About Hegel
Reason and Revolution. By Herbert Marcuse. (Routledge, 25s.)
THis is a book about Hegel. It was first published fifteen years ago and is now reprinted with a brief epilogue. It has the defects of a work written by a man unfamiliar with the English language and who has been assisted by helpers in whom the love of the abstract noun is not dead. It is a difficult book, laboured and repetitive. Nevertheless, it has great Merits. It removes many of the current misunderstandings about Hegel, and it reveals him as (what his attentive readers have always known him to be) a supremeliobservant man.
The focus of interest here is Hegel's political philosophy, its circumstances and its fortunes. The first half of the book groups an exposition of Hegel's whole philosophy round this centre; and in the second half the affinity or lack of affinity to Hegel's manner of thinking of subsequent reflection on politics and society is studied. This naturally entails a consideration of Marx, whose liberties with the Hegelian dialectic are, perhaps, insuffi- ciently exposed. But there is a brilliant exposition of the rejection of Hegel contained in the 'positivist' way of thinking; and it is positivists and not Hegel who are convincingly shown to be the inspirers of much that hasty readers have laid at his door. --- Briefly, and neglecting many Philosophical niceties, the situa- tion with regard to Hegel is something like this. As it turns out, the most important texts for understanding the modern world are Biblical : the two passages in the Book of Genesis in which human beings are recognised to be free of the world and as having to exert themselves in the practice of this freedom—dominion and work. These were the spring of Bacon's understanding of the exploitation of the resources of the world which he both observed and preached; and it was to their authority that Locke somewhat naively pointed. Itwas left for Hegel to construct an incomparably more critical and more profound philosophy of human activity on this hyothesis.
Somewhat cumbersomely, Hegel expressed the principle involved as the sovereignty of geist over the world, and as the 'negating' power of reason. He recognised tiitoryi as a course of events in which this sovereignty was exhibited. The natural world and the products of human activity are perpetually con- structed and reconstructed in human activity, and in this process reason is both the impulse and the guide. The 'dialectic' is a description of this process believed by Hegel to be more exact
than earlier descriptions. But further, he perceived that the singular exploiter of the resources of the world—the 'individual' —had recently ,emerged, as a consequence of rational human .choices. This 'individual' he recognised as a great achievement, but one difficult to manage. While Hobbes had seen him as pre- eminently a centre of religious belief apt to conflict with others of his kind, Hegel recognised him as a centre of practical activity apt to collide with others in his efforts to enjoy the world. The 'State,' as he understood it, is an association of such human beings in which the propensity for mutual frustration is mitigated by laws, not imposed from above but made by the people con- cerned. It is at once a product of reason and an emblem (but not more) of the inherent harmony of rational conduct.
In the circumstances of the time, some thinkers dreamed of a
human association from which collision had been excluded by the destruction of the 'individual.' Others believed themselves to have discovered that the world, so far from being under the dominion of grist, is governed by iron laws of nature. And, since to perceive and to obey these laws was to remove human conflict, the race was to be delivered over into the hands of an elite who claimed to understand these laws. But Hegel held fast to the view that there are no such laws and that the 'individual' is an achievement not to be surrendered. He recognised govern- ment (not a comprehensively managerial activity, but a sovereign activity in which men exercised their power to make rational laws for themselves) as the iertium quid required by the situation. In his youth, this way of thinking led Hegel to speak the language of Jacobinism; later, he was inclined to believe that the enjoyment of the world was so difficult an enterprise that freedom was to be found only in contracting out of it in favour of the contem- plative activity of understanding the conditions on which the world might be enjoyed, a view he shared with Aristotle, Dante, Spinoza and many others.
Whore in all this is to be found Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, the 'organic' state and the rest of what are commonly regarded as the propensities of Hegel's way of thinking, would be difficult to say. Professor Marcuse has done much to detach Hegel front what has little or no affinity to him. But, while to correct misunderstandings is valuable, there remains something more to be done. Hegel is so profound and stimulating a thinker that he deserves not only to be not misunderstood, but also to be learned from. In a casual note Hegel himself remarked upon the release which comes when we are indifferent to a writer's defects and can regard him as an inheritance to be enjoyed. In respect of Hegel, we have not yet achieved this release, and until we do so we shall continue to miss much of what we might learn from him. MICHAEL OAKESHOTT
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