World Spirit as Planetary Thinking

§5. Individuation of the Spirit as Historical Process

Hegel’s theory of individuation is a game of triads (or syllogisms), where each element of the triad is, in turn, composed of another triad. The world, or even the cosmos itself, could be seen as the rhythmic generation and cancellation of these triads. One difficulty of reading Hegel is that one needs to loop back to the previous triads constantly, but since each of these elements refers to other triads, the looping goes on and on. Similar to when one wants to trace a complex recursive algorithm, one gets lost in the numerous and laborious listing of triads. In each triad, there is a tendency to arrive at the self-consciousness of the concept; such a tendency is desire (Begierde). Each dialectical movement of the concept contributes to another dialectical movement. Hegel’s cosmos is sublime, like a psychedelic becoming, where everything is generated and transformed recursively in the form of triads. The world neither moves mechanically nor is it vulnerably exposed to contingency; it individuates dialectically, meaning recursively. Hegel did not have recourse to the word recursivity, nor did Deleuze in Difference and Repetition; they had to, therefore, either reuse existing terms, such as circular, or search elsewhere. However, circular can also mean mere repetition, whereas visually, there is no difference between beginning and end—for example, a closed automaton, in which every part repeats the same procedure in every cycle. Recursion is different: it is circular, but it never repeats itself; like Heraclitus’s river, one cannot step in it twice.

The soul individuates in time and as time. The soul, the first form of subjective spirit,17 is that which returns to itself recursively instead of repetitively, as we see in Plato’s Phaedrus. Aristotle criticized that the soul cannot be circular since the soul is as capable of not thinking as it is capable of thinking. If thinking can be interrupted, then it is not circular.18 Retrospectively, we might say that Aristotle is a thinker of linearity in this respect since he is unable to think of a circular form that is not repetitive, in other words, that is, recursivity. All thinkers of linearity, when confronting the question of the absolute beginning, be it temporal or causal, are haunted by infinite regression. Aristotle emphasized this in Book Α of Metaphysics, “those who maintain the infinite series destroy the good without knowing it. Yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit.”19 If the series is infinite, then there is no telos, and insofar as there is no telos, there is no Good. Therefore, Aristotle demands a prime mover—an unconditional cause, a cause that is not the effect of another cause, namely, the Absolute. Hegel’s dialectics is not linear; it is eternally circular—the Absolute is not at the beginning. At the beginning, it is only the immediate and abstract existant. Therefore, nous for Hegel consists of constant returning to itself in order to self-differentiate and attain self-consciousness. Hegel’s interpretation of πάσχειν and ένεργεῖν in nous of Aristotle’s De Anima in Philosophy of Mind and Lectures on the History of Philosophy is criticized as a misreading, one of scandalous nature.20 In Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel commented on the prime mover: “God is pure activity [reine Tätigkeit]. . . . [He is] the substance which in its potentiality also has its actuality, the substance whose essence [potentia] is itself activity and in which the two are not separable; in it, possibility cannot be distinguished from form [Form], and it is that which itself produces [produziert] its own content, its own determinations.”21 God is no longer the original and ultimate point that emanates but rather a circle, a pure activity. It also holds true for the subject, which ceases to be a substance, but rather becomes pure activity. This circular image of thinking is attributed to Hegel’s “misreading” of Aristotle’s De Anima since he superimposed his own theory of individuation on the Aristotelian text.22 Or perhaps more precisely, as Catherine Malabou has claimed, Hegel sets up a “speculative relation between teleological circularity and representational linearity.”23 Dialectics is fundamentally a theory of individuation: everything individuates, and therefore, everything is in becoming as a result of a syllogism: being—nothing—becoming. The spirit is no exception; it moves from childhood to adulthood in a triadic sequence. Individuation does not aim for a philosophy of nature, or perhaps more accurately, the philosophy of nature is only an instance of a dialectics that is not yet able to fully overcome contingency. And in this sense, Hegel moves beyond the philosophers that were before him because, for most of them, individuation was thought of from the perspective of nature or of God. Spinoza, for example, provided a point of departure for philosophy with his concept of causa sui, namely, the inseparability of the concept from being, as well as the immanent causation of the process. However, for Hegel, Spinoza falls prey to an oriental view that affirms the unity of substance and lacks an occidental principle of individuality.24 That is to say, Spinoza’s substance remains a totality, namely, God, which is close to the metaphor of the dark night in the preface of the Phenomenology. Even though causa sui already means a self-causation and, therefore, movement, this process lacks a dialectical method; Spinoza’s method is geometric, therefore, mathematical and formal. The attributes are for Hegel only forms and representations, which reflect the substance from outside, and the substance is incapable of “immanent reflection.”25 The famous dictum attributed to Spinoza’s theory of individuation, omnis determinatio est negatio, is for Hegel only a determination of a negativity (coming from outside), but not yet the negation of the negation. In Hegel, the individuation of the spirit is dialectical, teleological, and, therefore, historical. The spirit individuates in time and as time. Or maybe we can say that the Spirit is time as per the last paragraph of the Phenomenology of Spirit, “Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist”:

Time is the concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason Spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just as long as it has not grasped its pure concept, i.e. has not annulled time. It is the outer, intuited pure self which is not grasped by the self, the merely intuited concept; when this latter grasps itself it sublates its time-form [hebt seine Zeitform auf], comprehends this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuiting. Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of spirit that is not yet complete within itself [der nicht in sich vollendet ist].26

The Concept does not have a pregiven form; the Concept is not a mold that imposes itself on raw material in order to realize itself; the Concept realizes itself as time and in time. In this sense, time is the Concept itself, while the Concept is not time but rather a time with its time-form sublated. The separation between Concept and time does not allow us to grasp either Concept or time fully. The Concept actualizes itself through externalization and internalization. Therefore, it demands time, but it is also precisely time itself. For without such movement, then time would be nothing other than pure becoming (or Zeitform, as Hegel terms it). Instead, this becoming is not in itself contingent, but it cannot proceed without contingency. Contingency is what enables it and what it has to overcome with its logic27 until it arrives at the Absolute. It is worth looking at this concluding paragraph of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in detail:

As its fulfilment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself [Insichgehen] in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection [Erinnerung]. Thus, absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence—the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s knowledge—is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection [Er-innerung], the inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although this Spirit starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts. The realm of Spirits which is formed in this way in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of Spirit, and this is the absolute Notion.28

History, we are told, is the self-knowing of the Spirit. This knowing involves an externalization of the Idea (the living Concept or the life of the Concept). This externalization is not an imprint of the idea on matter, like the instantiation of the Platonic form or the Aristotelian hylomorphism, but rather a constant self-realization of the idea, augmenting its capacity for self-determination. This process of externalization is technical in the sense that it produces technical apparatus, writings, infrastructures, and institutions. This process of externalization is a tendency—if we can follow Henri Bergson and André Leroi-Gourhan’s use of this term. For Bergson, the élan vital is the most fundamental tendency that expresses itself in two other tendencies, namely, instinct and intellect, and the intellect is that which produces tools and produces tools with tools; for Leroi-Gourhan, this fundamental tendency is the externalization of memory qua the liberation of bodily organs. In Kapp, a student of Hegel and the first philosopher who produced a book on the philosophy of technology, externalization is considered as the projection of organs, which will be internalized, and this circular form is that which conditions self-consciousness:

