Subject: AUT: A note on the much maligned Hegel
From: chris wright <cwright-AT-megapathdsl.net>
Date: 03 Aug 2004 22:41:27 -0400


This is a very sharp, accurate recounting of the fames 'What is real is
rational, what is rational is real' statement, put forward against those
crude readings which misrepresent Hegel and dialectic.

 Bob wrote:

> to All =On 7/15  2756 I summarized a small part of Dudleys 
> Irrationality of the
> rational -which brings us to the conclusion-theRationality and  Hence
> irrationality of the Actual=Dudley says
> "
> We are now  in a position to improve upon the standard asserttion of
the 
> rationality of the actual. The original standard interpretation,which 
> I will give the 
> short shrift that it deserves,took Hegel's claim to mean that 
> everything in
> existence is rational in the sense of justified,and hence beyond 
> criticism.Hegel
> then supposedly defends and glorifies,perhaps even deifies,19th
century
> Prussia,war and the entire slaughter bench of human history. Hegel is
the
> ultimate conservative denying the very possibility of positive
change... "
>      This interpretation gained some currency in Hegel's lifetime and 
> he had the  
> chance to identify its central  shortcoming personally=The 'standard'
> interpretation superficially equates 'actuality' with' 
> existence.'=regarding the
> inflammatory preface of the Philosophy of Right 1821 Hegel pointed out
> that he
> had  drawn careful distinctions between the actual  and the existent 
> since1812
> when the Science of Logic was published.-This went largely unnoticed
and
> persisted for a century until the revised standard interpretation 
> gained currency.
>      The revised standard interpretation  recognizes  that actuality 
> is a higher
> standard than existence  for Hegel. Political entities that fail to 
> respect the
> freedom of their citizens exist all over the world,but they are not 
> actual states 
> according to Hegel says Dudley....a  state is actual to the extent 
> that its
> structure is analogous to the sructure of its concept.
>     This revised interpretation acquits Hegel of the charge of 
> conservatism  that
> justifies the status quo.However by now drawing sharp  distinctions  
> between
> the rational and irrational it sharply divides the differences and can
> give rise to
> a new kind of zealotry-A proper grasp would include Hegel's claim 
> regarding
> the rationality of the actual thus requires an appreciation not only 
> of the
> distinction he draws between actuality and existence but also the
> identity-in-difference he attributes to the rational and the 
> irrational,Hegel
> recognizes and accepts the fact that reason is internally 
> conflicted,at odds with
> itself,so that it is rational for there to be tension between two 
> moments of the
> concept,each of which is rational by definition. Dudley says.Hegel 
> rejects the
> view that the actual is defined by the absence of contigent 
> positivity-all actuality
> involves positive particularity.  

You presumably refer to Hegel's notorious statement that 'the actual is 
rational and the rational is actual'. Against the critique of the 
acceptance of the status quo Hegel referred to his Science of Logic *) 
where he had made a difference between Existence and Actuality (Doctrine
of the Essence). Existence is what has become from a source or origin in
the past whereas Actuality is becoming as the unity of the Essence (the 
negative) and Existence (the positive), that is, the immediacy of 
reason. Hegel also made use of this insight in his minor political 
writings, so for instance in his assessment of the "Proceedings of the 
Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Württemberg 1815-1816" (1817) where 
he justified the King's position against the Estates which only wanted 
to keep their privileges they had from the feudal system. But this does 
not mean that he had justified the unity of the institution of the King 
against the plurality (the many) of the institution of the Estates - as 
his so called liberal friends criticized - since the King's position was
only the immediacy of reason but not yet its actualization in the 
objectivity of the spirit which is the sublation of the immediacy of 
reason in the concept.

