For the mature Hegel, ancient Greek ethical life suffered from deficiencies that render it an unsuitable ideal for the modern world. For example, the ethical substantiality of Greek life formed the content of citizens’ wills without their reflection. Citizens’ deepest commitments simply reflected those of the community. Hegel argues that this relationship between citizen and ethical substance would prove unstable because it lacked space for subjective freedom. To capture the complexity of Hegel’s account of Greece, then, it is necessary to identify the various deficiencies he believed characterized ancient Greek life. Doing so provides the resources to understand more precisely why he undertook his famous ‘retreat from Eleusis’ between 1797 and 1805 (Kelly Reference Kelly1978) and to understand his commitment to a distinctively modern form of ethical life in the shape of the highly articulated modern state.
In this article I discuss four deficiencies that Hegel identifies in ancient Greek life: 1) the immediate relationship between the subjective will of the individual and the ethical norms of the polis, which Hegel calls ‘beautiful ethical individuality’ (PR: §353, 377);Footnote 1 2) the absence of institutions that mediated between a citizen’s loyalty to the polis and the citizen’s private ends; 3) a conception of the human being based on natural categories rather than as a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as free’ (PR: §57, 86), which underlay slavery; and 4) the granting of recognition in connection with natural categories, with the result that political institutions presupposed political integration rather than generating it. Hegel himself does not always clearly distinguish among these deficiencies, but each plays an important role in his rejection of Greece as an ideal for modern life. While he was attracted to the Greek ideal, he came to believe that it was an inadequate form of life that could not situate subjective freedom. His theory of the modern state represents a response to the question of how these deficiencies can be overcome.
Hegel’s commentators have long noted his criticisms of ancient Greek ethical life. However, the account offered here is unique in two ways. First, it differentiates the four deficiencies that Hegel identifies in ancient Greek life rather than treating them all as instances of a single phenomenon, such as beautiful ethical individuality. Beautiful ethical individuality is not the only feature of Greek life that Hegel believes is problematic. Slavery and inadequate forms of recognition represent conceptually distinct, if related, deficiencies. Second, this account offers a systematic explanation of how these features relate to one another. While each is deficient, in their interaction with one another they generate an attractive yet internally unstable set of institutions in which freedom cannot be fully realized.
I. Beautiful ethical individuality
‘Beautiful ethical individuality’ (PR: §353, 377) refers to the immediate relationship between Greek citizens’ subjective will and the ethical norms of the polis. As Charles Taylor writes, ‘The Greek state could work because men were immediately identified with it’ (1975: 396). Hegel links it to ‘beautiful freedom’ and ‘beautiful ethical life’ (VPG: 137; VPG: 138). He explains it most fully in the Philosophy of History:
Thus here there is the union of the ethical and the subjective will or the realm of beautiful freedom, for the idea is united with a plastic shape: it is not yet abstract for itself on the one hand, but rather immediately connected with the real [Wirklichen] […] This realm […] is unselfconscious [unbefangene] ethical life, not yet morality, but the individual will of the subject stands in the immediate custom and habit [Sitte und Gewohnheit] of right and law. […] What is divided into two extremes in the Orient, into the substantial as such and individuality [Einzelheit] pulverizing itself against it, comes together here. But the separated principles are only immediately in unity and therefore at the same time the greatest contradiction with itself [der höchste Widerspruch an sich selbst]. (VPG: 137–38)
This passage describes the unmediated unity of ethical substantiality (des Sittlichen; des Rechten und der Gesetze; das Substantielle) with the subjective will of the individual (der subjektive Wille; der individuelle Wille des Subjekts; die Einzelheit). The relationship between subjective will and ethical substantiality is one of unity because the latter forms the content of the former, but the unity is as yet unmediated by what Hegel later in the same paragraph calls ‘the free subjectivity of ethical life’.
In the introduction to Philosophy of History, Hegel defines ‘subjective will’ as ‘an entirely formal determination that does not contain what it wants’ (VPG: 67). That is, the phrase refers to the willing activity of the individual without reference to the will’s content. Hegel’s use of the term ‘subjective will’ to describe beautiful ethical individuality thus emphasizes an important point, namely, that Greek individuals felt at home in, invested themselves in, and willingly conducted themselves on the basis of the ethical substance that underlay Greek ethical life. ‘The political order did not exist on the basis of externally compelling people to participate. Each citizen freely joined the deliberative body’ (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2017: 72). The citizens willed the very norms that constituted the ethical substance in which they lived, desired to fulfil the obligations associated with the roles they filled, saw the good of the polis as their own good. ‘The ethical is the principle as in Asia’, says Hegel, ‘but it is ethical life which is imprinted with individuality and thus means the free willing of the individuals’ (VPG: 137). The ethical norms of the community constituted the content of a citizen’s ethical commitments and subjective will.
