Firstly, it’s important to understand the world in which Hegel was growing up and where his motivation came from. Germany at the time was nothing more than a collection of diverse, backward, separated princedoms, in what was called the Holy Roman Empire. They were surrounded by powerful states like Austria, Russia, England and France, who marched back and forth across Germany kicking them around and doing what they willed with them.
At the same time Germany was an extremely cultured part of the world, but they were denied any say in the affairs of Europe or any control over their own lives. So it was in that context that Hegel took an interest in the concepts of Volksgeist and Zeitgeist: Volksgeist – the spirit of a people, and Zeigeist, the spirit of the times. Now he didn’t invent these terms. These terms were made up by Herder, but he wanted to investigate why one people could build a powerful state and change the course of history, while another people would live in slavery or be marginalised, that one people would come to the fore at one stage in history, and then fall into the background while at another time another people would come to the fore.
So these were Hegel’s concerns. Although later on, spirit became a unitary thing, which pre-existed history, and manifested itself in history, we can understand Hegel better if we realise that this wasn’t his starting point, it was what came out of an effort to unify his reflections. He started with trying to understand the spirit of a time and the spirit of a particular people as different from another, and enquired into the sources of why it is that a people at a certain time and place thought in a certain way and people in another place and another time thought in a different way.
So he was a cultural-historical psychologist, whose concerns began with culture and history, and later went to the only way in which culture and history can exist, and that is in a through individual human beings. And it’s important to understand this as Hegel’s starting point, because Hegel began with thinking, and a material culture and a way of life, as a single unitary thing. This is what the spirit of a people and the spirit of a time is.
In the context of the history of philosophy, I want to introduce Hegel in terms of his contribution to our conception of the subject. ‘Subject’ goes back to Aristotle; ‘subject’ is the Latin translation of the Greek word. In ancient times, it meant the same as it meant in grammar, the subject was something of which a predicate could be said. So if you strip away the use of something, its colour, where it is, everything you could say about it, the ‘subject’ is what is left, and this was the concept which was used for many centuries until Descartes gave it its particular spin, and along with all the heretics and opponents of Christian domination at the time, Descartes introduced a kind of dualism. And this was, as we know, a thought / matter kind of dualism. Descartes’ concept was very problematic, though it’s one that expresses very well, I think, ordinary consciousness, even to this very day. But within philosophy, Cartesian rationalism, together with its opposite, Empiricism, led to a very destructive kind of scepticism, and ultimately to Hume. And it was Hume’s scepticism which stimulated a response from Kant, because if Hume was right, then there could be no science, and Kant recoiled from this, and introduced his ‘critical’ philosophy. The subject for Kant was transcendental, that is to say it was no real thing at all, it wasn’t a homunculus, as it had been for the early empiricists, it was a nothing, it was simply an x about which something could be said or something of which thoughts are predicates. So, there is no ‘inner person’ or ‘subject’, there was just a transcendental subject. The effect of this was to remove the subject from itself, from all history and culture, it stood behind culture because it was a nothing. At the same time it had direct access to Pure Reason, from which it could deduce the proper laws of conduct and the nature of time and space and so on, thereby being able to engage with experience.
Now this was unsatisfactory, because it placed the subject outside of history, and referred the conduct of life to eternal laws standing outside of history. It was Johann Fichte who tackled this problem in Kant’s philosophy. Fichte defined the Ego as pure activity, and in my reading of the history, it is with Fichte that Pure Activity enters philosophy as a conception for psychology, and Hegel retained this definition of the self as pure activity. What Fichte did is he made a pragmatic critique of Kant, that it to say, he sought to derive Natural Law from interactions between individuals. And it’s still this kind of pragmatic critique, I would advocate, that is the way that Hegel has to be modernised.
Now Hegel retained this conception but he did the difficult thing, that has to be done for the pragmatic critique – he had to turn it around. According to Hegel, Fichte was trying to deduce the nature of the state, of the whole community, from the individual, and Hegel’s very reasonable claim was that this was self-evidently not the case, that one had to deduce the psyche and nature of the individual from that of the state. So he had to turn inside out, this pragmatic critique which would derive everything from activity and interactions amongst people, as a foundation to derive the nature of the human condition.