Self-consciousness proves to be the result of a process in which knowledge of an exterior is transformed into knowledge of an interior. This knowledge, turning back toward the exterior and expanding our understanding of it, in turn provides new information about our interior, ultimately producing, in this endless complication of our orientation in the world and of our self-orientation generally, the content of all knowledge [Wissen]—in short, the sciences [Wissenschaften].29

It is, therefore, hard to say that Hegel’s is an idealist dialectics in contradistinction to a materialist dialectics because the idea cannot develop without the material other.30 The negativity in the process of individuation comes not only from the outside but also from the act of the spirit itself, an act that is the potential source of both contingency and negativity. When returning to itself, Spirit has to recollect (erinnern) but also to internalize (er-innern), to organize. The recollection and internalization of that which is externalized partakes of the same act. This act of returning to itself is endless. Like sinking into the night of self-consciousness, it has no end; it is “desire in general.” Desire, for Hegel, is less psychological than it is rational. To desire is to enter into a laborious activity because the object of desire, that is to say, the Absolute, is never given as such and will not be given as such at any moment. Therefore, we see that this returning act of self-consciousness is also endless. Every return to the inner self via the outer actuality is the only beginning of another act starting anew (A → B → C → A′). But this new beginning is one that is richer than the previous one since it is based on a higher degree of self-consciousness (A → B → C → A′ → B′ → C′ → A″).31 The aim of individuation is the absolute concept or absolute knowing.

§6. World Spirit as Planetary Thinking and the Place of Reason in History

It is worth recalling that the Phenomenology of Spirit starts with the question of immediate experience (the here and now of sense sensation) as the abstract universal, and the task of the phenomenology is to clarify how this abstract universal can pass into the concrete universal. Phenomenology is, therefore, the description of the individuation of self-consciousness from the private person to the social class, to a people, and finally to world history. Through a ceaseless return to the self as well as the historical sedimentation of its externalization, world history emerges as the horizon of self-consciousness. The individuation of the Spirit is the becoming of the world, namely, human history. It is “a journey of consciousness,” “a pilgrimage of reason,” or “an odyssey of spirit proper.”32 Hegel’s Weltgeist is, therefore, planetary thinking, asserting its foundation entirely on reason. It is a Geist that moves dialectically. It is one that is able to comprehend not only the human world but also cosmic existence. World history is, therefore, nothing but proof of dialectical reason. Reason plays a fundamental role in Hegel’s philosophy of history because reason is, at the same time, the cause, the effect, and the solution. World history is also known and made visible by dialectics—in the sense that dialectics is central to the political epistemology that is capable of knowing the Absolute. While the planetary did not appear to be a major problem or concern in the nineteenth century, since the twentieth century, it has become a key question and one that must be revisited.

In Alexander Kojève’s infamous reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit, he takes the lord and bondsman dialectics and understands it as the motive of history: history could be seen as a constant struggle for recognition. This struggle for recognition also follows the logic of dialectics; that is, it always begins with a historically constructed, priorly given contradiction that then, in turn, sublates it. The lord and the bondsman represent an inequality in which the self-consciousness of the lord is the being in itself and for itself, while that of the bondsman is being in itself as bondsman and being for the lord out of the fear of death. The fear of death for the bondsman maintains the unequal relation between them. However, the bondsman, through his work (the negation of the thing), gains a self-consciousness of being independent, while the lord recognizes that he depends completely on the bondsman, who has been serving the mediation between him and the thing. Mutual recognition is now demanded since the bondsman likewise has to be recognized, and the lord also wants to be recognized by a similar or higher social class. Work here is that which transforms the relation: work is also presented as a tendency of negation, that is, the motor of the dialectics.

The Spirit’s individuation follows dialectics and culminates in the self-consciousness of different historical protagonists. After the section on the lord and bondsman, Hegel continues with the world spirit of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness. Stoicism, we are told, “as a universal form of the World-Spirit” is principally a phenomenon born of a time of “universal fear and bondage” because it sees the truth in thinking itself and therefore refrains from the otherness. It is also precisely because of this that it was also “a time” when “universal culture . . . had raised itself to the level of thought.”33 Freedom of thought is itself an abstract freedom because it escapes the other (i.e., external reality) and withdraws into itself. It is an “incomplete negation of otherness [unvollendete Negation des Andersseins].” Therefore, we see that for Hegel, skepticism redirects the stoic, independent consciousness to confront the other and imposes negativity on it. Skepticism gains its self-consciousness by causing otherness, which appears in the first instance and claims to be real, to vanish. In comparison with stoicism, which withdraws into thought itself, skepticism negates the otherness in order to be self-content. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness progresses according to its degree of maturity and independence. In comparison with stoicism and skepticism, the unhappy consciousness advances beyond the confinement in thinking itself, characteristic of stoicism and the renouncement of the externality of skepticism. It arrives at a moment of consciousness where it affirms the other without recognizing the other as the other of the self or itself as the unity of both. This is also, for Hegel, the passage to Jewish consciousness. In Judaism, a proto-model of the dialectics of the lord and the bondsman plays out,34 where a duality of extremes develops in which essence is beyond existence and God outside humanity (the immutable); this is said to leave humanity stranded in the inessential. In Christianity, a unity between the immutable and the particular is called forth through the figure of Christ as God incarnate, namely, that in this experience, the immutable is unified in the particular and the particular with the immutable; however, such unity pretending to be a happy union is, in fact, another unhappy consciousness, because both the immutable and the particular still remain an “other.” For this reason, Jean Wahl claims that Jesus is still a Jew, and his effort to reunite is, first of all, an act of separation:35“Hegel strove to describe this unhappy consciousness that is the Christian and romantic soul . . . since the Jew does not have the privilege of unhappiness or that he shares it with the soul who is most completely opposed to him.”36

In general, we could probably say the unhappy consciousness is tragic in the sense that it is a necessary stage toward freedom, a stage where the contradiction between the self and the other, the law of the family and the law of the state, the mortal and God come to the fore.37 The tragic nature of Judaism and its continuation in Christianism is not the same as that of Greek tragedy, not only because, as Hegel says, Christianism is a religion of pain,38 but also because it is not able to overcome the contradiction and to reunite each half: every attempt at reunification is only a step toward separation. The unhappy consciousness is a decisive moment for the subsequent formation of a community because it constitutes the unity of the split, and for Hölderlin and Hegel, such a reunion was precisely the desire of the Germanic nation.39 This phenomenon, or rather this tendency, repeated itself on the eve of the second world war and continues to be repeated today among the extreme Right and the neoreactionary by figures such as Peter Thiel and Nick Land.40 The unhappy consciousness feels without understanding the participation of the universal in the particular, leaving this contradictory duality insurmountable since it is still only a feeling, not a concept:

The object of unhappy consciousness . . . is the unity of the immutable and the specific. But unhappy consciousness does not relate to its essence through thought, it is the feeling of this unity and not yet its concept. For this reason, its essence remains alien to it. . . . The feeling of the divine which this consciousness has is a shattered feeling, precisely because it is only a feeling.41

