I. Introduction
After the development of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and its culmination in a modern juridical-civil state, Hegel describes a stage of self-alienated spirit called culture (Bildung). Eventually this stage of social and individual development will ossify into the cultural division of otherworldly faith and utilitarian rationality—the dual directions of the Enlightenment.Footnote 1 But nestled between the basic formation of the legal state and the cultural and political revolutions of the Enlightenment is a state of extreme social alienation. The description of Bildung, in sections 488 to 526 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, constitutes the story of the initial forays of modern individualism and the attempt of persons, having established legal identities, to form a more complete identity out of the forces and norms that the civil state has made manifest.Footnote 2 Those forces are the coercive power of the state and the economy. This section sheds light on the uniquely phenomenological component of Hegel’s early work, which is not visible in his later Encyclopaedia presentation of the philosophy of Spirit. That phenomenological core can be described as a commitment to explaining social action through the desires of individual agents. Hegel famously states that self-consciousness is ‘desire in general’ (Begierde überhaupt) (PhG: §167).Footnote 3 That claim and its meaning is controversial, but it will not be necessary for me to pick a side in the controversy.Footnote 4 My focus is on the importance of keeping the desiring individual, whatever the nature of desire and its role in the constitution of subjectivity, at the forefront of social phenomenology and pointing out the dangers of not doing so.
If we start from Weber’s four-fold division of social action into the two forms of rational action (zweckrational and wertrational) and two types of non-rational action, affect-based and tradition-based, we can say that Hegel’s desire-based social analysis focuses us on the affective and exposes the primacy of its logic for the other three forms of social relationships (Weber [Reference Weber1925] 1947: 115–17). Showing that would require more than a single article, but roughly speaking, we can see that prudential rationality with its means-ends logic (Zweckrationalität) and moral rationality governed by unconditional values (Wertrationalität) are the two forms of self-conscious life that emerge after the high-point of self-alienation in the Bildung chapter. But the engine driving the dialectic and history itself is the life of desire.Footnote 5 Rather than reducing affective and desiring life to a form of practical rationality aimed at achieving goals in the world, Hegel sees that desire and life have the structure of dialectical movement that defines Spirit itself (PhG: §169, §804). To say that the movement of individual desire should be central to social phenomenology is to stress that we lack a full account of any particular set of social relations if we do not recognize this complex movement. That movement is, firstly, to empty oneself and submerge oneself in social substance and, secondly and at the same time, to internalize and master social substance. In this way, the individual ‘as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels out this difference between objectivity and content’ (PhG: §804). Through knowing mastery of aspects of the external world, what was once a foreign object or mental content is transformed into a component of life itself and thus a further development and expression of freedom.
Several still influential phenomenologies of social existence can be charged with forgetting this affective core of social existence. The twentieth century ushered in a widespread philosophical concern with society as a mass phenomenon ruled by the logic of technology. For example, Herbert Marcuse worried that automation and technology in ‘advanced industrial society’ had fundamentally transformed society into something inhuman, that ‘two-dimensional culture’ as an antidote to industry and capitalism had been ‘liquidated’ and incorporated into mass existence, and that mass information had shut down public discourse and thought, with the result that all qualitative social change was essentially contained within existing ‘one-dimensional society’ (Marcuse Reference Marcuse1964). We see a similar conception of social existence in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. For Sartre, seriality or serial-being is the normative reflection of technological mass society (the practico-inert) in the relations between people (Sartre [Reference Sartre1960] 1976: 303). Sartre argues that objects ‘produce men’, hold them together in non-dialectical relations as mere objects, lead them to see all other people as ‘other-objects’ and thereby render persons impotent (304). The best-known account of this phenomenon is Heidegger’s account of the ‘they’ (das Man) and our ‘thrownness’ into publicity (Offentlichkeit) by which we exist as an alienated ‘they-self’ (Man-selbst).
Hegel’s analysis leads us to question whether this de-spiritualization of humanity is actually possible. Is civil society not always ‘an antagonistic totality’ rather than a homogeneous one? (Adorno Reference Adorno1963: 28) Human beings, even when conforming to their social milieu, do so as part of a spiritual and social struggle and a ‘process of labor’ aimed at finding definite possibilities that constitute some sort of satisfying self-hood (Adorno Reference Adorno1963: 21). I do not mean to suggest that Marcuse, Sartre and Heidegger did not offer solutions on how to overcome mass-existence. Instead, I question whether analyses such as these are adequate as instances of social phenomenology. Social phenomenology has a responsibility to render social agents intelligible as affective beings. To fail to see absorption in the ‘crowd’ as expressing a legitimate desire for unity with the social substance is not only a failure of understanding. It also threatens to cover up the possibility of and responsibility for social transformation available to the actors themselves. More, if the social phenomenologist does not retain desire as the fundamental expression of life within the ontology of social collectivities, then they block the way to a sympathetic and understanding relation to the subjects within modern mass-society. Our analysis risks leading, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, to the dehumanization against which the critics of mass-society are fighting.