Now I want to move to one of Hegel’s early works, The System of Ethical Life, which dates from 1803-4, prior to the Phenomenology, where, in relatively clear terms – relatively to Hegel’s normally arcane and impenetrable style – he explains the foundations of his psychology.
What he says is that when needs are immediately satisfied, through the existence of their means of satisfaction in Nature, there is no consciousness, but what happens with the development of human society, is that a gap opens up between needs and their satisfaction, and this delayed gratification is mediated by a labour process, which divides activity into consumption and production. And Hegel gained the insight that this gap which opens up between needs and their satisfaction is the foundation of human consciousness. It also brings with it, division of labour, the division between theory and practice, and ultimately a surplus product. That is, that a human life produces something over and above what it needs to live, something of use to someone else, and this creates the capacity for subjects to interact with one another.
The structure of this early work is also very profound. The whole consists of an alternation between Intuition being subsumed under the Concept, and the Concept being subsumed under Intuition. Intuition and Concept are ideas that come from Kant, as the two fundamental sources of knowledge, and one of the problems with Kant was: how do you reconcile these two apparently quite distinct sources of knowledge? one through sensuous perception of the world, the other through Reason.
Now, Hegel’s idea is that you live in the world, and through sensuous contact and work in that world you learn of it. Right? But this world isn’t just Nature, it’s things made by people, it includes institutions, buildings, words, tools, and so on, and these are concepts. They are concepts that exist in the world. So that for instance when we use a tool, we sensuously and intuitively grasp a concept, which is a norm of labour. And conversely, when we do something, we are acting under the guidance of Reason, according to norms, working in the world, sensuously, making and doing and consuming things, and we have there Intuition subsumed under the Concept.
So he sees the whole of history in the fact that the world is not as it ought to be, that there is always a gap, or a conflict between Intuition and the Concept, and this continual subsumption of the one under the other, is a driver for history. So long as the world that we sensuously know and live in differs or is in conflict with how we know through Reason the world that ought to be, then there will be change and inner conflict. It is wonderful the way he describes this contradiction which exists in the very heart of every consciousness, and locates it in the world, the world of human affairs. In other words, he creates here a concept of Mind, which genuinely contains the contradiction which Kant was wrestling with.
In this same work, The System of Ethical Life, Hegel identifies three different categories of activity which are constructing the Universal, are building up consciousness and the human form of life. Firstly, there is working with means of production, and he goes through what one learns in working with plants, and how one grows and develops as a human being through working with animals, and how in turn working with machines develops consciousness and of course, the world in which you live itself.
And through this use of what we will categorise briefly as tools – tools being the first paradigmatic artefact through which the universal is constructed. The second is paradigmatically the word, or the entirety of symbolic culture. That’s the second paradigmatic artefact that we use to construct the universal, and Hegel has a third, which is the child, raising the next generation, that is to say, taking our knowledge and becoming aware of it and formulate it as knowledge so as to give it to the next generation. So raising children, succession planning, he puts on the same level as working with tools and working with words, the three ways in which spirit, or Mind, is constructed. This is something that is well worth our paying attention to.
So that’s how consciousness is constructed. This is an elementary level of consciousness, of being aware of a difference between a subject and an object. The next level is self-consciousness, when one lives in a world where one is aware that there are other subjects.
The next major point is the Phenomenology of Spirit, his most famous work, and I can only be brief here. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the most important thing that we have to understand is the subject matter of this book: what is it about? Well, it’s about formations of consciousness, or Gestalten. A Gestalt is three things together: it’s consciousness in the ordinary everyday sense of a person’s thinking, it’s also consciousness in the form of civilizations, the entirety of the objective thought, if you like, ‘objective mind’, though he didn’t call it ‘objective mind’ at the time, that’s something that came later, that’s putting two things together, activity and material culture.
He tells the story of the development of mind three times. Firstly through the historical development of thought. This isn’t ontogenesis. He talks about the development of thought from the beginning of civilization up to the present time, in terms of thought. Then he retells it in terms of what we would call history, the development of different social formations in which these forms of thought existed. And then the third: spirit knowing itself, that is to say, when this story is told by the thinker and the form of thought and the form of society, which understands itself as a part of that whole history.