We may follow Wahl that “abstraction is the synonym of unhappiness,” and for the spirit in order to have true joy, it has to move toward the concrete universal. This consists of Hegel’s historical analysis but also the aim of his own project—to search for a true union beyond the unhappy consciousness that continued into modern times and that expresses itself in the separation between the church and state, and the state and civil society. Empty abstraction, or semblance (Schein), like all immediate phenomena, must be put to the test as an initial movement of the Concept. The test, dialectics, leads to the self-consciousness of the Concept, the Idea. Self-consciousness means reason is aware of itself, not only in an abstract way, like when one is conscious of oneself without which one could not even think and speak (in itself), for to speak is to be conscious of what one spoke and going to pronounce next; but also that reason is able to know and determine itself in the most concrete form (for itself), namely, that the progress of reason (or the journey of Geist) is at the same time rational (vernünftig) and effective (wirklich):42 rational because it is not contingent or arbitrary, effective because it actualizes (verwirken) itself in reality, both as movement and as externalization:43 “It [reason] lives on itself, and it is itself the material upon which it works. Just as Reason is its own presupposition and absolute goal, so it is the activation of that goal in world history—bringing it forth from the inner source to external manifestation, not only in the natural universe but also in the spiritual.”44 If there were no discourse of reason, there would not be any philosophy of history in the West, including a philosophy of world history, because a philosophy of history already presupposes reason instead of utopia as its end. This explains why a philosophy of history only appears after the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. World history is the unfolding of reason’s self-searching and becoming self-consciousness; in order to do so, it has to act in reality, and through acting (wirken), it returns to itself in order to set off again. Reality (the Other) is the being of the externalization of the spirit, but it is, at the same time, the world in which the spirit is necessarily situated (the Other without which the Spirit is nothing). The world complexifies and concretizes as and through the actualization of spirit, through its self-knowledge and self-willing. Thus, we may say that reality is one aspect of actuality insofar as reality is its externalized part, and actuality is the possibility of reality insofar as actuality is conditioned by a pregiven setting—be that a concrete situation or a historical context. The spirit seen in this way is negentropic in the sense that it creates order through the “extraordinary force of the negative.”45 This order is not arbitrary. Namely, it is not whatever order, but rather rational order. This doesn’t mean that every act is rational since, as is apparent, we encounter all kinds of stupidity every day. However, insofar as the process of actualization is a recursive movement, it is capable of self-correction in the next cycle of actualization. Therefore, what is rational is preserved, and the passive part of actuality, or that which is not considered rational, is dissolved (löst sich auf) in the next movement.46

The world civilization, one may say, is the technical retention of the spirit’s memory of this world, which allows it to act on it recursively. We may follow Hegel and call it second nature. Second nature is not limited to habits, for habits are mostly sustained by technical objects—for example, writing or dining equipment. The world civilization as second nature is that which allows the spirit to progress since the spirit inherits it, and it is that which the spirit has to fight against in order to be free—not to be incarcerated in a mere in-itself, and never an achieving self-consciousness.47 There is no definite goal that can indicate the end of history since such a goal is always only a stepping stone toward the Absolute. The Absolute is not a road sign which indicates a definite destination; instead, it is only an indication of the culmination of the self-knowledge of the “infinite actual spirit.”48 We might say that the Absolute is, therefore, a threshold beyond which the spirit sets off on a new journey, indicated by a new direction and desire for higher spiritual achievement. In the Philosophy of Mind, the Absolute is the moment when the Other no longer poses as a limitation to the Spirit but rather presents itself as the means toward the absolute being-for-itself of the Spirit, which we could find in art, religion, and philosophy.49 The Absolute spirit is distinguished from the subjective spirit (anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology) and the objective spirit (right, morality, ethics), being a distinct moment of the development of the Idea. I emphasize a “distinct moment” instead of saying a “later moment,” as is the first impression when reading Hegel, where one might think that the absolute spirit is what succeeds the subjective and objective spirit. However, in terms of temporality, both successiveness and simultaneity coexist; otherwise, Hegel’s own recursive logic would be only in service of linearity. The absolute spirit is always already at work (energein) with both subjective and objective spirit; only its culmination is not yet experienced. It is called absolute because it is the moment when the spirit is no longer dependent on anything other than itself, namely, that the spirit is able to grasp itself as what it is:

The absolute Spirit is the identity, of the being eternally in itself, as the returning and returned into itself [ebenso ewig in sich seiende als in sich zurückkehrende und zurückgekehrte Identität]: the one and universal substance as spiritual [geistige], the judgement in itself and in a knowing [in sich und in ein Wissen], for which the substance is (known) as such [für welches sie als solche ist].50

Independence also means that the spirit is able to free itself from the world and in the world.51 This act of freeing (Befreiung) is the freedom of the spirit but also its capacity to free contingency as contingency, that contingency is no longer arbitrary but rather rational. The absolute Spirit is the manifestation of the recursive movement of the subjective spirit (characterized by Erinnerung) and the objective spirit (characterized by Entäusserung), and it appears as the last moment of the development of the Idea. In the three absolute spirits, philosophy (concept) is the unity of the previous two, art (sensation, intuition) and religion (representation). According to Hegel, the life of the spirit is only known retrospectively since philosophy is always a latecomer. For Hegel, the Absolute, however, is not the end as it is often read after Kojève. Since for Hegel, world history—the becoming self-consciousness of the planetary—holds no particular consciousness as its goal:

World history does not begin with any conscious goal, such as we find in the particular spheres of human life. The simple social instinct of human beings already involves the conscious goal of securing life and property and insofar as this life in common has already come into being, that goal is extended further. . . . That goal is the inner, indeed the innermost, unconscious drive; and the entire business of world history is (as we said) the work of bringing it to consciousness.52

There is something uncanny here since history, the actualization of the human spirit as time in space, is driven by something unconscious, something that we thought we had grasped, but it might be only partial, for self-consciousness is a process without a quantifiable endpoint. However, this self-knowing is far from aleatory; it is rational, namely, logical. For example, the formation and development of a Volk could be read as the self-knowing process of its spirit whose archē is already inscribed in the oracle of Delphi; it is also thanks to this self-knowing, that the Volk develops a program that preserves its people and continues to survive. In this process, only what is necessary will be preserved; those that are merely contingent and dangerous for the preservation of the people will be eliminated—for example, the irrational demand of the king, the unethical exploitation of one class over the other, or the unjust appropriation of private property. By the same token, when we consider the world civilization, there must be, so postulated by Hegel, a spirit that will be common to all cultures and realizes itself by unifying them. The world spirit is in itself a rational force which constantly actualizes itself in its own self-knowing and in the world: “Reason recognizes that which is true, which is in and for itself, that which has no limits. The concept of the spirit is returned into itself. In this movement spirit makes itself its own object. In this way progress does not proceed into infinity. There is rather a purpose, namely, the turn into itself.”53