I begin by discussing Heidegger’s theory of social alienation in Being and Time as an example of a phenomenology that fails to understand social agents’ positive desires and aims. I am not saying that there is no account of how human beings can live with and respond to others ethically in Being and Time.Footnote 6 Certainly Heidegger has an account of the appropriate response to the threat of mass existence.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, it seems that ‘das Man, the Anyone, hoi polloi, “the many” understood not as a loose sum of individuals but as a public kind of power of apathy and indifference built into the repeatability of language, is the base-line category or “existential” of Heidegger’s properly political-rhetorical ontology’ (Kisiel Reference Kisiel2013: 128). If we take Heidegger’s description of inauthentic existence in mass-society as actually being true, then we confront something so inhuman and depersonalized that it is not possible to see those caught in its thrall as persons. In failing to recognize the legitimacy, persistence and dialectical necessity of the desire that leads to the anonymous, absorbed co-existence that he labels ‘inauthentic’, Heidegger cannot recognize persons in the ‘they’ or the (albeit limited) expression of freedom that they find within it.Footnote 8 It is only in a relation that transcends the social—a relation to nothingness, death and Being itself—that Heidegger believes one can be in society authentically while, also, being apart from it.
After this discussion of Heidegger, I will show how Hegel depicts a self that is similarly absorbed in and ‘absolutely disrupted’ by society but that is continually both acting on its desire and overcoming the limitations of given social forms (PhG: §517). What we find in Hegel’s social phenomenology is a dialectical process of social development in which social norms are subject to criticism because of their static non-dialectical nature and their inability to reflect and give meaning to Spirit, which ‘is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward’ (PhG: §11).
II. The absence of spirit in Heidegger’s das Man
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the crowd was seen as one of the major threats to society. In France, Gustave Le Bon wrote that the demise of tradition and authority would result in the ‘era of crowds’ and believed that the ‘masses’ were determined to ‘destroy utterly society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization’ (Le Bon [1895] Reference Le Bon1960: 16). Although there were many similar sentiments among authors in Germany, Spengler’s Decline of the West influenced Heidegger greatly.Footnote 9 Spengler argued that abstract ideas and the ‘waking consciousness in the educated’ created ‘Public Opinion’ which, along with money and machines, had eliminated from society ‘the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood’ (Spengler Reference Spengler1922: 400). Liberalism and democracy had promised freedom but the result was an uncoupling of money, production and thought from the State and ‘the soil-bound life’ (403). The ‘masses’ are reduced to being ‘readers’ of accepted opinion, ‘voters’ and ‘slaves of the machine’ (464, 504).
Heidegger’s version of this worry about mass-existence and the crowd is unique in several ways. The most striking feature is that ‘the “they” is an existentiale’ which ‘belongs to Dasein’s positive constitution’, i.e., is the equivalent of an ontological category of our way of existing (SZ: 129, 44). Time and again Heidegger denies that losing ourselves in das Man is a momentary aspect or ‘ontical property’ (SZ: 176, 44). Instead, there is a ‘constant temptation towards falling’—Dasein’s default is that it has ‘fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the “world”’ by ‘absorption’ in and ‘Being-lost in the publicness of the “they”’ (SZ: 175). It would not be wrong to compare this to Kant’s notion of radical evil as an ineradicable proclivity towards corrupting the moral law for self-love. Heidegger claims to have made not an ‘ontical assertion’ about the corruption of human nature but an ontological account of the Biblical Fall, which explicates our corruption in terms of our being constantly ‘sucked into the turbulence of the ‘they’s’ inauthenticity’ (SZ: 179).