Yet for Hegel, the identity between subjective will and ethical life in Greece was immediate in the sense that it was neither a product of nor an object of citizens’ reflection. On the one hand, the citizen did not decide to align his commitments with those of the community; he was simply educated into them such that they formed his second nature. Obligatory, public activities and the business of governing shaped the beliefs and character of each citizen such that he unreflectively embodied the ethical norms of the polis. More generally, for the Greeks ‘the freedom of the spirit is conditioned and has an essential connection to a stimulus of nature. Greek freedom is stimulated by an other and is free in that it changes and produces the stimulus out of itself’ (VPG: 293). This is clear, Hegel thinks, from the importance of the oracle for Greek democracy. ‘When a colony was to be started, when foreign gods were to be introduced, when a general wanted to go into battle, an oracle was consulted’ (VPG: 310; see also VPG: 404 and PR: §279). The same was true of personal decisions. Neither individuals nor poleis would reach an important decision simply on the strength of their own deliberations; they sought guidance from outside of themselves.Footnote 2
On the other hand, Hegel believed the Greek citizen also did not subject his ethical commitments to reflection. They constituted his identity in such a way that they remained invisible to his reflective activity: ‘Among them [the Greeks] the habit prevailed of living for the fatherland without any further reflection’ (VPG: 309). Consequently, citizens had a direct, unmediated relationship with the public life of the polis. Their actions were all directed toward the realization of the common purposes of the polis. As Terry Pinkard writes,
For the Greek democratic political ideal to be real, citizens had to assume that debate in the public arena was conducted in a way such that each citizen firmly had the good of the polis as his basic, unyielding commitment. That commitment itself was beyond deliberation, and commitment to the agreed-upon policies had to be equally stringent. (2017: 77–78)
The relationship as Hegel envisions it is unmediated by reflection: it is not that citizens undertook their daily activities with a background awareness that those activities contributed to the common purposes of the polis; rather, citizens undertook to achieve the common purposes of the polis in their actions without evaluating those purposes.
The upshot of beautiful ethical individuality is that Greek freedom was limited.Footnote 3 ‘In Greece substantial, ethical freedom was the basis; Greece was not able to withstand the blossoming of subjective freedom’ (GdP II: 123). Subjective freedom consists in ‘the right of the subject to find its satisfaction’ in its actions (PR: §121, 149). This satisfaction is not that which the ancient Greek experienced through membership in the polis. Rather, it is realized when ‘the will can recognize something or be something only in so far as that thing is its own’ (PR: §107, 136). The right of subjective freedom extends, Hegel argues, all the way to the choice of occupation.
In Plato’s republic, subjective freedom is not yet recognized, because individuals still have their tasks assigned to them by the authorities [Obrigkeit]. In many oriental states, this assignment is governed by birth. But subjective freedom, which must be respected, requires freedom of choice on the part of individuals. (PR: §262A, 286)
Greek ethical life demanded a form of individuality in which subjective will is conditioned by its immediate relationship to ethical substance. Because subjective freedom presupposes that the individual can justify actions and decisions on the authority of his or her own reason, it undermines the immediacy of beautiful ethical life.
Hegel thus claims that beautiful forms of ethical life are unable to situate subjective freedom. The ethical norms demand allegiance not on the basis of their rationality, but on the basis of authorities that stand above individuals: the gods, oracles, religious traditions, nature, the community, etc. When individuals begin to question the ethical norms, they are asking that the norms be justified on the basis of non-arbitrary authorities, or authorities which the questioning individuals can accept. When the response is simply to reiterate the authority of the authorities underlying the norms, there are two consequences. First, individuals become alienated from the norms, and with that, freedom dies. Ethical substance no longer appears to individuals as something they can invest themselves in, as norms in which they feel at home, but instead confronts them as an external, arbitrary authority. Since ‘the actor is free only when she acts on reasons that are intelligible and not just “given”’, the individuals who question the authorities are no longer free (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2017: 36). Second, precisely because the norms rest on authorities that will not answer in terms of reason, the individuals’ reason becomes detached from the norms. The norms lose their authority, since the public sphere which they structure fails to provide a context in which the individuals’ form of reason-demanding is responded to or reciprocated.Footnote 4 Because the ethical substance no longer commands the individuals’ loyalty, the form of life premised on immediate unity collapses.Footnote 5
II. Absence of mediating institutions
Hegel’s critique of the absence of mediating institutions in Greek life is closely tied to his critique of beautiful ethical individuality. The polis was the first and foremost object of loyalty for the Greek citizen; ‘the goal was the living fatherland’ (VPG: 309). The relationship between the citizen and political life could therefore be direct, without secondary associations or other institutions to mediate between a citizen’s loyalty to the polis and whatever private ends the citizen might pursue. Public life was the controlling aspect of a citizen’s life. In both Athens and Sparta ‘political virtue’ was dominant, ‘which nevertheless developed in the one state into an artwork of free individuality, but kept the character of something substantial in the other’ (VPG: 315). Even in Athens, where the arts and sciences blossomed, citizens developed their talents in a manner that contributed to the public life of the polis. No aspect of a citizen’s life was isolated from the public life in which the citizen was a participant; he simply lived ‘for religion, for state, without thinking about it further’ (VPG: 327). The polis did not need and did not have institutions that provided a context for the exercise of subjective particularity.Footnote 6
Consequently, when the Sophists ‘declared choice to be the principle of what is right and declared whatever is useful for the subject to be the final ground of determination’, the political life of the polis disintegrated (VPG: 328). The breakdown occurred because the polis had no mechanism to mediate the citizen’s loyalty to his own projects and desires with the universal life of the polis. A citizen who began to pursue his own projects had no means for understanding those projects as contributing to the life of the polis; a citizen’s projects would simply run parallel to public life with no connection to it. Thus ‘the self-sufficient development of particularity is the moment which appears in the states of the ancient world as an influx of ethical corruption and as the ultimate reason [Grund] for their downfall’ (PR: §185, 222). Not able to reconcile the exercise of their subjective particularity with the public life of the polis, ‘many citizens now separated themselves from practical life, from the affairs of the state’ (VPG: 329). Because the public life was the only means the ancient Greek polis had for forging the close connection between a citizen’s subjective will and the ethical substance of the polis, a citizen who began exercising subjective particularity effectively dropped between the cracks of the formative processes. Particularity ruined the Greeks’ socially and politically cohesive form of life because of the absence of mediating institutions.
