Derecho a la educación en lengua propia y castellano

“The state consists in the march of God in the world, and its basis is the power of reason actualising itself as will” (Hegel 1991, p. 279).

For Hegel, alienation in both its positive and negative forms is always intimately connected with the schism between particularity and universality, between the internal and the external. This movement between subject and object, which Hegel views as central to the development of self-consciousness, was outlined in chapter 1, but more can be said of it in order to clarify its role in the motif of transformation. First of all, in terms of the origin of alienation as estrangement, Hegel seems to consign this to humanity’s prehistory: all genuine historical attempts at the formation of society have had, at least implicitly, the abolition of the alienation of the ‘divided subject’ as a fundamental goal. For Hegel argues that the emergence of the divided subject is ontologically prior to any formation of a family, tribe, Volk or State: there is no nostalgic yearning for an imagined state of nature in Hegel. Historically, he argues, the trouble has been in attaining an authentic mediation, with the subject repeatedly coming to identify with one aspect of consciousness, individual or universal, which in turn necessarily engenders a striving for the other, the situation of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ referred to in chapter 1:

For the estrangement per se, it makes no difference whether man considers himself absolutely independent or absolutely dependent upon a distant God, whether he views himself as an isolated individual or as an existence en masse, whether he is turned totally outward or totally inward; for each of these extremes already implies the other, and ‘the more independent and separate the internal becomes, so likewise the more independent and separate the external becomes’ (Löwith 1965, p. 162).

Löwith goes on to note that, as Hegel takes the situation of the divided subject to be the presupposition of philosophy, unity is then its inherent goal (ibid, p. 163). It is in this way that Hegel links the course of world history with philosophy in general, with each epoch seen as a manifestation of Reason’s attempted sublimation of its

What can tentatively be called ideology in Hegel, then, is any outlook containing the mistaken assumption that self-sufficiency can be attained with the abandonment of this striving for unity, with a total identification with just one aspect of consciousness. This being the case with the ideologies of ancient Stoicism and skepticism outlined in the first chapter, ideologies that are incapable of withstanding their own

presuppositions:

Neither stoicism nor skepticism, however, was capable of sustaining itself –

skepticism (as the truth of stoicism, as that to which one is driven when one attempts to cash out the Stoic attempts at a free life) ends up dissolving itself, since it

ultimately has to submit its own freedom to doubt to the same kind of skeptical questioning to which it submits everything else, and, in doing so, exposes itself to itself as being only the result of the contingent thoughts of a particular individual (Pinkard 2002, p. 231).

Although these ideologies are self-contradictory, it need not be assumed that their conception was irrational. Hegel maintains that it is the work of Reason to attempt to rationalise the world around it, to identify oppositions and apparent contradictions and work towards their reconciliation, to “…legitimate existing reality by conceiving it philosophically” (Hyppolite 1969, p. 108). Stoicism and skepticism are self-

contradictory, but only insofar as the Roman world they belong to is itself self-

contradictory, for they serve as the latter’s rational reflection. Hegel sees the downfall of ancient Rome as the inevitable symptom of a situation in which the average

individual is completely alienated from universal life, a situation he paints in colourful terms:

The dissolution of the whole ends in universal misfortune and the demise of ethical life, in which the individualities of nations [Völker] perish in the unity of a pantheon,

and all individuals [Einzelnen] sink to the level of private persons with an equal

status and with formal rights, who are accordingly held together only by an abstract and arbitrary will of increasingly monstrous proportions (Hegel 1991, p. 379). It could be said, then, that for Hegel an ideology would be comparable to an

incomplete philosophy; one that may accurately formulate an individual’s relation to a contingent historical epoch, but which fails to come to an understanding of the

individual’s relation to universality as such. Collective comprehension of this failure, then, leads to revolution. In a passage that seems to anticipate the central argument of Marx’s concept of ideology in The German Ideology, Hegel, in the preface to his Philosophy of Right, writes:

As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over Rhodes (Hegel 1991, pp. 21-22). What prevents Hegel from drawing a materialist conception of thought from this is precisely his emphasis on the motif of transformation. For he sees in each successive epoch he examines, the so-called Oriental, Greek, Roman and Germanic realms, a closer approximation to the truth of the mediation and unity of particularity and universality. Only in the development towards the modern state, he argues, does the individual come to recognise his/her particularity and relation to the external, not as two opposing extremes, but as two interdependent aspects, each reinforcing the truth of the other. Thus it is important to examine Hegel’s conception of the state, for with its realisation, the possibility of ideological thought would presumably be impossible.