Hegel entirely disagrees with interpreting the Fall of Humanity as absorption in mass-society and the loss of one’s authentic selfhood. Instead, for Hegel, evil and the Fall are found in ‘withdrawal into itself or self-centeredness of the existent consciousness’ (PhG: §776, §780, §783).Footnote 10 This too is an ontological feature of human beings, as it is the foundation of knowledge and understanding, the very birth of thought. But this Fall into ourselves is not a collapse into Spirit-less monologism as is the Fall into the ‘they’ for Heidegger. At the same time that we are becoming ‘self-centered being-for-self’ or evil, we are made ‘self-discordant’ because we are also confronted with the goodness of ‘existent self-consciousness’, which is desire that externalizes itself in the world (PhG: §780, §776).
Heidegger’s many descriptions of das Man make clear that while the ‘degree of Being’ may not be lower for Dasein in its two modes (authenticity and inauthenticity) and that one of these modes (inauthenticity) ‘lies closest’ to us, inauthenticity does designate a serious problem in which ‘everyone is the other, and no one is himself’ (SZ: 43, 129, 128). Perhaps Heidegger’s language misleads by obscuring the positive role of the ‘they’ in human existence. In fact, his language makes it questionable whether the degree of Being of Dasein is not profoundly lessened by being inauthentic. After all, Heidegger says that ‘Dasein … stands in subjection to Others. It itself is not. Its Being has been taken away by the Others’ (SZ: 126). To say that Dasein is not and has its Being taken away sounds an awful lot like a lessening of the ‘degree of Being’. Heidegger also seems to warn us against taking inauthenticity to be ‘bad and deplorable’, although he may simply be warning us not to take this ‘ontological-existential structure’ to be an ‘ontical property’ that we could eliminate (SZ: 176). It is in fact impossible to remain value-neutral regarding inauthentic existence. Consider that inauthenticity is said to be a state where human beings have neither ‘found’ themselves nor ‘lost’ themselves, which contrasts to the essential ‘mineness’ of being a person, expressed in its power to ‘“choose” itself and win itself’ or ‘lose itself and never win itself’ or ‘only “seem” to do so’ (SZ: 128, 42). It is impossible to hold that this ‘tranquilized’ state of ‘alienation’, in which our ‘ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden’ and we ‘border on the most exaggerated “self-dissection”’, is not simply ‘bad and deplorable’ (SZ: 178).Footnote 11 Otherwise, why leave it?
The explanation of why and how inauthenticity happens only strengthens the case that it is viewed as something bad. Initially, Heidegger says that that ‘in utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next’ and this ‘real dictatorship of the “they”’ means that ‘we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge’ (SZ: 126). As it seems implausible that merely reading a newspaper is sufficient for our ‘Being [to be] taken away by others’, Heidegger posits in us an ‘essential tendency’ to be concerned with our distance from others and with ‘averageness’ (SZ: 127). This too seems insufficient because mere concern with how we relate to the norms or averages of society does not mean being lost to ourselves in das Man. Heidegger is simply wrong if he believes that ‘care of averageness’ and ‘distantiality’ equates with a ‘“levelling down” of all possibility of Being’ and an ‘insensitivity of every difference of level and of genuineness’ (SZ: 127). Rather than obscuring and levelling everything, sociological analysis, such as the one offered by Erving Goffman, shows that the traditional norms and practices in society are neither neutral foundations of selfhood nor destroyers of selfhood. They represent a positive aspect of true selfhood, i.e., a ‘conventionalized means of communication by which the individual expresses his character or conveys his appreciation of the other participants in the situation’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1967: 54). In other words, concern with and inhabitation of shared norms and practices establishes social and ethical necessities of ‘deference’ and ‘demeanor’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1967: 5) and does not equate either with ‘deficient and Indifferent modes of solicitude’ in which no one matters to anyone else or with Dasein’s ‘not-Being-its-self’ (SZ: 121, 176). But for Heidegger no such positive, pro-social and self-expressive desire for co-existence with others motivates Dasein’s absorption in das Man. Heidegger must instead posit a ‘constant temptation’ of ‘falling’ into an existence ‘disburdened’ of itself, which ultimately is an expression of anxiety and ‘a constant fleeing in the face of death’ (SZ: 177, 254). Rather than our seeking selfhood, Heidegger claims that our state of inauthentic, self-negating absorption in the ‘they’ is covering up the ‘indefiniteness’ of our death (SZ: 258).