Effectively, institutions in Greece were two-layered: citizens operated at one level, and the primary object of their loyalty was the higher level of the polis. ‘The Greeks lived publicly; they had not yet invented private life’ (Vieillard-Baron Reference Vieillard-Baron1994: 59).Footnote 7 There were no intervening levels of institutions that could, on the one hand, serve as the object of loyalty for a certain group of citizens and, on the other hand, direct the corporate loyalty of that group to the higher level of the polis. Such a two-layered structure has no means for situating the subjective particularity of citizens, since subjective particularity by definition involves a change in the object of a citizen’s loyalties; a citizen’s own projects and desires rather than the polis become the first and foremost object of his loyalty. Once the shift in loyalty occurs, no mechanisms remain to reconnect the citizen’s loyalty to the ethical life of the polis.
This deficiency will plague any form of political life that makes the common life of the state the foremost object of citizens’ loyalty. This is one reason for Hegel’s scathing remarks about Fries in the preface to Philosophy of Right. According to Hegel, Fries calls for ‘a people among whom a genuine communal spirit prevails’; among such a people, ‘all business relating to public affairs would gain its life from below; living societies, steadfastly united by the sacred bond of friendship’, would undertake all manner of public service (PR: Preface A, 15). Hegel counters that such claims ‘reduce the complex inner articulation of the ethical, i.e. the state, the architectonics of its rationality […] to a mush of “heart, friendship, and enthusiasm”’ (PR: Preface A, 15).
Hegel’s fear is that any contemporary form of life without mediating institutions would ultimately alienate people from the common life of the state, because it would remove the mechanisms that bridge the gap between citizens’ diverse, self-interested economic activity and their loyalty to the state.
Individuals as a mass … embody a dual moment, namely the extreme of individuality [Einzelheit] which knows and wills for itself, and the extreme of universality which knows and wills the substantial. They can therefore attain their right in both of these respects only in so far as they have actuality both as private and as substantial persons. (PR: §264, 287)
Without mediating institutions, individuals can attain their right in one respect or the other, but not in both at once. Where individuals devote most of their energy to public affairs, they have little opportunity to develop their own private interests. Where they are absorbed in their own private affairs with no institutional link to the political life of the state, the political cohesion of the state suffers.
Although Hegel does not identify Rousseau explicitly, his critique of this feature of Greek life also represents a clear rejection of one aspect of Rousseau’s political thought.Footnote 8 Rousseau believes that citizens’ freedom is partially a function of the amount of influence each has in drafting laws (see SC: III.1). Since the citizens collectively constitute the sovereign authority, each has a voice in drafting laws for the body politic. However, the less influence each citizen has relative to the overall number of voices, the more likely he is to experience the decision of the entire body as domination. As a result, ‘the larger the state becomes, the less liberty there is’ (SC: III.1, 174). In fact, when a state reaches a certain size, it may turn to ‘using deputies or representatives of the people in the nation’s assemblies’, which effectively enslaves the people (SC: III.15, 198). Content to let the assemblies legislate, the people lose their interest in the affairs of state and concentrate on their own private business. As a result, they lose their freedom by giving up their participation in making laws.
For that reason, Rousseau argues that the ‘truly free state’ is one where ‘the citizens do everything with their own hands and nothing with money’ (SC: III.15, 198). All the citizens direct their energy to the common purpose, understanding that their freedom is bound up with their continued exercise of sovereignty in the making of laws.
The better a state is constituted, the more public business takes precedence over private business in the minds of the citizens. There is even far less private business, since, with the sum of common happiness providing a more considerable portion of each individual’s happiness, less remains for him to look for through private efforts. (SC: III.15, 198)
Each citizen finds satisfaction in the affairs of the state, and each therefore focuses on those affairs rather than on private business that might conflict with the common interest. Rousseau identifies the same conflict that Hegel does between loyalty to the polity and private interests, but his conception of liberty commits him to rejecting mediating institutions at the expense of private interests. For Hegel, on the other hand, limiting the pursuit of private interests represents a limitation on freedom.
The modern state must therefore possess institutional arrangements for linking the private affairs of individuals to the political life of the state. This occurs, according to Hegel, by means of the corporations. In family and civil society citizens
attain their right in the first respect directly; and in the second respect, they attain it by discovering their essential self-consciousness in [social] institutions as that universal aspect of their particular interests which has being in itself, and by obtaining through these institutions an occupation and activity directed towards a universal end within a corporation. (PR: §264, 287)
The corporations, in turn, by means of their role in the legislative activity of the estates, attain ‘a political significance and function. […] Only in this respect is there a genuine link between the particular which has actuality in the state and the universal’ (PR: §303, 343). As Frederick Neuhouser writes,
Because the moment of difference is not to be suppressed by the state but rather incorporated into it, the principal concern of Hegelian politics is to find a way of integrating the particular wills of individual citizens with the general will not only through the framing of laws that further the good of the whole but also by subjectively transforming citizens so as to enable them to embrace the general will as their own. (2000: 137; see also Church Reference Church2012: 79, 97, 102–3)
Such integration cannot occur without mediating institutions. Consequently, when Greek citizens began to pursue their own private interests, the result was the dissolution of the public life they had known. The vital, unified political life of the fifth-century polis could not but degenerate into factional strife and self-seeking behaviour. The modern state, on the other hand, can allow the full development of subjective particularity without detriment to political cohesion.