I think the key concept to be taken from the Phenomenology of Spirit, is this concept of ‘immanent critique’. When you’re reading this book, you’ll read something, and think maybe ‘that’s a load of rubbish’ or whatever, and then, 10 pages later, you find Hegel showing that it’s a load of rubbish, and then going on to say something else. He doesn’t stand outside his subject matter, that is to say, a particular form of consciousness, and say what is wrong with it; he enters into that subject matter, a formation of consciousness, and argues in its own terms. So the idea is to show how in any way of thinking, or formation of consciousness, there is a certain standard of truth, a certain form of inference, by which what is true is measured. By continual application of that rule, at a certain point, the questioning of things, of putting things to the test, this continual skepticism, leads to the negation of that form itself, and it finds itself to be untrue. At some point or other then, a formation which is able to overcome that particular form of skepticism arises.
The second thing I’d like to draw attention to is this: once one has self-consciousness, that is to say, a society isn’t just one integral subject, but differences and conflicts are contained within society, you have this problem of the relation between the individual and society, which is not problematic in the beginning. In ancient society, Hegel held, the individual was merely a member of their particular tribe or city-state, or whatever. But once you go down the road to modernity, you have this problem of how the individual sees itself in relation to the whole community, or the Universal. Hegel just briefly sketches through a succession of stages in this book, and how this contradiction is worked out. He sees it being worked out in changes in the form of consciousness stretching over a couple of thousand years.
I’ll move briefly now to the Logic, which, for me, is the richest of all Hegel’s works, and in a way, the easiest to understand because it’s just logic. But Hegel himself makes it clear that you can’t understand the logic without life experience, some knowledge of history, and so on, but at the same time, it’s just logic, and anyone who has life experience can understand it.
The problem is to understand what the hell is the subject matter of the Logic. What is it that he is talking about when he brings forward the different propositions one after the other. The Phenomenology was about formations of consciousness, and these change, they change in real time, and are empirically, really visible things. If you understand how a particular community works, you can see it, you can enter into it, you can understand its logic, but it has a dynamic and it changes. What the Logic is about is the logic which underlies the truth or eventual internal falsification of the form of consciousness.
So whereas formal logic is a propositional calculus which just talks about things and their attributes, Hegel’s Logic is talking about formations of consciousness and their internal dynamics.
The Logic has three phases, three Books. The first Book is the Doctrine of Being, and here, the opposites come simply one damn thing after another. One thing comes forward, it fails, passes away, and it is replaced by another. The former opposite is gone; once you’ve realised that Being amounts to Nothing, there’s no going back, you can only go forward to Becoming.
The second phase is Essence or Reflection. Here, when a proposition is put forward, and it meets a counter-proposition, and these two opposites remain as each other’s opposites. You have Form and Content, and Form and Content remain there, but what happens is that the particular opposition between Form and Content is supplanted, sublated by another opposition, but Form and Content remain there. So through Essence you have a continual build up and concretization of an idea, until eventually, as you move to the Doctrine of the Notion, that entire genesis is negated in the formation of a brand new notion, which captures the problem which Essence is dealing with and unites it with the Being of the thing. And here, as every new challenge or opposition comes along, it’s incorporated into the notion, making it more concrete. In fact, that’s a whole life process.
Now I find that though this is very abstract – it doesn’t talk about real people, real times, or anything real – it’s extremely rich, because it talks about what is necessary rather than accidental or contingent in the development of thinking.
My favourite part of the Logic, is the Subject, the first part of the Notion. It’s quite difficult to grasp, but all the time when Hegel’s talking about ‘subject’, he is not using this word in the Kantian sense, which is basically a synonym for an individual. Not at all. Hegel is neither a liberal nor a structuralist. He has quite a unique understanding of the relation between the individual and the universal, the individual and the collective if you like. He sees the subject as being simultaneously three things: Individual, Universal and Particular. And in the Logic, these terms are to be understood logically. So the Individual could be a specific proposition; you could also understand it as a specific action of some individual person at a particular moment. The Universal is the impersonal idea itself. So whereas the individual is finite and mortal, it lives and dies; the universal is the concept, or word if you like, and the Particular mediates between these. So it doesn’t live forever, it’s ongoing, it continues so long as the particular form of life where the individual operates according to the universal exists.