I find Heidegger’s statement that this theory of inauthenticity constitutes ‘an existentially adequate determination of Dasein’s basic state’ as puzzling a remark as any found in Being and Time (SZ: 177). It is not at all clear why the basic state of human beings should not be understood in terms of the agency of desire and the affective life of a being who is continually trying out the available possibilities of selfhood and co-existence rather than fleeing into a state that is the abandonment of identity and agency. Perhaps the reason is that we begin from a position of ‘thrownness’ in the world and of reliance on pre-existing patterns of behavior. Yet there seems no reason to attribute to shared social practices and norms the perniciousness of a ‘dictatorship’ nor to deny that the agent is acting out of and towards self-hood rather than fleeing the self in reaction to death.
This represents a profound tension in Heidegger’s text that scholars have had to resolve by jettisoning the existential crisis that publicity (Offentlichkeit) and the ‘they’ represent and neutering the notion so that it merely indicates that we exist in a ‘familiar world of common practices and expectations shared with other Daseins’ (Hatab Reference Hatab2000: 25). Similarly, McMullin adopts a value-neutral notion of everydayness in which we live in an absorbed way with others but retain our self-identity (McMullin Reference McMullin2013: 37). These interpretations follow the path carved out by Dreyfus to argue that this everyday, inauthentic social existence is ‘the source of the intelligibility of the world and of human life’ via ‘our shared, everyday, public practices’ (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus2005: 141).Footnote 12 Regardless of the success of these interpretations and many more besides, they are part of an apologetics; they are, at best, charitable reconstructions that remove distracting existential rhetoric to arrive at fundamental ontology and, at worst, are bowdlerizations of Being and Time that remove its radical ambitions to destroy both the history of thought and tranquilizing mass-society.
Returning to the inadequacy of Heidegger’s description of the ‘great mass’ of the ‘they’ (SZ: 127), it might be objected that Heidegger’s discussion of ‘mood’ (die Stimmung) and his assertion that ‘in every case Dasein always has some mood’ is precisely that affective foundation whereby our social phenomenology can make inauthentic Dasein into something recognizably and sympathetically human (SZ: 134).Footnote 13 But there are several reasons that mood will not help. Firstly, moods themselves are not individuating. Publicness and the ‘they’ are also defined by mood (SZ: 138). Mass-existence is often thought of in terms of shared emotional contagion and wild mood swings of enthusiasm and apathy (Scheler [1913] 2008: 14; Kierkegaard [Reference Kierkegaard1962] 1972: 39). Secondly, although Heidegger says that mood discloses ‘how one is’ and ‘brings Being to its “there”’, there can be false or deceptive moods because in ‘fleeing’ we turn away from our ‘thrownness’ and the task of disclosing the world and making our own meaning (SZ: 134, 138).Footnote 14
Part of the problem here is, once again, Heidegger’s ontologizing of what is a psychological phenomenon. Feelings and affects are part of the empirical psychologies of agents, but Heidegger wants to avoid such psychologism and. describes mood ontologically as something prior to the conscious cognitive mind, which discloses ‘Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something’ (SZ: 137).Footnote 15 Mood is defined merely in terms of the possibility of having things matter to us and finding ourselves in the world. Specific moods such as fear, anxiety and boredom play central roles in Heidegger’s thought, but he explicitly denies that moods can be thought of in terms of the inner acts and motivations of a subject (SZ: 136). In fact, in ontological moods, such as anxiety, the self seems to disappear in a confrontation with Being and Nothingness. Mood, as a pre-personal orientation of ‘submission to’ the world, is nothing more than the minimal sense of ‘Dasein in its thrownness’ and is entirely compatible with Dasein’s evasion of ‘its very self’ (SZ: 139). Heidegger’s notion of mood does not suffice to disclose an agent and neither will the standard psychological understanding of mood because they ‘are generally not specific enough to explain specific action’ (Goldie Reference Goldie2000: 147).