III. Slavery
As we have seen, Hegel thought that beautiful ethical individuality in Greece had its corollary in the absence of mediating institutions; the immediate unity between subjective will and ethical substance was sustained by institutional arrangements that integrated citizens’ loyalties directly with the public life of the polis. For this very reason, Greek democracy entailed high participatory demands. Describing the democratic life of the polis, Hegel writes, ‘Every citizen [Bürger] had the right and the duty to hold and to hear lectures concerning the administration of the state in public, to train in the gymnasium, to join in festivals’ (VPG: 311). Citizens had to participate in the governing process and communal activities that served as focal points for the public life of the polis. These public activities effected the social and political integration of citizens with one another and with the polis, which gave Greek democracy its lively character. The same activities oriented citizens into the ethical norms that structured their life together, thus effecting the beautiful ethical individuality that made Greek democracy possible. Anyone who did not have the time and resources to participate in these activities was simply cut off from the public life of the polis.
For this reason, Greek citizens had to be free from ‘the work of everyday life’ (VPG: 311). The kind of leisure necessary was available only because slaves took care of time-consuming, everyday tasks which would otherwise prevent citizens from participating in the life of the polis. As Hegel writes, in Greece ‘the particularity associated with needs has not yet become part of [the realm of] freedom, but is confined to a class of slaves [Sklavenstand]’ (PR: §356, 379). Slavery set the Greek citizen free to participate actively in the public life of the polis. The consignment of labour to slaves thus goes hand in hand with the other central features of Greek ethical life. As Hegel contends in Philosophy of History, slavery ‘was a necessary condition of a beautiful democracy’ (VPG: 311).
Hegel criticizes slavery on the grounds that it depends ‘on regarding the human being simply as a natural being [Naturwesen] whose existence [Existenz] (of which the arbitrary will is also a part) is not in conformity with his concept’ (PR: §57, 87). On this understanding, the human being is in principle no different from objects in nature, which can be possessed and used by human beings. The enslaved human being becomes, as Aristotle says, ‘an instrument’ in the hands of the master (P: I.4.1253b32, 1989). The slave certainly has a will which he can and does exercise. However, that he has a will does not in principle distinguish the slave from any other tool. ‘The master considers the slave not as a person, but as a thing devoid of self; and the slave himself does not count as an “I”, for his master is his “I” instead’ (EL: §163 A1, 241). As Aristotle says, the slave is simply a tool more useful than others (P: I.5.1254a17, 1989).
Hegel ultimately rejects this ‘false [unwahren] point of view whereby the human being exists as a natural being and as a concept which has being only in itself, and is therefore capable of enslavement’ (PR: §57, 87). His criticism of this understanding is directed at two sides of slavery, the subjective and the objective, both of which rest on the ‘as yet only immediate consciousness of freedom’ (PR: §57R, 87).Footnote 9 Briefly stated, the subjective side of slavery consists in the slave’s own conception of himself in relation to the master, while the objective side consists of the conception of human beings that is presupposed by slavery as an institution. I begin with a treatment of the subjective side of slavery, because it is here that Hegel brings his criticism to a point.
The beginning of §57 of Philosophy of Right provides Hegel’s reason for rejecting slavery.
The human being, in his immediate existence [Existenz] in himself, is a natural entity, external to his concept; it is only through the development [Ausbildung] of his own body and spirit, essentially by means of his self-consciousness comprehending itself as free, that he takes possession of himself and becomes his own property as distinct from that of others. (86)Footnote 10
Hegel’s argument revolves around the contrast between the human being ‘in his immediate existence’ and the human being with a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as free’. The contrast between immediacy and self-consciousness indicates that the root issue has to do with an individual’s self-definition: the individual who takes possession of himself by virtue of a particular self-conception cannot be a slave, while the individual who exists immediately can be a slave. On this interpretation, slavery is in part a function of the slave’s self-conception.
Hegel’s discussion of taking possession of oneself helps illuminate his position. §57 is in the abstract right section of Philosophy of Right, in a short section entitled ‘Taking Possession’. In this section Hegel lists the three modes in which an individual may take possession of an object (physical seizure, giving form, and designating ownership by a sign); each mode involves making ‘my will … discernible in it’ (PR: §55, 84). The discussion of slavery occurs within the subsection on giving form to an object, where Hegel makes the point that possession is established by working on or tending to an object. ‘When the person embodies his freedom in a thing, he places his will in it and appropriates it, and in this way the thing becomes the person’s property’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2017: 45). In the following paragraph, Hegel turns to his discussion of taking possession of oneself.
According to Hegel, one takes possession of oneself by means of a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as free’ (PR: §57, 86). This self-consciousness, as Hardimon shows, involves a particular conception of oneself. Individuals characterized by this form of self-consciousness are individuals in the strong sense: they conceive of themselves as ‘bearers of separate and particular interests, possessors of individual rights, and subjects of conscience’ (1994: 148). They see themselves as individuals whose goals and projects are their own in the sense that no external party has imposed them in a coercive manner. Hegel’s point here is simply that an individual with this self-conception locates the legitimacy of his or her goals and projects within his or her own will. In this way, the individual ‘takes possession of himself and becomes his own property as distinct from that of others’ (PR: §57, 86). Such a self-definition makes one ineligible for slavery.