So for example, if you want to know about unionism – trade unionism, my favourite topic – unions cannot exist outside of there being individuals who are members of a union, cannot exist without people actually belonging to unions; not just having a general sentiment in favour of unions, you have to have unions. Right, but none of this can exist without the conception of those people belonging to the unions, that these are unions and all the beliefs and ideas and principles that go along with them. Because if they’re not seen as unions but operate as insurance societies, then you don’t have unionism.
The individual, the universal and the particular here all mediate between one another. Basically, Hegel’s idea is that the subject which begins simply as an abstract thing, like the slogan “Down with Sexism!,” in the course of time, through the construction of actual forms of practice, and the changing of universal principles through ever concretising them through the experiences of millions of individuals who engage in those practices, ultimately, that’s how you get a mature, real, idea.
I hope that wasn’t too arcane, trying to deliver Hegel’s concept of the subject in three minutes is very challenging.
Although Hegel presents the Individual, the Universal and the Particular here as a logical triad, as I see it, in our times, and if you look at how Hegel actually uses this in his social theory and his ethics and so on, it can really be best understood through an implied ontology, that is, the different kinds of thing which exist. So the way I read the doctrine of the subject is when Hegel is talking about the Individual, he’s talking about the psyche – it’s tied to an individual body and it lives and dies. When he talks about the Universal, I take this to be material culture; I use this term so that people outside of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory understand what we’re talking about and don’t mix it up with a form of activity. So I’m talking about material culture, which on the one hand exists as things such as tools, or words written on a page, but on the other hand also exists in our internalisation of them, in changes to our own body in which these same material things are embodied. And our bodies are included there in material culture. And activity, the third thing, which is what I understand by Particular, ongoing things in which people get to know about things and create them. You’ll see that this ontology can be justified if you read for example, Hegel’s social theory, how he attempts to construct his theory of the state in terms of forms of mediation, whereby people can have freedom, not just as individuals, but through a control of their existence in the world, by being able to engage with and express themselves through the power of the entire community and its products.
So, let’s just sum up.
Now, Hegel is very antique. We have to get our heads around the fact that this great historical thinker didn’t know Darwin, and not only did he not know about Darwin’s theory of evolution, he actually actively rejected Lamarck’s theory of evolution. He acceoted that the world was created by God, if you like, and life entered matter in a flash of lightning. I mean, he knew what he didn’t know. It’s not so much that he believed these things, but he had no substitute for these ideas. What he was interested in was the development of Mind, and he had no theory, for example, of how the human body came into existence. He actively rejected the theory that the human body developed out of the animal. But for example, he believed that women were weaker than men, not only physically but intellectually, because he didn’t have a theory of the development of the human body. So he’s extremely limited in that sense.
Also, he never knew a social movement as such. He always believed that the only hope for the development of civilization was if the educated and powerful and wealthy classes in society should do something about things. He had no conception that the rabble, as it was called, could get organised and change the course of history. He certainly had no conception of a women’s movement, even though he knew some very, very powerful women around him, in his milieu, but he wouldn’t even talk to these women about his philosophy, because he held that they would not be able to understand it.
So there are enormous limitations in Hegel, and the question of what Marx did with Hegel is a huge subject, his additional emphasis on production is an important contribution.
And of course his work on value, and abstraction as a process that takes place in activity, objectively, and not just as a mental process. This is a clearly Hegelian theme, but as far as I can see it is Marx’s unique contribution.
Also, the concept of alienation, is clearly a Hegelian theme, but one which Hegel himself was never able to grasp. He didn’t see any real distinction between wage labour and labour within an organisation with which the individual identifies themself.
So finally, I think one of the major challenges still facing psychology today is the individual-society dichotomy. I think Hegel has some fantastic ideas to contribute to dealing with this problem and a very good way to begin to tackle them, together with a variety of currents of psychology, would be to see if we can appropriate from Hegel, what he has to contribute to psychology today.