The diversity of the world civilizations will finally subsume themselves to reason because those who are left behind will not be admitted; the irrational will not be able to survive in world history. The movement toward the concrete universal also means the subsumption of planetary diversity to a logic that governs the synchronization and the unification of all different civilizations. The world spirit is time itself; it conquers space via synchronization. The synchronization process is made possible by technology and assured by reason—namely, reason is the necessary measure of progress. Certain particularities might stay, but they still have to follow the dialectical logic. Contingency can only have a place in history after it has become necessary. A civilization that wishes to resist reason will only be conquered and then dismantled. Places that have nothing to contribute to the spirit will be eliminated—for example, Siberia, if one is to recall what Hegel writes about it: “First, the northern slope, Siberia, must be eliminated. This slope, from the Altai chain, with its fine streams that pour their waters into the northern Ocean, does not at all concern us here; because the Northern Zone, already stated, lies out of the pale of History.”54 Who is this “us” that bears the interests of the spirit? Europe, or more exactly, Western Europe or the Prussian state? Indeed, Hegel excludes both the Poles and the Slavs from the spirit’s journey toward the Absolute even though he noted that the former liberated Vienna from the Turks and the latter had been drawn into the sphere of occidental reason.55 Instead, both Poles and Slavs, not regarded exactly as belonging to the West, were only contingent to world history. The same goes for both Asian and African civilizations. We read in Philosophy of History, “the History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.”56 §393 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind remains a controversy regarding Hegel’s racism and the privilege he gave to the Caucasian race: “It is in the Caucasian race that mind first attains to absolute unity with itself; here for the first time mind [Geist] enters into complete opposition to naturalness, apprehends itself in its absolute independence, breaks free from the oscillation between one extreme and the other, achieves self-determination, self-development, and thereby produces world-history.”57

It is beyond our intention to criticize Hegel’s analysis of the African spirit as childish and the Asian spirit as being stuck in post-childhood because the intention is to interpret Hegel’s texts philosophically, as they deserve, though it does expose the fundamental question concerning the place of reason in Hegel’s philosophy, for reason is universal but also homogeneous.58 Reason will have to expand itself when it wants to become truly planetary. What Hegel insists is that European rationality will one day reign the world because it will be proven to be the most rational and mature spirit in and of the entire human history. The European spirit, not through its geography but its rationality, is destined to be the universal spirit, and it will synchronize those “local spirits” (Lokalgeister) which struggle to be in history and to be part of history.59

The principles of the spirits of peoples [Volksgeister] are in general restricted on account of their particularity, for it is in this particularity that, as existent individuals, they have their objective actuality and their self-consciousness. Their deeds and destinies in their relations to one another are the manifest [erscheinende] dialectic of the finitude of these spirits, and out of it arises the universal spirit, 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.60

World history does not belong to a particular people, but rather its subject, the world spirit, emerged in the dialectical movement of particular and finite civilizations. The world spirit is the self-legitimating juridical body that justifies the progress of world history. This was the ending paragraph before Hegel entered into the last pages of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right dedicated to the question of world history, also a transition from his critique of right in 1821 to his lectures in the next years on the philosophy of history. Today we might question if this Weltgeist, which Hegel sees in Napoleon mounted on his white horse in Jena in 1806 just before he sent off his manuscript for Phenomenology of Spirit to his publisher, is not simply a bias or even an illusion. As Nietzsche wrote in the Untimely Meditations, for Hegel, “the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin.”61 The Prussian Volksgeist is the world spirit observed by Hegel at the University of Berlin and now, perhaps, from the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery. Alexander Kojève once thought that Hegel’s identification of Napoleon with the end of history was a mistake; it wasn’t Hegel but Kojève himself who saw the end of history, and it wasn’t Napoleon but Stalin who indicated the completion of the universal and homogenous state.62 However, Kojève is much more sympathetic to Hegel, asking why it was Hegel and not the others who recognized Napoleon: “Why then is it Hegel who attains it, and not some other of his contemporaries, all of whom know that there is a man named Napoleon? But how do they know him? Do they truly know him? Do they know what Napoleon is? Do they understand him?”63

It was only Hegel who recognized Napoleon, not as a Frenchman who conquered Jena or a short general riding a white horse, but rather as world soul, which proves his philosophy of history. It was later the Franco-Russian Hegelian Kojève who would claim to be the only philosopher after Hegel capable of recognizing the Absolute through Stalin. The history that we know is a past that belongs to the human being. For sure, there is time and space before human beings, but it is not a history of the spirit; as Hegel writes, “World-history is not connected with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the destinies of individuals are tied to the positions of the planets.”64 The movement of the spirit is guided by reason and realizes itself through the collective actions of the human species; the reverse is also true, that human actions emerge from the becoming self-consciousness of the spirit. Contra Nietzsche, this historical process, thus conceived by Hegel and realized at the same time through European colonization, is but another proof of the dialectical logic and carries Hegel’s world process beyond Berlin.

Thus, in The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt defended Hegel against Nietzsche: “The question is how long the spirit of Hegel has actually resided in Berlin. In any event, the new political tendency which dominated Prussia after 1840 preferred to avail itself of a conservative philosophy of the state, especially one furnished by Friedrich Julius Stahl, whereas Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin.”65 The world spirit and the Western philosophy of history are inseparable. We may even say that Hegel’s spirit has reached far beyond his own imagination. We mentioned earlier what Hegel had to say about Siberia. Siberia, however, was not really eliminated; for it maintained its vitality through Moscow. And after Schmitt’s writing, the world spirit traveled further, this time from Moscow to Beijing, the world’s second-largest economic force and probably the only force that can resist the USA in the 21^st century. The German writer Moritz Rudolph wittily described Hegel’s Weltgeist as salmon. Salmons go back to the same stream from where they were born to, spawn and die. Hegel said that the Weltgeist began in the East, voyaged to Greece, and then to the Roman Empire. And in Hegel’s time, it traveled to the Germanic people. This journey is, at the same time, a becoming self-consciousness as well as a liberation—a moving toward concrete freedom. Like salmon, it is now going back to where it began, where it will probably end. Hegel’s Weltgeist has traveled through the entire world, from the East to the West, and back again, having briefly visited the USA after Hegel’s death (Hegel had already anticipated the triumph of the New World).

This rhetoric risks being a cliché, fitting the typical discourse of the “decline of the West” as was claimed a hundred years ago by conservatives such as Oswald Spengler. More recently, we also often hear political slogans such as “decline of the west and rise of the East” claimed by Eastern nationalists, self-fulfilling the history of the world spirit or encounter science fiction novels such as The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from The Future, where the destruction of the West occurs due to climate change.66 But maybe one could say, later with astonishment, that by the cunning of reason, the Weltgeist’s tour to the East was actually only a disguise, because the West is its true home! Was not Marx already a forerunner when he saw the realization of the Hegelian world spirit as a world market, which “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole terrestrial globe.”67 Today one could equally argue that the world market is a necessary stage of dialectics. Philosophy is always a latecomer; its understanding of history is always only an après coup or a Nachträglichkeit, as Hegel writes in the introduction to the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings when the dusk falls. But one thing is at least clear, the thinking of the Weltgeist, be it a traveller or a synchronizer, is a planetary thinking. This does not mean that all historicist discourses are planetary thinking; for if the Weltgeist is a planetary thinking, this is because it considers the world not as a passive being to be conquered, but rather it understands the world as an organism that will finally arrive at its own completion: self-consciousness.