As you say ["the identity-in-difference he attributes to the rational 
and the irrational"], this sublation is the recognition of the 
irrational as a moment of the concept of freedom which releases its 
other (the difference) as own moments which thereby lose their immediate
absolute position. So, the statement 'the actual is rational and the 
rational is actual' belongs in a time before the Concept in his 
subjective and objective moments has become independent and cannot be 
transferred simply into our time. Hegel's 'Doctrine of the Concept' 
comes after his 'Doctrine of the Essence', and in the latter 'Actuality'
as the absolute of being and reason finds its end in the absolute 
substance in which the independence of the individual is negated: 

"True, substance is the absolute unity of thought and being or 
extension; therefore it contains thought itself, but only in its unity 
with extension, that is, not as separating itself from extension, hence 
in general not as a determinative and formative activity, nor as a 
movement which returns into and begins from itself. Two consequences 
follow from this: one is that substance lacks the principle of 
personality -- a defect which has been the main cause of hostility to 
Spinoza's system; the other is that cognition is external reflection 
which does not comprehend and derive from substance that which appears 
as finite, the determinateness of the attribute and the mode, and 
generally itself as well, but is active as an external understanding, 
taking up the determinations as given and tracing them back to the 
absolute but not taking its beginnings from the latter." (SL, para 1179,
translated by A.V. Miller)

On the one side the 'to be in force' (Wirksamkeit) is an important 
moment in Hegel's philosophy as it was also in earlier philosophies (see
also Hegel's letter to Hardenberg in October 1820 (No. 376) in which he 
presented to him his Philosophy of Right). On the other side for Hegel 
this 'Wirksamkeit' is no longer merely an anonymous force but mediated 
through subjectivity.

> There is more to this part of the article but I'll
> stop here=I woud say that vestiges of the original interpretation 
> remain today
> -The Catholic theologian Balthassar  criticising Hegel for a lack of 
> compassion
> uses the first interpetation . Possibly Beat's referral to the Word 
> War one article
> accusing states existence and not  considering their actual
theoretical 
> basis.Best regards--Bob

Do you refer to a recent quotation from a text by Georg Lasson?:

"... it will not come to an end until the nation to which
Providence has given the task of making the principle of the true
cultivation of the state at home in humanity throughout the world, has
been so physically strengthened and spiritually matured that those
powers which today fancy themselves to be justified in subjecting the
planet to their inferior principles can no longer resist it." [Georg 
Lasson: Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History 
(Werke, VIII, Leipzig [1920], 172)]

It is difficult to say what he does mean. I do not think that he refers 
to that what you have called the "original interpretation" but rather to
the second interpretation, however, without making the step into the 
independence of the Concept (as described above) fully clear.

Best wishes,
Beat Greuter


*)
"As for the term Actuality, these critics would have done well to 
consider the sense in which I employ it. In a detailed Logic I had 
treated among other things of actuality, and accurately distinguished it
not only from the fortuitous, which, after all, has existence, but even 
from the cognate categories of 'Dasein', 'Existence' and other 
determinations. - The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the 
popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, and 
philosophy a mere system of such phantasms. It is also opposed by the 
very different fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too 
excellent to have actuality, or something too impotent to procure it for
themselves. This divorce between idea and reality is especially dear to 
the analytic understanding which looks upon its own abstractions, dreams
though they are, as something true and real, and prides itself on the 
imperative 'ought', which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing even
on the field of politics. As if the world had waited on it to learn how 
it ought to be, and was not! For, if it were as it ought to be, what 
would come of the precocious wisdom of that 'ought'? When understanding 
turns this 'ought' against trivial external and transitory objects, 
against social regulations or conditions, which very likely possess a 
great relative importance for a certain time and special circles, it may
often be right. In such a case the intelligent observer may meet much 
that fails to satisfy the general requirements of right; for who is not 
acute enough to see a great deal in his own surroundings which is really
far from being as it ought to be? But such acuteness is mistaken in the 
conceit that, when it examines these objects and pronounces what they 
ought to be, it is dealing with questions of philosophic science. The 
object of philosophy is the Idea: and the Idea is not so impotent as 
merely to have a right or an obligation to exist without actually 
existing. The object of philosophy is an actuality of which those 
objects, social regulations and conditions, are only the superficial 
outside." (ENC, para 6, translated by William Wallace)






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