When we look at the phenomenon of collective being, for example, the members of a political party with which we disagree, we often do so in a way that makes no attempt to understand or sympathize with the strivings of the individuals that make it up. We overlook the Hegelian point that Edith Stein emphasized: ‘the individual ego is the ultimate point of emanation for all living consciousness’, including the collective consciousness and experience of groups (Stein Reference Stein2000: 133). This forgetting of the personal focuses merely on what is shared among them. It ignores both the differences within the group and the struggles for selfhood that individuals themselves are undergoing. Ironically this has the effect of self-dehumanization, because we cut ourselves off from any understanding of and sympathy with those who make up the group.Footnote 16 Human action is, as Scheler notes, governed by ideal, spiritual values as well by ‘drives’ that make up our vital being (i.e., Weber’s categories of the affective and wertrational). So any social phenomenology requires an account both of the ‘superstructure and substructure of human life’, both missing in Heidegger’s account of our everyday inauthentic existence with others (leaving us only with Weber’s category of the traditional) (Scheler [Reference Scheler1924] 1980: 34–35).Footnote 17
My worry is that Heidegger’s hyperbolic concern with Dasein’s loss of itself by following the crowd is an instance of ‘making the enemy, so that this standing against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may not lose its edge’ (Heidegger [Reference Heidegger1933–4] 2010: 73; and see Žižek Reference Žižek2013: 164). What Heidegger is doing is reducing ‘personal motivations’ and ‘immediate issues’ within social conflict among persons to ‘struggles over “eternal truths”’ that take place in ‘political and ideological spheres’ (Coser Reference Coser1956: 116). In other words, the failure to recognize the personal at work in mass-society and the (mis)construal of mass-society as an existential threat to personal existence (rather than the field in which individuals are striving for freedom) set aside the responsibility of substantive, ethical social critique. In its place, we find a battle between two ontologies–the ontology of mass existence and the ontology of authentic personhood as an achievement of a specific type of relation to the social and to what is beyond the social.
III. Social alienation and spirit in Hegel
I now want to contrast the Heideggerian account of how we are ‘torn away from authenticity and into the “they”’ with Hegel’s account of the same phenomenon (SZ: 178). Admittedly, Heidegger is describing the state of humankind of advanced industrial society, whereas Hegel is describing humanity on the cusp of the Age of Enlightenment and the birth of industrial society. I do not believe that the historical placement of their analyses matters, for several reasons. Heidegger is presumably describing an existential-ontological structure of all Dasein, not just those living in the 1920s. Also, Heidegger sees this threat of technology as emerging precisely when economics and politics are empowered by modern scientific thought, which is the age that Hegel is describing (Heidegger [Reference Heidegger1955] 1977: 22). Lastly, Hegel’s account of Bildung borrows from Diderot’s work Rameau’s Nephew, which is representative of a cynicism that is more postmodern than modern (Stanley Reference Stanley2007).
Another concern is whether it is even plausible that Hegel could offer the sort of personalist social phenomenology that I am advocating. After all, is he not the thinker who fails to recognize the significance of the individual against the slaughter-bench of history? Is he not simply a conservative apologist for the State, claiming that ‘the State is thus the embodiment of rational freedom’ and the ‘march of God in the world’ (Hegel Reference Hegel1956: 47; Reference Hegel1952: 279)? But such final idealizations of the Absolute can be profoundly misleading by failing to recognize his demythologizing of these ideals and his placing them on a material basis in a historical dialectic. After all, Hegel argues that Reason and ‘the Idea’ act only as the ‘warp’ to the web of history and that ‘human passions’ are the ‘woof’ without which nothing would be accomplished (Hegel Reference Hegel1956: 23).
Heidegger seems to have based his criticisms of Hegel on just such a surface-level reading of Absolute idealism. He regards Hegel as holding that ‘the essence of beings is infinity’ and, therefore, the meaning of the finite world collapses into the infinite or the Absolute (HPS: 80, 145).Footnote 18 He believes that Hegel has an ‘onto-ego-theo-logical concept of being qua infinity’, but this can only be maintained if time, finitude and human history are (implausibly) banished from Hegel’s philosophy (HPS: 145).Footnote 19 It is for this reason that Heidegger (dishonestly) claims that time only exists for Hegel as the space-time of the philosophy of nature and not the course of human history (HPS: 144). This is made possible only by the shocking claim that ‘time disappears’ for his philosophy of ‘absolute knowledge’ and that it only remains as ‘the past’ (HPS: 12, 146).
Heidegger claims that Hegel holds that ‘being is time’, which is to say that the meaningful time of human history is the mere appearance of abstract, infinite, mathematical time. This attempt to Platonize (and Newtonize) Hegel ignores his statement that ‘Time’ is the ‘destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself, the necessity to enrich the share which self-consciousness has in consciousness, to set in motion the immediacy of the in-itself’ and ‘to realize and reveal what is at first only inward’ (PhG: §801). In other words, rather than identifying time with what has become, with history and with beings, Hegel holds that time is the negative impetus, the lack of completion, for the unfolding of Being and the dialectic of Spirit. Thus, it is profoundly oriented towards the future and the unfolding of consciousness and self-consciousness. Nor is time identified with reification either as the abstract absolute or with history but with Spirit coming to intuit itself and regarding its ‘pure Self as Time outside of it’, ‘its Being as Space’, and its ‘immediate Becoming’ as Nature qua ‘continuing existence’ (PhG: §807). Time is not identified in Hegel’s ontology with the pure self, the absolute, space, or nature, as Heidegger argues, but with humanity qua Spirit coming to intuit itself as the nexus of Time, Being, Nature and Spirit.