The question of self-consciousness was never posed in China, according to Hegel, since in China, the spirit and nature still needed to be clearly distinguished, one from the other. Religion and state did not have the same sense in the West as they did in China since the individual’s true faith, Hegel claims, “can exist . . . independently of any external compulsory power,” while this was not the case in China.68 Therefore, one can also claim by following Hegel that a political state is not possible in China. Hegel’s explanation of Chinese philosophy in his lectures on the history of philosophy remains the most superficial of understandings, something we would not find today from any Westerner interested in eastern thought. This is partly due to the lack of literature available in Hegel’s time, as well as the turn against a hyperbolic admiration of Chinese culture that occurred in the eighteenth century, especially after the Macartney Mission—the first British envoy to China and whose trade proposal was arrogantly declined by Emperor Qianlong. The description of the Gua in the Iching (Hegel calls the speculative philosophy of the Chinese)69 as the “most abstract,” and “most superficial categories of understanding”70 could also be seen as a retort against the romantic perception of China in the past century in Europe, especially in the work of Leibniz.

Today, it is probably too easy to prove that Hegel is fundamentally Eurocentric—for clearly, he was. And it is also not at all difficult to renounce Hegel’s concept of history as being Eurocentric—for it patently was. However, this is not what makes Hegel relevant, and it is also not what makes Hegel less interesting today. On the contrary, what is intriguing in Hegel’s political philosophy and philosophy of history is this primordial form of planetary thinking, which is not simply an ideology like those culturalist slogans we see today in the mass media but rather a systematic discourse on the self-consciousness and self-determination of the world and how it is driven and determined by reason.

§7. Freedom as the Drive of the Transitions of Political Forms

Why should we pay attention to Hegel’s planetary thinking today if it is true that the Geist is no longer in Berlin and that European thinking, from the perspective of today’s geopolitics, might be considered provincial? If there is a Weltgeist, and if world history is the pursuit of freedom and reason, then should one be an optimist about the future of humankind and the future of the planet? Or is such faith in Weltgeist fundamentally just a theology with a secularized camouflage, as Rudolf Haym reproached Hegel of doing in his influential Hegel und seine Zeit, that Hegel’s Weltgeist is merely an ideological trick?71 Or, as Marx argued, that it is clearly just pantheist mysticism?72 Hegel’s planetary thinking—his concept of the Weltgeist and its relation to world history, is still pertinent, even today, and we could argue that it is becoming even more so. In this faith, planetary freedom is promised: “This is one of the truths of speculative philosophy: that freedom is the only truth of Spirit.”73 The individuation of the Spirit will lead to freedom as something necessary—namely, without which there is no individuation. Contrary to Kant’s nature that guarantees perpetual peace, Hegel’s reason intends to be the guarantee of planetary freedom. Philosophical contemplation of history is only valid when history is seen as the history of reason: “It is only fitting and proper to philosophic contemplation for us to take up history at the point where rationality begins to enter into worldly existence, not where it is still merely an unrealized possibility; that is to say, history must begin where rationality makes its appearance in consciousness, will, and action.”74 However, this faith in reason is by nature like the faith in God; that is to say, such a theory of planetary freedom is also a theodicy. History is eschatological in the sense that the endpoint—if it exists, is the moment when the spirit realizes its promise of freedom. We have to step back by asking what is meant by freedom for Hegel and what planetary freedom might look like if we were to follow and prolong Hegel’s analysis of the world spirit. Without answering these questions, we are still far from justifying that Hegel is one of our contemporaries.

For Hegel, the fundamental question of right is freedom, as he wrote in §29 of Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, “Right [Recht] is any existence at all which is the existence [Dasein] of the free will. Right is, therefore, by definition, freedom as Idea.” We might even generalize Hegel’s claim that the presupposition of freedom in right is fundamental for all European constitutions, including those of ancient Greece, while the association of right and individual freedom only came after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Hegel lived in modern times when individual freedom gained unprecedented significance in politics. For the Greeks, freedom was the cornerstone of the polis, and vice versa, the polis being the condition of freedom; thus, the political thought of Plato and Aristotle are philosophies of the polis, and for the latter, a man without a polis is like a hand without a body.75 However, what the Greeks meant by freedom is not the individual freedom that we understand today as that which is granted to every citizen as a right, but rather the freedom of settlements, the slave trade, and participation in popular assemblies, as is revealed by Socrates’s response to the challenge of Glaucon and his brother Adeimantus in the Republic, where Socrates imagines the founding of a city governed by the aristocracy, starting from a group of five people, and gradually adding populations with different craftsmanship. The polis, in Socrates’s speech, consists of different technai, each of which defines the role of the citizen as well as demands his excellence or virtue. Socrates’s rhetoric against Thrasymachus’s challenge on the value of justice is very much based on his analytic definition of the polis according to technai—for example, wage earnings and money making is a technē that should be distinguished from the technē of shepherding. By confusing shepherding and money making, farming and guarding, the city fails to understand that each individual citizen can only be good at one technē, and excellence or virtue is an expression of the mastery of a particular technē.76 When every citizen performs the technē that defines their identities, e.g., a carpenter achieves the excellence of his own skill, then it is justice. However, the meddling and exchange between different technai—for example, a carpenter who does the job of a shoemaker—is considered injustice.77

For sure, one should distinguish the philosophy of the polis in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, for the latter consists of a series of attacks against the former. Aristotle also gives a lower status to mechanical laborers by questioning if they could be counted as citizens78 because a citizen is strictly defined as a person who “shares in the administration of justice and in the holding of office.”79 It is beyond our purpose here to investigate Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his writings on the classification and ranking of knowledge into theory, praxis, or technics as well as its relation to the classification of goods in the Politics;80 however, we might still be able to claim, as Joachim Ritter does, that for Aristotle, a citizen who is able to be self-dependent is free, namely, to realize the purpose of nature in his own praxis; that is to say, he is able to realize the humanness of being a human (i.e. the human ergon or ergon in general).81 In other words, the question of justice is modeled on appropriateness, exemplified by the realization of one’s own nature and one’s individuality in the polis through habits and reason. The three elements, nature, habits, and reason, are the means by which individuals become good and virtuous.82

Greek freedom as a political right is fundamental to the polis since it is preventative to the formation of tyranny.83 The political right introduced by Solon spread out to the poleis, followed by the reorganization of the phylai by Cleisthenes after getting rid of the tyranny of Peisistratus.84 We know that Cleisthenes divided Attica into three regions (Athens and its surrounding, coastal areas, and hinterland), each having ten groups of demes; he then selected each deme from three regions to be linked together to form a phyle. That is to say, each phyle is a mixture of demes from three different regions. This reorganization, first of all, broke the synetheiai hai proteron (customary and familiar connections), and it, at the same time, also destroyed the foundation of aristocratic influences (Areopagos).85 This institutionalization reintroduced the civic right or equality of male adult citizens and created a civic time and civic space. This is also the moment of the emergence of isonomy, namely, the equality of citizens (notably except enslaved people, foreigners, children, and women)86 be that nobles or middle class, as well as the conviction that the government of the city belongs to the citizens, as is claimed by Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet, in order “to establish isonomy is to place arche es to meson.”87