The opposite side of the contrast is the human being ‘in his immediate existence’ (PR: §57, 86). If the individual’s reflective activity is at the root of the contrast, as I am arguing, then Hegel has in mind here a reflectively unmediated relationship to one’s own existence. Whereas the individual who takes possession of himself exercises the kinds of reflection that result in the self-conception described above, individuals who do not exercise those forms of reflection have not taken possession of themselves. Any self-consciousness they might have is so closely tied to the ethical norms structuring their social world that they locate the legitimacy of their goals and projects outside their own wills. In the case of the slave, ‘the self will of the slave surrenders itself to that of his master, receives for its content the purposes of his master’, as Hegel writes in his account of the master-slave dialectic in the Encyclopaedia (PM: §433A, 174). This stands in stark contrast to modern individuals, among whom, according to Hegel, ‘Everyone knows that he cannot be a slave’ (GdP I: 121).
Individuals without a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as free’ thus lack the kind of self-conception that would prevent them from falling into slavery. ‘Abstract right belongs only to those who are explicitly conscious of their freedom and who give that freedom “existence” both in their own eyes and in those of others’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2017: 43). Under the appropriate objective conditions, however, the individual is capable of such a self-conception; as Hegel contends, the individual can develop ‘his own body and spirit’ and thus take possession of himself (PR: §57, 86). Hegel contends that the development of the individual human being tends toward this form of self-consciousness. It represents what Hegel calls the concept of humanity—the ‘possibility, capacity [Vermögen], or predisposition’ (PR: §57, 86). The self-conception of the human being in his unreflective immediacy does not exhaust what it means to be a human being. Rather, the concept (Begriff) of the human being sets the limits to how human beings may be rightfully treated.
Hegel thus rejects slavery because it ‘does not contain the point of view of rationality and right at all’ (PR: §57, 87). The fact that the human being has a will indicates, according to the broad sweep of Hegel’s argument, that the human being lives most in consonance with his own humanity when the will actualizes itself in the world.Footnote 11 This requires that the human being enjoy subjective freedom, the right of locating in one’s own will the legitimacy of all norms by which one’s life is governed. As Hegel puts it in the Encyclopaedia, the human being ‘is implicitly destined to supreme freedom’ (PM: §482, 239). Slavery, like other forms of domination such as ‘serfdom, disqualification from owning property, restrictions on the freedom of ownership, etc.’, is normatively objectionable because it represents the ‘alienation of personality’ (PR: §66, 96).
Hegel’s argument against slavery is thus not simply that human beings are inherently free. In fact, Hegel criticizes this argument as ‘one-sided inasmuch as it regards the human being as by nature free, or (and this amounts to the same thing) takes the concept as such in its immediacy’ (PR: §57, 87). Freedom, Hegel contends, is not a natural characteristic of human beings in the way that, say, patrimony is. In the words of Lucio Cortella,
Modernity’s realization of equality—that is, its assertion of the freedom of the legal person—entails a “break” with traditional man. It separates abstract man from the concrete man linked to status, culture, religion. In this way it produces a concept of the human being, the person, that completely prescinds from his sociohistorical concreteness. (2015: 36; see also De Laurentiis Reference De Laurentiis2005: 93–94)
Freedom, as I have argued in the previous paragraphs, is bound up with the self-conception which individuals hold. Such a self-conception, however, is an achievement rather than a naturally occurring characteristic of the human being. Slavery is wrong not in view of the human being’s natural freedom but rather in view of the human being’s concept and ‘destiny’ (Bestimmung), as Hegel calls it in §4 of the Philosophy of Right (35).
This helps explain the otherwise offensive claim in the addition to §57 that, ‘if someone is a slave, his own will is responsible, just as the responsibility lies with the will of a people if that people is subjugated’ (88). This is a point about those who are slaves not merely because they are in bondage, but because they believe themselves to be slaves. The former would be held against their will and coerced into doing what they do not want to do; they would be prisoners rather than slaves (cf. Houlgate Reference Houlgate2017: 44). The latter, on the other hand, have essentially relinquished their wills to another. This can occur only if their self-conception allows them to do so. What Hegel has in mind, then, is not merely slavery as a relationship of force, but as a relationship based on a conception of oneself as an object of nature which can belong to another human being. Slavery, on this reading, represents a failure to grasp one’s personality.
This self-conception of the slave has its complement in the conception of the human being which underlies the institution of slavery. The Greeks practised slavery because their conception of human beings located the source of human freedom outside the human will.Footnote 12 ‘[W]ith them a man was held to be free only if he was born free’ (PM: §433A, 174). Freedom was simply a natural category in their minds, as was slavery, which is why Aristotle could claim, ‘Some men are by nature free, and others slaves’ (P: I.5.1255a1, 1991). The fact that slavery was practised in the ancient Greek polis thus indicates for Hegel a serious defect in the conception of human beings that underlay Greek ethical life. Greek freedom presupposed this objectionable understanding of human beings that made slavery possible. Because Greek ethical life required a relationship of dominance to be woven into the social order, Hegel could not see Greece as a model for contemporary life.