Contrary to the Heideggerian conception of the ‘they’ as an elimination of Spirit driven by an anxious flight from the self, Hegel recognizes the world of culture to be ‘a spiritual entity, … the interfusion of being and individuality’ and, therefore, ‘the work of self-consciousness’ (PhG: §484). Hegel certainly sees the problems for identity in a domain governed by custom and legal right (Sittlichkeit), which are ‘an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own’ (PhG: §484). The self is initially without substance and persons are like ‘playthings’ to the ‘raging elements’ of this alien reality—individuals endeavour to become full, free selves but are subject to pre-given social and legal reality (PhG: §484). Yet we should not think of the persons here as less than morally significant, self-aware, political and economic subjects. The problem is not that they are not individuals in a metaphysical and ethical sense, but that they are alienated from the social substance and their potential for identification with it, which appears only as an ideal ‘pure consciousness or essence’ at this stage (PhG: §485).
It may be said that the fundamental difference between Hegel and Heidegger is that the former remains a philosopher of subjectivity and consciousness, whereas Heidegger radically transforms the notion of the subject into a way of existing in a world.Footnote 20 But we should not overlook Hegel’s notion of subjectivity as ‘pure, simple negativity’ or the bifurcating process of continually internalizing alterity, which restores the self in a moment of sameness, but that is then immediately transcended (PhG: §18). This ‘labor of the negative’ is being a subject: the self is ‘self-moving selfsameness’ because selfhood is continually mediated or constructed in incorporating and understanding difference (PhG: §19–21). Whereas Heidegger says that ‘Dasein finds “itself” proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids—in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally concerned’ (SZ: 119), Hegel believes that such mediation is not where we find ourselves. Instead, we find ourselves in the constant negation of such mediation.
We find this structure of subjectivity as self-moving self-sameness in the account of Bildung. Contrary to the realm of mere legal reality and equality, which Hegel describes as a ‘non-spiritual universality’ that regulates behaviour rather than character, culture develops as the spiritual striving of individuals for universality that they themselves create (PhG: §488). ‘It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality. … This individuality molds itself by culture into what it intrinsically is, and only by so doing is it an intrinsic being that has an actual existence’ (PhG: §489). Culture is not the complete loss of identity but is, instead, both the origin and outcome of individuals striving for identity and recognition. But the problem is that the only cultural capital available to individuals is initially merely a ‘quantity’ that they can then possess with ‘greater or lesser energy of will’ (PhG: §489). Rather than mere legal equality, the equality that emerges is a sameness due to the false universality of the available quantity of cultural capital. The poverty of the value universe and the division of individuals into ‘types’ following the norms of available social values lead Hegel to say that ‘there are no individualities and no characters, but everyone is like everyone else’ (PhG: §489).
Although this sounds like Heideggerian inauthenticity, it is important to note that Hegel’s phenomenology takes place from two perspectives, both ideal and real, the former seeing individuals in the light of what they might be (and so lacking fully realized character) and the latter giving voice to individuals as they are in their striving. Therefore, Hegel sees that, although there are ‘no individualities and no characters’, there is something honest and ‘not so bad’ about this sameness, because, as true culture begins, what exists are actual people aiming for an individuality and full self-realization in the universal (PhG: §489). From this perspective, there are individuals self-consciously striving, with ‘the energy [of their] original character and talent’, to conform to reality and to make that culture ‘their own’ and to ‘gain power over it’ (PhG: §490). Contrary to Heidegger’s conception of the levelling down of language, attention and knowledge through idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, Hegel sees that individuals see themselves as constantly transcending culture. Cultural forms, at this stage, are entirely negative, as I will explain below, but they are the only available ‘objects’ within which one must attempt to find one’s identity (PhG: §491). Although culture is externally homogeneous, the difference (or negativity) that will diversify it already exists internal to persons. Thus, Hegel recognizes that the ‘absolute antithesis of good and bad’—within individual and cultural judgments—motivates the constant movement of culture, whose ‘existence is really the perversion of every determinateness into its opposite’ (PhG: §491). Unlike das Man, where humans are simply alienated, Hegel believes that ‘alienation will alienate itself,’ which moves the process of Culture and selfhood forward.