This emphasis on individual freedom also brought about a crisis of individualism—or in the words of Nietzsche, an extreme Apollinarism—and disrupted collective and communal life. The conflict between individualism and collectivism become a thematic of the tragedy. We are also told that it is during the governance of Cleisthenes that a theatre in honor of Dionysus was built at the base of the hill of the Acropolis, and the choruses were reinstituted of having fifty men and fifty boys from the ten demes (to sing songs in honor of Dionysus).88 The birth of individualism in ancient Greece expressed in the art and affirmation of the individual right was countered by the communal life of the polis.89 The polis assumes an identification between private individuals and citizens, but it also indirectly undermines the degree of individual freedom; as Hegel found in Plato, there is an exclusion of particularity from the state.90 This parochial nature of the polis was also cause of the instability of the universal that it attempted to establish.91

From Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution, we know that at least around 400 BC, the selection of the civil servants (boule, court juries, etc.) was made through a machine known as kleroterion, a simple mechanical random generator, which chooses members of the council randomly from the pool of applicants. The destiny of the polis fell on the shoulder of the citizens and conditions the ethical life of the Greeks. If, for the Greeks and the Romans, individual freedom was still limited to privileged individuals, Christianity opened a path to the universal, to the equality of everyone to be beloved by God.92 It is only since the French Revolution that freedom has become the right of every individual. The French revolution was a monumental event for Hegel where its new individualism couldn’t be countered by the political form of the polis or that of Christian religion. The scientific revolution and industrialization also meant that philosophy became detached from theology and metaphysics, and the private individual from the citizens of the polis. Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right could be read as a response to this event, asserting the new task of philosophy.93 Industrialization brought Aristotle’s definition of the freeman to an end. Because the free citizen, for Aristotle, is one who is able to develop their talent, to realize themselves. However, in the industrial epoch, as it was later more clearly pointed out by Marx, the workers had to alienate their labor time in order to make a living—such alienation led to the rise of the most dangerous class for Hegel, the rabbles (Pöbel), the unorganized or inorganic mass. Therefore, for Hegel, in modern society, the concept of freedom is no longer the same. In the past, self-restriction was largely due to the moral pressure of the collective and the communitarian norms (especially as a member of the church); this is now fading into the background.

It would, for sure, be incorrect to argue that individual freedom only appeared in modern times in the West; instead, what is meant here is that the history of political thought in the West is tantamount to a history of individual freedom and the political form associated with it. That is why Hegel claims that subjective freedom and individual conscience did not appear in China, while it was a mode of freedom that advanced in India. In the Philosophy of History, we read Hegel’s distinction between substantial freedom and subjective freedom:

substantial freedom must be distinguished from subjective freedom. Substantial freedom is the abstract undeveloped Reason implicit in volition, proceeding to develop itself in the State. But in this phase of Reason there is still wanting personal insight and will, that is, subjective freedom, which is realized only in the Individual, and which constitutes the reflection of the Individual in his own conscience. Where there is merely substantial freedom, commands and laws are regarded as something fixed and abstract, to which the subject holds himself in absolute servitude.94

Subjective freedom and individual conscience could be characterized as the right to will—one that is promised in the social, economic, and juristic domains. Such right to will is also the beginning of the multiplication of arbitrary demands, an entropic expansion of individual desire, which leads to a new social and economic structure beyond the family, namely, civil society. In ancient Greece, civil society was a slave to political society;95 in the Middle Ages, the two converged and identified with each other; the Reformation introduced private judgment of the reading of the Bible as a form of individual freedom, which was succeeded by the Enlightenment—in this sense Protestantism for Hegel preceded the Enlightenment. Thereafter, reason instead of virtue becomes the cornerstone of modernity;96 the separations between the state and religion and civil society and the state constitute the condition of a new political thought.97 Civil society has to be overcome by the state because, although it is based on rights, it aims at nothing concrete because it is driven and maintained by the interests of certain individuals and social groups. Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is not a defense of right, but rather a critique of right (or the idea of right), a critique against the arbitrariness of individualism and the domination of self-interest in civil society. Thus, Hegel, throughout the book, clearly distinguishes freedom (Freiheit) from arbitrariness (Willkür), an entropic becoming, in order to, step by step, redefine freedom in the modern state:

We can recall that in the Philosophy of Right a similar progression has to take place. In this science too, we begin with something abstract, namely with the concept of the will; we then proceed to the ensuing actualization of the still abstract will in an external reality, to the sphere of formal right; from there we go on to the will reflected into itself out of external reality, to the realm of morality, and thirdly and lastly we come to the will that unites within itself these two abstract moments and is therefore concrete, ethical will. In the sphere of ethics itself we then begin again from an immediacy, from the natural undeveloped hope that the ethical mind has in the family; then we come to the rupture of the ethical substance in civil society; and finally we reach the unity and truth, present in the political state, of those two one-sided forms of the ethical mind.98

This order from family to civil society and to the political state is nothing temporal but logical. This transition also does not mean that family and civil society are canceled, but rather they are sublated in the sense that they are unified into the political state. Kojin Karatani was right to have pointed out that it was Hegel and not Marx who grasped the unity of the Capital-Nation-State.99 We will have to confront Karatani’s reading of Kant and Hegel later; here, we want to raise the question concerning what is meant by unity.

Karatani uses Borromean rings to demonstrate this unity; however, this is not sufficient because not only are Borromean rings too static but also the relation between each ring depends on an overlap. This defect of describing the trinity in terms of the Borromean ring is precise because Karatani’s readings of Kant and Hegel miss the organicity that already concerned Kant in “The Architectonic of Pure Reason” regarding purposiveness and that Hegel developed beyond the three Critiques in his own philosophical project. We recall that in “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” Kant distinguishes understanding from reason and concepts from ideas. The task of the architectonic was to search for a systemic unity of reason, which couldn’t be resolved by the technical unity applied in the schematization of the understanding. Kant relies on the notion of purposiveness, i.e., teleology, to arrive at the a priori “systematic unity” instead of empirical “technical unity.”100 The search for purposiveness could be achieved by the reflection internal to the organic form. To some extent, we can say that Hegel took up Kant’s task and demonstrated how unity could be performed by dialectics.101 In Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, unity is exemplified in the idea of freedom. One tends to think that freedom means the liberty to choose, to speak, to write, to act, and its political form is what has been known as a liberal democracy. For Hegel, if freedom is thought of in this way, it remains arbitrary. While I have the right to say whatever I like, this right is still abstract and formal, and the act that is permitted by this right likewise remains arbitrary. Opposed to this arbitrary willing of right are laws and customs, those which forbid certain acts. For example, national security laws criminalize those opinions that are considered harmful and dangerous to the state. Laws are often considered to be necessary because, without them, chaos would reign. Without the laws of nature, nature would be completely opaque, and there would be no natural science since the sciences are built on laws that are, in principle, necessary; thus analogically, without social laws, society might fall into chaos, what Hobbes called the “war of all against all.” That is also to say, the determination of the will is only brought into objective existence through the state and its juridical system.102