Just as the individual has to achieve a ‘self-consciousness comprehending itself as free’, so must an appropriate conception of the human being be achieved historically before the institution of slavery comes to an end. Hegel avers that this conception arises with Christianity because of its emphasis on the infinite worth of the individual before God.Footnote 13
The genuine reason why there are no longer any slaves in Christian Europe is to be sought in nothing but the principle of Christianity itself. The Christian religion is the religion of absolute freedom, and only for Christians does man count as such, man in his infinity and universality. (EL: §163 A1, 240–41)
The Christian religion laid the foundation for a conception of the human being in which the personality of each is recognized—that is to say, in which human freedom is no longer conceived on the basis of natural categories but rather on the basis of ‘the will’s self-conscious (but otherwise contentless) and simple reference to itself in its individuality [Einzelheit]’ (PR: §35, 67). This conception of the human being precludes slavery, because it entails the commandment, ‘be a person and respect others as persons’ (PR: §36, 69). According to Hegel, the modern state, based as it is on this more adequate conception of the human being, thus overcomes the deficiency of Greek ethical life with respect to slavery.
IV. Recognition on the basis of natural categories
Slavery and the absence of mediating institutions in Greek ethical life go hand in hand with a fourth deficiency: the granting of recognition in connection with natural categories. On the one hand, where human freedom is conceived on the basis of natural categories, citizens’ recognition of one another will likewise be based on natural categories. The conception of the human being that permitted the Greeks to view some people as slaves by nature (i.e., to fail to recognize some people as persons who ought not be deprived of legal self-determination) also permitted them to assign citizenship on the basis of categories such as patrimony and sex (i.e., to fail to recognize some people as persons who ought not be excluded from the political sphere).Footnote 14 On the other hand, we have already seen that the institutions of the modern state link citizens’ particularity with political life. However, they also link the recognition citizens grant one another with the norms that validate and link the individuals’ particularity to the state. Where such institutions are not present, citizens’ recognition of one another has an entirely different basis, such as patrimony, sex, and even abilities. Granting recognition on the basis of natural categories is thus the flip side of absence of mediating institutions: if there are no institutions to link subjective particularity with the state’s universality, then there are likewise no institutions to give citizens’ mutual recognition a politically integrative character. This indicates the fundamental problem with the ancient Greek form of recognition: rather than effecting the political integration of citizens, it presupposes that citizens are already politically integrated.
Of the four deficiencies identified here, this is the one about which Hegel says the least. Nevertheless, two sets of texts allow a reconstruction of the role this form of recognition plays in his critique of Greek life. The first is comments about what Gray calls the ‘diminutive size of the city-state and the corresponding homogeneity of interest’ (Gray Reference Gray1968: 58); the face-to-face relations that characterized Greek democracy were an instance of this form of recognition. Secondly, Hegel argues in his treatment of the estates in Philosophy of Right that they provide a citizen with ‘recognition in his own eyes [Vorstellung] and in the eyes of others’ (§207, 238). I will argue that this latter form of recognition is politically integrative in a way that ancient Greek recognition was not.
Hegel contends that Greek democracy is possible only because of the small size of the polis:
democratic constitutions are possible only in small states, in states that do not exceed the extent of a city by very much. […] Living together in a city, the circumstance of seeing one another daily, make possible a common education [Bildung] and a vital democracy (VPG: 311–12).
Democratic constitutions require citizens to do the work of legislating directly rather than through representatives. This is possible only where the citizens share a commitment to their common political life, operate with fundamental agreements regarding the norms that structure their life together, and meet together to conduct the business of the polis. This is possible, in turn, only in a small state, because it is the participation in public festivals and the business of governing that educates citizens into the basic norms structuring political life. The only way for Athenian citizens to internalize what their democracy was about was to participate in it directly.
For that reason, as we have seen, ‘hard work was not the concern [Sache] of the citizen, whose activity was directed rather towards public affairs [öffentlichen Dingen]’ (PR: §248A, 269). Each citizen
must be present at the main proceedings; he must participate in the decision as such, not only through his single voice, but in the pressure of moving and being moved, because the passion and interest of the entire man lay in [his participation], and the warmth of the entire decision is present in the proceedings. The insight to which everyone should be converted had to be evoked through the warming of individuals to it by means of speech. If this were to occur in an abstract, dead manner by means of writing, the individuals would not be incited to the warmth of universality, and the larger the crowd was, the less weight the individual voice would have. (VPG: 312)
The function of public deliberation in the polis was to produce consensus, but the consensus was not a matter of rational agreement that could be effected by means of written communication. The agreement was rather a matter of what Hegel calls ‘the warming’ of the individual. Oral communication engaged the citizens ‘in the pressure of moving and being moved’ such that they reached a kind of affective agreement to the proposal at hand. Such communication is no longer effective, however, if the population increases beyond a certain size.
Thus, Hegel believed Greek democracy worked well because its small size allowed citizens to be caught up in affective forms of persuasion that function only in face-to-face settings. The persuasion is tied not merely to the arguments made. If it were, written communication would be just as capable of producing the kind of agreement that characterized the Greek polis. Writing, however, is ‘abstract,’ as Hegel says. Simply to achieve a consensus by means of written communication and tallying votes represents ‘a dead being.’Footnote 15 The affective forms of persuasion exercised in Greece functioned only because citizens knew one another; as Aristotle said, ‘If the citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s characters’ (P: VII.4.1326a14-15, 2105). Such persuasion is based on citizens’ acquaintance with one another’s character and talents.
Recognition in the polis was therefore based on natural categories or individual traits.