The good and bad, as abstract thoughts, indicate, respectively, the universal essence of self-consciousness that has escaped the constant movement of culture and the ‘surrendering’ of that essence into separate individuals. The good is immediately identified with the stable set of external set of norms that can give identity and the bad is identified with what divides individuals from themselves and from one another. The externalization of these thoughts of good and bad in the concrete social world takes place through the values of state power (Staatsmacht)—the only actual, identity-forming universal—and work, which sunders individuals via the value of wealth (PhG: §494). ‘Dominion’ or power and ‘wealth’ confront individuals as the two main objective values of their possible actions. These are negative values in that power is control and subservience of the individual and money is a flight from the universal (social normativity) into the purely particular (the non-spiritual or material).
Initially state-power is seen as good and wealth as bad, but the value-judgments placed on state-power and wealth shift as individuals search for meaning in their lives. Pursuit of state power reveals that the state requires obedience and does not value the individual (PhG: §497). This leads to a positive valuation of wealth, because it individualizes and supports enjoyment. But wealth is transitory and does not give a glimpse of ‘universal nature’, so the positive valuation of wealth turns to a negative one (PhG: §498). Money does not individuate in the sense of allowing the individual person as a spiritual being to find themselves adequately represented in the world: it merely particularizes the individual in their actuality and quantity of cultural capital. Power does not individuate because alignment with this universal demands sacrifice without recovery of the self.
Whether relating to dominance or wealth, one can therefore do so in one of two ways: by emphasizing its ‘essential difference from consciousness’ or by focusing on ‘its accord’ with one’s nature (PhG: §499). In other words, the individual is making active, individual judgments and evaluations and not merely going along with the crowd. The consciousness which finds things like itself and focuses on ‘the good’ is noble and the one that finds things unlike itself is ignoble and focuses on ‘the bad’ (PhG: §496, §501). Ignoble persons see in wealth only ‘disparity with its permanent essence’ or see in state power only ‘a fetter and a suppression of its own being-for-self’ (PhG: §501). Noble persons see in state power the lawfulness and self-same unity that is their ‘own simple essence’ or see in wealth the means for enabling the freedom to explore one’s self and consciousness (PhG: §500). There are obvious limitations to these possible orientations. State power does not have individual self-realization and freedom as its end and is not a universal self (as the Absolute or God is). Therefore, as an impersonal ‘universal substance’ lacking in ethical concern, it demands the individual to act in service of it and even sacrifice themselves heroically for its sake, as opposed to the nurturing community of revealed religion based on love and a personal universal (PhG: §503, §504). The individual in service to state power will find it unsatisfying and shift towards the ignoble consciousness, which leads towards the distortion of the aims of state-power towards individual self-interest (PhG: §506). Given the immensity of Hegel’s work, this form of nurturing community is often overlooked (as it is by Heidegger).
Rather than a form of language that obliterates the self as in Heidegger’s notion of idle chatter, language is the centre of emerging forms of selfhood and social relations. Individuals can assert their existence, the ‘I’, while at the same time renouncing themselves or forming allegiances (PhG: §508). The dialectical nature of self-assertion through language and self-externalization, followed by absorption by the ‘universal “I”’ (inadequately expressed in state-power) results in the noble consciousness paradoxically giving ‘obedience’ and retaining its ‘independence’ (PhG: §510). What this shows is that even in self-renunciation to a power whose aim is absorption of the individual, the individual remains, ever transcending the actual towards the possible. Even when state power forms into a self, a monarch and the individual becomes a flattering sycophant, it is not long before those who give themselves to the monarch become organs of state-power itself through the dialectic of lordship and bondage (PhG: §511, §512). No non-absolute universal—especially not das Man—can in fact contain the spiritual unfolding of persons.
While, therefore, the noble consciousness behaves as if it were conforming to the universal power, the truth about it is rather that in its service it retains its own being-for-self, and that in the genuine renunciation of its personality, it actually sets aside and rends in pieces the universal Substance. (PhG: §513)
The following principle of truly human social phenomenology seems to be what Heidegger forgets.
