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kind of constitution would it have to be in which universality, particularity, and unity
each had its explicitly actual and separate formation? Because it is altogether a question
of no abstraction but of the state, of society, Hegel's classification can be accepted. What
follows from that? The citizen as determining the universal is lawgiver, and as the one
deciding, as actually willing, is sovereign. Is that supposed to mean that the individuality
of the state's will is one individual, a particular individual distinct from all others?
Universality too, legislation, has an explicitly actual and separate formation. Could one
conclude from that that legislation is these particular individuals[?]
The Common Man: Hegel:
2. The monarch has the sovereign 2. The sovereignty of the state is the monarch.
power, or sovereignty. 3. Sovereignty is 'the will's abstract and to that
3. Sovereignty does what it wills. extent ungrounded self-determination in which
finality of decision is rooted'.
Hegel makes all the attributes of the contemporary European constitutional monarch into
absolute self-determinations of the will. He does not say the will of the monarch is the
final decision, but rather the final decision of the will is the monarch. The first statement
is empirical, the second twists the empirical fact into a metaphysical axiom. Hegel joins
together the two subjects, sovereignty as subjectivity sure of itself and sovereignty as
ungrounded self-determination of the will, as the individual Will, in order to construct out
of that the Idea as 'one individual'.
It is evident that self-assured subjectivity also must actually will, must will as unity, as an
individual. But who ever doubted that the state acts through individuals? If Hegel wanted
to develop the idea that the state must have one individual as representative of its
individual oneness, then he did not establish the monarch as this individual. The only
positive result of this paragraph is that in the state the monarch is the moment of
individual will, of ungrounded self-determination, of caprice or arbitrariness.
Hegel's Remark to this paragraph is so peculiar that we must examine it closely:
Remark to § 279. The immanent development of a science, the derivation of its entire
content from the concept in its simplicity ... exhibits this peculiarity, that one and the
same concept - the will in this instance - which begins by being abstract (because it is at
the beginning), maintains its identity even while it consolidates its specific
determinations, and that too solely by its own activity, and in this way gains a concrete
content. Hence it is the basic moment of personality, abstract at the start in immediate
rights, which has matured itself through its various forms of subjectivity, and now - at the
stage of absolute rights, of the state, of the completely concrete objectivity of the will -
has become the personality of the state, its certainty of itself. This last reabsorbs all
particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it
lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying 'I will', makes
its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.
To begin with it is not a peculiarity of science that the fundamental concept of the thing
always reappears.
But also no advance has then taken place. Abstract personality was the subject of abstract
right; there has been no progress, because as personality of the state it remains abstract
personality. Hegel should not have been surprised at the real person - and persons make
the state - reappearing everywhere as his essence. He should have been surprised at the
reverse, and yet still more at the person as personality of the state reappearing in the same
impoverished abstraction as does the person of private right.
Hegel here defines the monarch as the personality of the state, its certainty of itself. The
monarch is personified sovereignty, sovereignty become man, incarnate state - [or
political - ] consciousness, whereby all other persons are thus excluded from this
sovereignty, from personality, and from state - [or political - ] consciousness. At the same
time however Hegel can give this 'Souverainété - Personne' no more content than 'I will',
the moment of arbitrariness in the will. The state-reason and state-consciousness is a
unique empirical person to the exclusion of all others, but this personified Reason has no
content except the abstract on, 'I will'. L'Etat c'est moi.
Further, however, personality like subjectivity in general, as infinitely self-related, has its
truth (to be precise, its most elementary, immediate truth) only in a person, in a subject
existing 'for' himself, and what exists 'for' itself is just simply a unit.
It is obvious that personality and subjectivity, being only predicates of the person and the
subject, exist only as person and subject; and indeed that the person is one. But Hegel
needed to go further, for clearly the one has truth only as many one's. The predicate, the
essence, never exhausts the spheres of its existence in a single one but in many one's.
Instead of this Hegel concludes: 'The personality of the state is actual only as one person,
the monarch.'
Thus, because subjectivity is actual only as subject, and the subject actual only as one, the
personality of the state is actual only as one person. A beautiful conclusion. Hegel could
just as well conclude that because the individual man is one the human species is only a
single man.
Personality expresses the concept as such; but at the same time the person enshrines the
actuality of the concept, and only when the concept is determined as a person is it the
Idea or truth.
To be sure, personality is merely an abstraction without the person, but only in its
species-existence as persons is person the actual idea of personality.
A so-called 'artificial [moralische] person', be it a society, a community, or a family,
however inherently concrete it may be, contains personality only abstractly, as one
moment of itself In an 'artificial person', personality has not yet achieved its true mode of
existence. The state, however, is precisely this totality in which the moments of the
concept have attained the actuality correspondent to their degree of truth.
A great confusion prevails here. The artificial person, society, etc., is called abstract,
precisely those species-forms [Gattutigsgestaltungen] in which the actual person brings
his actual content to existence, objectifies himself, and leaves behind the abstraction of
'person quand même'. Instead of recognising this actualisation of the person as the most
concrete thing, the state is to have the priority in order that the moments of the concept,
individuality, attain a mystical existence. Rationality does not consist in the reason of the
actual person achieving actuality, but in the moments of the abstract concept achieving it.
The concept of the monarch is therefore of all concepts the hardest for ratiocination, i.e.,
for the method of reflection employed by the Understanding. This method refuses to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]