Hegel's Philosophy of Mind — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Georg Hegel · en
But what Hegel chiefly deals with under this head is the interdependence
of form and content, of social order and personal progress. In the picture
of an ethical organisation or harmoniously-alive moral community he shows
us partly the underlying idea which gave room for the antithesis between
law and conscience, and partly the outlines of the ideal in which that
conflict becomes only the instrument of progress. This organisation has
three grades or three typical aspects. These are the Family, Civil
Society, and the State. The first of these, the Family, must be taken to
include those primary unities of human life where the natural affinity of
sex and the natural ties of parentage are the preponderant influence in
forming and maintaining the social group. This, as it were, is the
soul-nucleus of social organisation: where the principle of unity is an
instinct, a feeling, an absorbing solidarity. Next comes what Hegel has
called Civil Society,—meaning however by civil the antithesis to
political, the society of those who may be styled _bourgeois_, not
_citoyens_:—and meaning by society the antithesis to community. There are
other natural influences binding men together besides those which form the
close unities of the family, gens, tribe, or clan. Economical needs
associate human beings within a much larger radius—in ways capable of
almost indefinite expansion—but also in a way much less intense and deep.
Civil Society is the more or less loosely organised aggregate of such
associations, which, if, on one hand, they keep human life from stagnating
in the mere family, on another, accentuate more sharply the tendency to
competition and the struggle for life. Lastly, in the Political State
comes the synthesis of family and society. Of the family; in so far as the
State tends to develope itself on the nature-given unit of the Nation (an
extended family, supplementing as need arises real descent by fictitious
incorporations), and has apparently never permanently maintained itself
except on the basis of a predominant common nationality. Of society; in so
far as the extension and dispersion of family ties have left free room for
the differentiation of many other sides of human interest and action, and
given ground for the full development of individuality. In consequence of
this, the State (and such a state as Hegel describes is essentially the
idea or ideal of the modern State)(9) has a certain artificial air about
it. It can only be maintained by the free action of intelligence: it must
make its laws public: it must bring to consciousness the principles of its
constitution, and create agencies for keeping up unity of organisation
through the several separate provinces or contending social interests,
each of which is inclined to insist on the right of home mis-rule.