[P]olitical unity—what Hegel calls the formation into a state—required a mutual recognition among citizens about who was and who was not a citizen, and in the Greek context, that carried over into some relatively natural ways of identifying people (in Greece, such as being born in Athens to an Athenian man and woman, and so forth). Some social requirements were thus taken to be rooted in natural but nonetheless normative or principled facts about life. (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2017: 81)Footnote 16
Hegel thinks recognition in Greece was partially a matter of patrimony; citizens recognized one another as fellow participants in the political life of the polis merely because each ‘was born free’ (PM: §433A, 174). Hegel also contends that recognition in the polis was a function an individual’s talents; he observes that the Greek citizen loved to show himself off ‘in order to prove himself and acquire recognition’ (VPG: 296). Greek citizens counted for something in one another’s eyes simply on the basis of natural characteristics—talents, physical attributes, and the like. Thus, their recognition as legitimate participants in the political process was logically prior to and disconnected from the norms of freedom that structured the political life of the polis. It presupposed political integration.
For this reason, citizens’ recognition of one another could not generate bonds of political cohesion once the forces of subjective particularity interrupted the close unity between each citizen and the public life of the polis. In fact, because the proper functioning of recognition in Greece presupposed precisely that unity, the forms of recognition Greek citizens had afforded one another slowly broke down and disappeared once the political cohesion of the polis diminished.
In the cities there were unceasing battles, and the citizens divided themselves into factions, as in the Italian cities of the middle ages. The victory of the one brought the exile of the others with it, and these then turned to the enemies of their native city to make war against it. (VPG: 326)
The common political life of the polis gave way to civil strife, and the citizens’ competing interests prevented them from recognizing one another as participants in a single, common project.
The unspoken target of Hegel’s critique seems to be Rousseau. Believing as he does that citizens are free only when they have a significant voice in legislation, Rousseau reaches the conclusion that the city must be very small (SC: III.15, 199). Only in a city ‘where each member can be known to all’ is a vital public life possible, according to Rousseau (II.10, 170). Rousseau thus prefers a small state because its citizens are more likely as a whole to embody the ‘social spirit’ which makes good legislation possible (II.7, 164). Each recognizes that the freedom he or she enjoys is grounded in the cooperative venture in which all the citizens together are involved. They share a ‘social bond’ which, the more it ‘extends the looser it becomes’ (II.9, 167). It is this social bond which prevents the citizens from seeing one another as bearers of competing interests; instead, each recognizes the others as bearers of the general will. The small size permits the citizenry to have ‘affection for its leaders, … for the homeland, … and for its fellow citizens’ (II.9, 167). If the state becomes too large, the affection wanes and the social bond dissolves. Because the state has no institutions to link political life with the recognition citizens grant one another, the disintegration of recognition spells the end of the state. Recognition does not play a politically integrative role; it presupposes political integration.
From the normative deficiency of the forms of recognition characteristic of beautiful ethical life Hegel drew a broader lesson. Forms of recognition based on natural characteristics will not be able to counteract the forces of subjective particularity in any context. That is why Hegel writes in §253 of Philosophy of Right,
If the individual [der Einzelne] is not a member of a legally recognised [berechtigten] corporation […], he is without the honour of belonging to an estate, his isolation reduces him to the selfish aspect of his trade, and his livelihood and satisfaction lack stability. He will accordingly try to gain recognition through the external manifestations of success in his trade. (272)
Disconnected from the politically integrative functions of the estates, an individual can gain recognition only on the basis of his or her own individuality. Such recognition, however, lacks connection to political institutions which integrate the exercise of subjective particularity with a meaningful public life. The political cohesion of the state would either have to exist by some other means, such as the community mindedness of the citizens, or it would simply dissolve.
What is needed, according to Hegel, is a set of institutions that allows each citizen to acquire recognition in a manner that ‘regards and “saves” the particularity of the subject by discerning in it something of universal importance and worth and by acknowledging the contributions of the individual to the community as a whole’, as Williams writes (1998: 254). That is precisely what Hegel thinks the estates provide in the modern state. They give each member ‘recognition in his own eyes [Vorstellung] and in the eyes of others’ by linking the individual’s particularity to a larger social grouping (PR: §207, 238). Recognition is linked to the individual’s contribution to a less selfish end than his or her own; in Neuhouser’s words, ‘It is through their socially recognized, productive labor that they [members of estates] constitute themselves as beings of standing’ (2000: 92). That is to say, their recognition is mediated by the institutions that validate the particularity of their labour and link it to the political life of the state.
V. Conclusion
Hegel’s critique of Greek ethical life finds its answer in the structural complexity he builds into his theory of the modern state. Where beautiful ethical life unites the citizen directly with the polis, the modern state is replete with institutions that bring various forms of separation and division back into a fully developed, highly articulated, ethical form of life. Where the polis represents an undifferentiated form of ethical life which cannot provide a legitimate institutional sphere for subjective particularity and subjective freedom, the modern state situates individuals’ subjectivity within a context of meaningful social membership. It is for this reason that Hegel can claim, ‘The Greeks remain at the mid-point of beauty and do not achieve the higher point of truth’ (VPG: 308). Not ancient Greece but the modern state is the full actuality of ethical life.
Those, then, who claim that Hegel’s philosophy represents ‘a modern content poured into Greek molds’ (Gray Reference Gray1968: 37) have not captured the full import of Hegel’s critique of Greek ethical life. It is certainly true that the life of the ancient polis attracts Hegel. What he finds most attractive is the satisfaction that each citizen found through his membership in it. The ancient Greek polis allowed each citizen to experience the satisfaction of participating in a common political life that reflected his most deeply held beliefs and values and that was also the product of his own energies. To suggest, however, that Hegel simply transposes this form of social membership into the modern world misses the point of his critique of Greek ethical life.Footnote 17 The form of social membership that characterized it cannot be regained for the modern world, nor would it be desirable to do so, because it was premised upon domination and a conditioned form of freedom.