Self-consciousness can make abstraction from every particular aspect, and for that reason, even when it is tied to one of them, it retains the recognition and intrinsic validity of itself as an independent being (PhG: §517)
The failure of state-power to create a reciprocally self-affirming form of social life leads individuals to strive for the selfhood denied them in obedience to the state through the pursuit of wealth. The result is that ‘everything that is called law, good, and right’ is ‘rent asunder and destroyed’ (PhG: §517). The self dominated by wealth is incredibly paradoxical, having to take up a meta-perspective on itself as a contradiction—both noble and ignoble, universal and particular, selfish and beneficent, elastic and valueless, capable of being anything to anyone, depending where the money lies (PhG: §518, 519). Wealth lacks the universal norms of the state and requires one to do or be whatever provides money. This results in a division between givers and takers. The paradoxical logic of the gift emerges. The gift of money imparts freedom from need and the possibility of the luxury of self-consciousness, but to receive money is to be indebted and reliant on another. This may seem like the ‘they’ as described by Heidegger, because, as Hegel describes it, ‘all identity, all existence is disrupted’ and ‘all stability and Substance have vanished’ (PhG: §519). The ‘Spirit’ of this stage of social development is ‘a subjective opinion wholly devoid of essentiality, a superficiality from which Spirit has fled’ (PhG: §519). But again we must turn to the dual perspective of Hegel’s phenomenology.
For those who acquire power and wealth, there is a need to overlook all contingency and the arbitrariness of that acquisition. This is the ‘arrogance’ of the elite: to believe they essentially deserve their position (PhG: §519). The arrogance of the rich benefactor in fact tries to constitute the world as one in which everything is superficial, that Spirit has fled, so that money defines all. This is the self-deception that attempts to justify the right to buy another person’s self. Thus, the rich person’s identity ‘suffers the most distortion’, because it attempts to ignore ‘the inner rebellion of the other’ and to treat people like commodities (PhG: §519). However, a figure emerges who speaks the language of ‘base flattery,’ which is the ‘rebellion’ against wealth that gives us a deeper insight into this alienated world (PhG: §520). The resultant language is one of irony: what is praised is known to be ‘without any intrinsic being’ (PhG: §520). So the public is not dissolved into impersonal being: some mock wealth as they seemingly conform to it. ‘This self-consciousness which rebels against this rejection of itself’ at once recognizes that, in actuality, the person bought and sold is also totally divorced from this prostitution (PhG: §520). Rather than a blind, sheep-like they-self, what takes place in this state of absolute disruption of self is, for the first time, a self that has a clear consciousness ‘of itself in its truth and in its Notion’—namely, that one’s concrete self appears ‘as an out-and-out “other”, and yet, at the same time, directly as its own self’ (PhG: §520).
The disrupted self does not feel anxiety. Nor does it simply feel what the society of wealth tells it to feel. It feels joy. At the same time that it is subservient to the forces of society, it recognizes itself as the movement that is always surpassing those traditional structures. Although this is similar to what Heidegger calls authenticity, for Hegel the continual shift from absorption in social norms to our transcendence of them is a feature of the inability of any object to satisfy and contain the subject as a living and desiring being. This self-consciousness results in a sort of joy because the subject is, for the first time, master of his or her desire.
Something profound is learned here that will initiate further social development. What is learned is that ‘the universal power, which is the Substance’ of the historical process of social development ‘acquires a spiritual nature of its own through the principle of individuality’ and that it is this process itself, not specific states of affairs or abstract notions of what is good/bad, that Hegel calls the Notion (PhG: §521). Here is the first glimpse of the Absolute as ‘True Spirit’ unfolding in history. Rather than the decidedly non-self-conscious existence of the ‘they’, Bildung results in a ‘highly developed freedom of self-consciousness’ (PhG: §521).
IV. Conclusion
Being and Time is filled with concepts that retain the traditional metaphysical notion of the subject while attempting to reject that subject-centered philosophy of consciousness. For this reason, Heidegger’s theory of mass-existence forms part of a ‘social externalist’ theory of the self, in which the personalist core of the human subject is completely lost to the ‘they’ (Carman Reference Carman2003: 146). Yet, as one tries to make sense of inauthentic and authentic social life, the stubborn self remains. I have argued that the personalist core, the desiring subject, is essential not only to Hegel’s dialectic but also to the project of social phenomenology in general. It is dangerously self-validating to construct society, modern life and groups as impersonal forces that threaten the self and community. What must be done is to understand the decisions and desires of those who make up those forms of life. Hegel shows us that this fear of a loss of self to mass society is a flight to some abstract ideal, such as the future, authentic self or community. It is a way of avoiding the actual, the present, the material and avoiding the uncomfortable insight that good and bad, self and other, sameness and difference are held together in the Notion, the process of subjectivity and, therefore, in love (PhG: §787).