Therefore, the definition of sovereignty is not a question of territories and borders since it doesn’t yet touch the core of the concept; borders or boundaries only set limits to the applicability of the juridical system concerning rights. When a law is imposed, it means that a space is defined beyond which this law will no longer be applicable; and within this defined space, certain acts are not permitted. Otherwise, they will be criminalized and punished. Therefore, the question of space is twofold since, on the one hand, there is the spatial and territorial limit (i.e., land, sea, and air), and on the other hand, there is the limit on the actualization of the will. The superficial opposition between freedom and laws (of nature) persists and presents itself as a paradox: for if freedom means arbitrary (because it depends on individual will) and law means necessary (because it is grounded), then should individual freedom subordinate itself to the laws of nature? This contradiction or tension between freedom and law is an eternal subject in Western thought, and it once again gained momentum around the French Revolution. Rousseau’s Social Contract was one of the key efforts to reconcile the opposition between law and freedom, which we can also find in Kant.103 If, in Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, one finds on the one hand that the modern state promises a concept of right that implies individual freedom as historical progress, then on the other hand we see that this right is at risk of becoming merely arbitrary (abstract right) and therefore harmful to the political state. If this is the case, then we can read the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right as an attempt to resolve this contradiction systematically.

§8. Recursivity of Reason and Freedom in the Modern State

Before we see how this contradiction is potentially resolved by Hegel, we might want to understand how the opposition between law and freedom was phrased by Kant in the famous third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason. We know that the antinomies arise out of cosmological inquiries. Kant formulates it in this way “if the conditioned is given, then the whole sum of conditions, and hence the absolutely unconditioned, is also given” (A409/B436). This touches each antinomy, but in particular, the third antinomy, which concerns freedom and the laws of nature. Given an event, one can trace its causes infinitely because there is always a preceding cause to every conditioned event. And if the absolutely unconditioned exists (searching for it is the task of reason), then is it independent from causal laws or nature? If there is such a being beyond all causal laws, is it the source of freedom whilst being at the same time absolutely necessary (the question of necessity is that of the fourth antinomy)? Let us look at the thesis and the antithesis more closely:

Thesis: The causality according to laws of nature is not the only causality, from which the appearances of the world can thus one and all be derived. In order to explain these appearances, it is necessary to assume also a causality through freedom.

Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything in the world occurs solely according to laws of nature.104

Here Kant didn’t yet deal with the question of freedom from the perspective of practical reason, but from theoretical reason. Kant resolves the antinomy through his transcendental idealism by associating the thesis with the thing-in-itself and the antithesis with the phenomenon. While the thing-in-itself might be free from the causalities of nature, all appearances nonetheless must follow the laws of nature. Therefore, according to Kant, both thesis and antithesis are to some degree correct. Kant’s resolution of the antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason is not yet satisfactory because Kant is only attempting to bypass mechanism, and not overcoming it. In order to avoid contradiction within linear reasoning, Kant has to separate two realms so that even though both thesis and antithesis violate the principle of contradiction, insofar as they are limited into two completely separate realms, this contradiction is only one by appearance, that is, not a real contradiction. That is to say, Kant resolves it by drawing boundaries but not going beyond the boundary. This is one of the principal reasons why Hegel criticizes Kant’s study of the four antinomies as suffering from a lack of depth. It is only in the Critique of Practical Reason and more specifically later in the Critique of Judgment that Kant brings in recursive reasoning, which resolves the antinomy in a more sophisticated manner—namely, the categorical imperative and reflective judgment.105 However, for Hegel, this decisive act in Kant’s later philosophy still suffers from the incapability to go beyond subjective representation: “If, in the concept of the faculty of reflective judgement, it does get to the Idea of mind, subjectivity-objectivity, an intuitive intellect, etc., and even the Idea of nature, still this Idea itself is again demoted to an appearance, namely to a subjective maxim.”106

This statement, on the one hand, affirms the significance of the reflective judgment in the concept of freedom; on the other hand, it reproaches Kant (as well as Fichte) for not having yet reached the concept, and the spirit, as being in and for itself.107 In other words, Kant’s concept of freedom (which is equivalent to morality and to the categorical imperative108) remains too formal and subjective, and therefore not historically and objectively grounded. At the same time, Hegel sees that the antinomy shouldn’t be limited to the four cosmological themes that Kant listed; rather, it should be generalized as a philosophical method.109 We know that Hegel replaces the antinomy with his dialectical method, for dialectics is the Hegelian logic par excellence.

For Hegel, logic is distinguished from nature according to its capacity to handle contingency. Nature demonstrates the weakness of the Concept since it is not able to resist contingency; logic is Concept in its full capacity of reflection, which unifies the in-itself and for-itself. History is contingent, but historicity, the movement of history as Concept, is the opposite. Since a historical event can arrive, be it a war out of the greediness and jealousy of a people, or a natural catastrophe, the logic according to which history unfolds itself is nothing random because such contingency is always subsumed to a necessity based on the reflection of this accidental and immediate event. Dialectics is a logical operation based on recursiveness. It aims to resolve the antinomy not by exposing the limit of pure reason—for it still leaves the unconditioned as unknown, but rather to demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation—by making disappear those that are contingent and retaining those that are necessary: “Here, as elsewhere, the point of view from which things seem pure contingencies vanishes if we look at them in the light of the concept and philosophy because philosophy knows contingency to be semblance and sees in it its essence, necessity.”110

Dialectics is fueled by contingency (or, more precisely, the necessity of contingency) since without which, it will not move forward—thinking only becomes more concrete when it is tested against contingencies; while moving forward, it will have to sublate these contingencies, so that only necessity subsists. Dialectics is prohairesis (volition) in the sense that it moves from the irrational toward the rational. The passage from arbitrary to freedom is the passage from irrationality and contingency to rationality and necessity, from subjective mediation to restitution of reality. Necessity has two meanings here; firstly, it means that contingency is recognized as that which is opposed to the necessary, and secondly, that the act (Handlung) overcomes contingency by either eliminating it or rendering it necessary, like the hero does. A hero is driven by his hubris, which leads to crimes and guilt while at the same time it is recognized as being necessary and as honorable.111 Freedom is necessary as it is in Spinoza;112 arbitrariness is contingent. For sure, not all acts of will are arbitrary, but they have the potential to be so. Therefore, a critique of right is proof of reason and necessity. Freedom, in this sense, has little to do with having more choices. Even the right to vote, for example, can also be arbitrary. One is given two candidates, and one votes one against another, just as if one were choosing among bags in a shop. Again, elections do not have to be arbitrary, but the act of voting can be purely arbitrary. The right to vote does not necessarily mean freedom; though, without the right to participate, one is definitely deprived of the possibility of freedom. True democracy and the tyranny of the majority refer to the same term. There are ambiguities when one comes to defining these political concepts, and it is precisely because of their ambiguity that reason is put to the test by contingency. The exercise of reason, or self-consciousness, is a tirelessly recursive process. It is certainly not a moment of enlightenment. This tirelessly recursive process characterizes the movement of the spirit through its contact with and acting on the outer world, what Hegel calls the objective spirit. Consciousness is not to be understood as a substantial entity that has its reality internalized—for example, a microchip, which sits somewhere in the body or like the pineal gland, the soul’s seat, in Descartes’s mechanized being. Consciousness is a totality of dynamic relations—both internal and external:

Necessity does not become freedom by vanishing, but only because its still inner identity is manifested, . . . Conversely, at the same time, contingency becomes freedom, for the sides of necessity, which have the shape of independent, free actualities . . . are now posited as self-identical, so that these totalities of reflection-into-self in their difference are now also reflected as identical, or are posited as only one and the same reflection.113

Everything can be contingent, going out for a coffee, losing money, winning the lottery, or even a certain well-respected law of physics, but not everything can be necessary. Especially in the realm of thinking, why would one thought be necessary but not the other? Hesitation means defeat since it indirectly admits the contingency of such a necessity: the decision can also be otherwise. One is often confronted with choices—for example, going to study abroad, emigrating to another country, and so on. These options can be merely contingent when nothing is proven to be rational and necessary. Even the will to freedom can also be arbitrary since it could also be the demand of arbitrariness—for example, to do whatever one wills. What is given by right turns out to be nothing but consumerism, just as Adorno and Horkheimer described in Dialectics of Enlightenment. Therefore, Hegel’s concept of freedom is not what we understand today as the freedom of speech or the freedom to vote. In fact, today, the opposition between liberalism and authoritarianism becomes an obstacle to understanding freedom. The degree of freedom thus defined tends to treat freedom as quantifiable properties, just like consumer products. Indeed, the demarcation used to characterize authoritarianism and liberalism becomes, at times, arbitrary and dangerous. What is more important is not the capacity to consume but the capacity to decide, that is to say, to think rationally (vernünftig).

Hegel’s freedom means independence from the Other. However, this independence is not a fleeing from the Other but the overcoming of the Other.114 Freedom is situated between arbitrariness and unconditional obedience; it denotes rational self-determination. Freedom is the possibility of reason since reason can go astray and fall victim to arbitrariness or its opposite. Freedom is necessity because, insofar that it is not arbitrary, it must have a reason to be. Absolute obedience is not the opposite of arbitrariness but is its conceptual twin since both are dogmatic and hence not conscious of their own conditions. Planetary freedom means, first of all, the triumph of reason since when every individual and group is able to exercise their own reason without violating the other’s freedom to reason, we move toward the realization of freedom. However, this exercise of reason does not simply subjectively conform to moral laws; rather, it is ethical (sittlich) in the sense that it is also made possible by and through its own externalization, namely, objectification and institutionalization.

If we understand freedom in terms of choice (or varieties of choice), we are still lingering between intentional participation and pure consumption—and it is precisely in this context that mass media has its great influence today. And if we understand democracy as the freedom to choose our representatives, then such democracy is only valid when it is seen from the perspective of civil society, in which the individual’s interest and preference are prioritized. The fundamental quest in Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is to reconcile the universal and the particular, the communal and the individual, duty and right. It performs a logical demonstration of the organic structure and legitimacy of the state as the necessary and logical development beyond family and civil society. Families are private units, while in civil society, they have to engage with each other in different forms of association. That is to say, though the private reason tends to withdraw to itself, in civil society, it is involuntarily redirected to the public since it cannot avoid the other. Each acts according to its own interest in the form of an individual, family, and/or corporation, which characterizes civil society, a distinctive social force that has emerged in modern times. However, civil society remains arbitrary, therefore, particular, and here comes Hegel’s decisive claim that it is only in the state that a unification of the universal and freedom can be attained.115 Hegel’s method is neither deduction nor induction but dialectics. This reconciliation finally leads, therefore, to the concept of the modern state as the most concrete outcome of the dialectical movement, which goes beyond the individual, family, and civil society. That is to say, freedom has to be realized through the modern state: “In the ethical essence, the state, nature is robbed of this power, and necessity is elevated to the work of freedom, to something ethical.”116

Civil society is still too influenced by the interests of different groups and individuals; therefore, it remains arbitrary. Arbitrariness or contingency is precisely that which dialectics takes as an object of operation and that which it wants to overcome. Therefore, the ideal political system should be one that is able to maintain necessities. Family and civil societies are both moments of the Idea. They appear at the same time as semblance and abstract actuality. It is in the political state, through its institution and constitution, that duty and right are unified. To function, such a state cannot be a top-down system because a top-down system is still too mechanical, and it only organizes the upper layers of the system and leaves the bottom unorganized. Likewise, when politics is driven solely from the bottom up, it runs the risk of producing mere rabbles. The ideal state will be able to reconcile top-down and bottom-up organically. That is why we have claimed that the organic model is fundamental to Hegel’s political epistemology.

The organism is not only a metaphor here because, as a philosopher, Hegel also develops a dialectical logic to clarify the operation of such organicity. If what characterizes organicity in Kant’s writing is the parts-parts (reciprocity) and parts-whole (community) relation (see Critique of Judgment, §64), then in Hegel, we might say that it is characterized by self-consciousness, the constant movement to return to oneself and to rationalize oneself. Becoming self-conscious is a recursive movement that unifies structure and operation, self and Other. Dialectics is also a totalizing process: through its contact with the Other, the self develops a strategy that effectively integrates this relation to the Other within itself. In the process of totalizing, only necessity is preserved. The state is considered here the necessary development of the spirit, and the history leading toward the state is also nothing contingent because, while dialectics might allow for the cunning of reason, it will surely not tolerate contingency: “Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates and exploits for its own purpose.”117

The ethical life that is only possible in the state is the promise of freedom. Here, ethical life is distinguished from the moral, as we have shown above. Morality insofar as it has its source in subjective feeling risks being arbitrary because not all subjects are accustomed to self-reflection; morality is the possibility of internality, and it may not pass into actuality (Wirklichkeit). The ethical has its primary source in the Greek ethos (customs, habits), which is grounded in the polis—the ethical community (sittliches Gemeinwesen).118 The moral is an enterprise of Christianity that gives agency to the innerness of the individual. Throughout the history of philosophy, Joachim Ritter claims, especially via Christian Wolff, ethics is dissolved in the discourse of morality, which in turn becomes a discourse of human nature.119 Kant inherited the Wolffian theory of morality and developed a subjective reflection in order to arrive at universal laws.120 Hegel’s concept of the ethical is not a return to the Greek polis because the city-state is no longer adequate to accommodate the modern principle of individual freedom.121 Instead, it is the political state that has become the dominant political form of modern times. The ethical is the sublation of the Greek ethos and Kantian morality, for although Hegel criticizes Kant’s practical philosophy, he nevertheless recognizes the importance of the reflective operation of morality. That is to say, Hegel was searching for a more articulated political form that is able to facilitate an objective reflection. On the contrary, the ethical life can only be fully realized in the state: it is neither moral sentiments nor codified rules, but rather it is their unity, like in Sophocles’s Antigone. The state is not an entity that gives orders from top down, the way that, in mechanism, the spring is the prime mover. The state is a machine that is able to function like an organism constantly striving for a unity; the state is the externalization of the spirit, and it is also the place where the Spirit has traveled across a threshold. Individuation has taken place, and the state indicates metastability in which an organismic operation is attained.