Hegel argues that modern ethical life, on the other hand, allows the full development of subjectivity. It is thus structurally different than Greek ethical life. Four points in particular distinguish modern ethical life from Greek ethical life for Hegel, each point corresponding to one of the deficiencies he identifies. Modern ethical life is 1) universal, 2) institutionally complex, 3) politically integrative, and 4) compatible with reflection on the part of citizens.
He claims that modern ethical life is universal. There are no slaves in the modern state; every individual enjoys full social membership in it. The roots of this universality lie for Hegel in the understanding of the human being as a person. This understanding, unlike that which underlay Greek ethical life, stipulates that every individual be treated in accordance with the concept of the human being as a being which externalizes its inner life into the world by means of will. When Hegel writes, ‘The Orient knew and knows only that one is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the Germanic world knows that all are free’, it is precisely this phenomenon to which he is referring (VPG: 134). He believes modern ethical life provides each individual with the opportunity to satisfy his or her own particularity. Whereas the enslavement of some was required for others in Greece to enjoy freedom, in the modern world all enjoy freedom.
As a consequence of excluding slavery, however, the work associated with particularity falls to the citizens themselves. The state must provide avenues by which citizens can pursue the private ends associated with particularity while still directing their loyalty to the state. Modern ethical life is therefore institutionally complex. The state provides ‘legal recognition’ of estates and corporations within which citizens can pursue their particularity (PR: §253, 272). At the same time, the estates and corporations raise the consciousness of the individual beyond him- or herself, because they provide the needs and work of each individual with a socially recognized character, what Hegel calls ‘the honour in his estate’ (PR: §253, 271). Finally, the estates direct the loyalty of the individual to the state as the legal basis for the pursuit of particularity. Social membership in the modern state is thus spread across multiple institutions.
The political linkage between the state and the corporations provides social membership in the state with a politically integrative character (cf. Franco Reference Franco1999: 276–77). Citizens recognize one another not simply on the basis of natural categories but on the basis of the contribution each makes to public life by means of his or her membership in a corporation. A contribution that occurs by ‘unconscious necessity’ is not enough; ‘only in the corporation does it become a knowing and thinking [part of] ethical life’ (PR: §255A, 273). Participation in a corporation thus gives an individual’s pursuit of private ends significance in the reproduction of the institutions of the modern state. Individuals no longer see one another simply as competitors in the pursuit of private ends; ‘the spirit of the corporation … is now at the same time inwardly transformed into the spirit of the state’ (PR: §289, 239). Modern ethical life generates bonds among citizens by which political integration is strengthened.
Finally, Hegel believes modern ethical life is compatible with citizens’ reflection. A citizen can reflect on the norms that underlie modern ethical life without undermining those norms. A citizen can abstract from the social roles he or she holds without experiencing alienation from those roles. Individuals can exercise the full range of reflection associated with modern subjectivity, and their reflection will (so Hegel argues) only reinforce for them the extent to which modern ethical life provides each with a legitimate sphere for the exercise of subjectivity and with social membership. In Hegel’s words, ‘That relationship—or rather, that relationless identity—in which the ethical is the actual living principle [Lebendigkeit] of self-consciousness, may indeed turn into a relationship of faith and conviction or a relationship mediated by further reflection, into insight grounded on reasons’ (PR: §147, 191). Reflection ruined ancient Greek ethical life, but modern ethical life can accommodate it.
Hegel’s assessment of modern ethical life is perhaps more optimistic than is warranted. It is true, as he claims, that the objective conditions that underlay slavery in the ancient world are a thing of the past in Europe—and, by and large, around the globe. The legal systems of most nations recognize the personality of each human being; it is for that reason that slavery has been outlawed. However, Hegel’s claim that everyone in the modern world ‘knows that he cannot be a slave’ (GdP I: 121) is contestable. Even under legal systems that recognize the personality of each human being, some individuals do not come to view themselves as individuals in the strong sense—that is, they fail to locate the legitimacy of their interests in their own wills. As a result, they alienate their wills to other people, much as Hegel believed slaves in the ancient world did. Such cases, in which individuals never develop a consciousness of their own freedom, represent a failure of the institutions of modern ethical life to generate the subjective conditions for the full development of freedom.
An even greater challenge to Hegel’s optimism about modern ethical life arises from a related case: individuals who abandon the consciousness of their own freedom because of more or less subtle coercion and subsequently alienate their wills to others. What is in view here are not instances in which one individual complies with another because of an ongoing implicit or explicit threat of force, but in which an individual ceases to consider him- or herself free and conforms to the will of another even without the continuing threat of force. Cases like this suggest that the achievement of the subjective conditions of freedom by an individual can be lost, even if the objective conditions that support such an achievement remain in place. If so, then the achievement of the consciousness of one’s freedom may be fragile, and modern ethical life may prove less resilient than Hegel believed.
In any case, modern ethical life represents for Hegel an advance over ancient Greek ethical life. Greek ethical life has serious deficiencies, and a theory of the state cannot overcome these deficiencies by simply juxtaposing ancient forms of social membership with the separation and difference that characterize modernity. Instead, modern institutions must provide for forms of social membership that permit the full exercise of particularity while integrating citizens into the larger life of the state.Footnote 18
