. That is why history ends in the nation-state, and the quarrel concerning freedom becomes a pure postcolonial narrative. Kojève claims that after 1806, nothing happened. Is it not an exaggeration? He continues: “The Chinese revolution is only the introduction of the Napoleonian Code in China. The famous acceleration of history that we talk about so much, have you noticed that as it accelerates more and more, the historical movement advances less and less?”81

After the world revolutions, the immediate act of the anticolonial combatants was to establish a nation-state. Paradoxically, the most anticolonial act is also the most colonial one. Hegel’s theory of the state extends to the planetary scale through wars and antagonism. History and freedom end in the universal states. The strength of Hegel’s theory of the state is that it is grounded on reason and the dialectical nature of history intrinsic to reason’s own existence. In other words, the history of reason and the philosophy of history are unified. Hegel’s discourse on freedom and the state is not only the culmination of modern political philosophy but also the justification of the necessity and rationality of the modern state. It also threw other political theories into the shade. The New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan recalled that when he first read Hegel’s Philosophy of History, where Hegel says that “subjective freedom” and “individual consciousness” didn’t appear in China, he was rather upset. On the one hand, he wanted to disagree with Hegel, while on the other hand, he also felt that Hegel was right.82 In his own Philosophy of History, Mou agreed with Hegel’s critique and showed in his own reading how the lack of “subjective freedom” and “individual consciousness” didn’t produce the Hegelian state in China:

The state must be reorganized into an organic unity through the self-consciousness of each individual before it can be said to be an organic unity. The unification of China in the past was only achieved by conquering, and the individual didn’t attain self-consciousness, so it did not become a static unit. And that unity is also unstable and not solid. The state is a cultural concept, a rational product formed by individuals through self-consciousness. It is not a natural object, nor can it be obtained by force.83

Another Chinese philosopher, Zhao Tingyang, proposed to revive the ancient Chinese concept of tianxia (literally “all under the heaven”) as a system based on “oneness a priori,” or what he calls an “integrated world system” in contrast to “a dominating world system” characterized by imperialism.84 This model is inspired by the Zhou Dynasty (West Zhou 1100–777 BC, East Zhou 770–256 BC). Given the fact that its history is remote and what is left of its history is fragmentary, it is difficult to judge the claim of Zhao adequately. One rather interesting thing is that, like Karatani, Zhao raises the concept of world sovereignty in contrast to state sovereignty; that is to say, on top of the sovereign state, there is another political unit that maintains the dynamics of the diverse sovereign states.85 Should we consider tianxia as the possibility of the world spirit returning to the East to spawn and die there? After all, tianxia, in order for it to avoid becoming a sino-imperialism, should instead be regarded as an attempt to reinvent a new language to articulate a planetary thinking. However, the difficulty of overriding sovereign states with tianxia is that there was no concept of a sovereign state or nation-state in the history of China; or as Mou clearly demonstrated, China, as well as tianxia, was not a state unit but a cultural unit.86 Therefore, it isn’t easy to justify that tianxia should be the successor of the nation-state according to dialectical logic. Furthermore, if one cannot demonstrate how tianxia triumphs over Kantian cosmopolitanism, then tianxia as an answer remains theoretically underelaborated.87 By claiming that tianxia is organic in contrast to Kantian cosmopolitanism, one regrettably overlooks the central role of organism in Kant’s political philosophy and perpetuates the myth that Eastern thinking is organic while Western thinking is mechanic. Nonetheless, the merit of returning to tianxia is due to the fact that the current geopolitical configuration based on nation-states is at an impasse, something that has already been affirmed by many philosophers.

Mou affirms Hegel’s critique, while at the same time, he contests the end of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, that is, the fact that Hegel stopped at the political state. Hegel did not only leave the conflicts between the states as inevitable, but he also affirmed the domination of some states over others. Hegel’s refusal of world sovereignty and his discourse on reason indirectly confirm the domination of the rational over the not-yet-rational or the less rational.88 Thus, Mou suggests to think beyond Hegel: “If the sacred idea of ‘existing separately on the earth’ must go further beyond the juxtaposition of various nation states and ‘exist on the earth in a complete and harmonious way,’ this is the goal of the ‘da tong’ (great unity or great harmony). How would this be possible?”89

Mou did not identify a philosophy of history in China that was able to be the counterpart of Hegel’s history of reason or that which was possible to respond to the above question; on the contrary, what he exposed was a historical process in which reason was absent as the protagonist. Instead of reason, what drove the historical process in China was either the personal charisma of the hero as the founder of the dynasty or the technique of governance.90 This was also how historiography was written and discussed in the Chinese tradition. If we can take what Mou says as an exemplary of the East, then the East–West divide lies not only on the question of reason but also on the very possibility of reason beyond the modern state.

This is a question left to us: How is it possible to conceive of a new planetary framework of politics, since planetary politics based on nation-states is only the continuation of the same game? That is to say, if either the United States or China takes the lead, then there is no change in the nature of geopolitics; what changes is only the configuration of power. What, then, could emerge after the nation-state if we are to follow Hegelian dialectics? If we follow Kojève’s claims concerning the end of history, we might say that reason vacillates after the victory of Napoleon. If reason has not yet come to its end after the political state, then it must become planetary, namely, it will have to be expanded in accordance with a planetary aim. Can it finally arrive at a “great unity” or “great harmony” as the Chinese thinkers aspire to? Is the nation-state a stepping stone toward such a unity? If our interpretation of Hegel is correct, then it is clear that such a harmonious whole is not possible. Hegel was not able to transcend the nation-state; or, the fact is that Hegel did not transcend the nation-state because the German state was still in its formation. Hegel justified the logical and historical necessity of the nation-state by way of a political organicism. But what comes after the organic state was beyond Hegel. That is why we had to penetrate into the heart of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, resituating it into the history of thought and exposing its limits. We will continue pursuing the Hegelian thread in the next chapter, examining diverse reflections on the planetary.