Hegel and the Greeks Draft 2

Hegel and the Greeks Harmony and the Ideal In his theory of aesthetics, Hegel tells us that true art exists only in the context of the classical ideal. This ideal, manifested in art most purely in Homer and the Tragedians, is the perfect complementarity of content and form, the interpenetration of spirit and its shape in nature. The ideal is a sublation of the dialectic tensions of symbolic art, the preceding and less advanced form of art. The symbol is defined by Hegel as an external existent “which yet is to be understood not simply as it confronts us immediately on its own account, but in a wider and more universal sense.” (304) As such the symbol is composed of two separate entities: the meaning and the expression. Now, while the relation between the two is not arbitrary like with the sign, it is nevertheless external, so that several expressions could denote a single meaning, and that a single expression could have several meanings. Thus, according to Hegel, “the symbol by its very nature remains essentially ambiguous.” (306) The correlation between the expression and the meaning always depends on a third term, should it be a common feature, an analogy, or convention. In other words, the expression and the meaning are not fully determined by one another, and depend on an external factor for their unity. In the Ideal, the spiritual should have “the principle of its externality in itself”, meaning that whatever it is that the expression “means”, its content, is not related to the expression through a third term as in symbolic art, but is one with its expression. “Thus” Hegel tells us, “in this interpenetration the natural shape and externality as a whole, transformed by spirit, directly acquires its meaning in itself and points no longer to the meaning as if that were something separated and different from the corporeal appearance.” (432) As the mention of corporeality indicates, the paradigmatic instance of the ideal is the human form, “because the external human form is alone capable of revealing the spiritual in a sensuous way.” (433) The human body expresses intentions, character, and reason immediately, i.e., the relation between the body and the soul is not one between two

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independent objects, brought together through convention or similarity. There is no soul without the body, and the human body is not human at all without the soul. As a consequence, modern doubt concerning other minds is irrelevant here, as it belongs to a time where a gap had been reformed between the spirit and the body. As far as the Greeks are concerned, such doubt is meaningless, since there is no private or inner content which in principle cannot be made external. According to Hegel, the body only becomes spiritual through acquiring a “second nature” through forming habits and customs. Having acquired this second nature, the Greek is identified with the norms of his community. Now, the correct understanding of this identification is crucial for the right understanding of Ideality as a unity between the natural and the spiritual, or the rational. I here take Robert Brandom’s understanding of this identification as an example of a reading that seems to me to make Ideality impossible. For Brandom, Greek identification with norms means accepting certain norms as good in themselves, rather than as good to me or to us. This is what leads him to claim that the Greek mode of ethical life involves viewing normative properties as natural ones, i.e. they appear as given from the outside, independent of our (normative) attitudes towards them. I believe Brandom’s conception of identity is too weak. He develops this conception in his interpretation of the self-consciousness chapter in the Phenomenology, where he writes of the relation between norms and self-definition, giving an example of a Samurai warrior. The warrior’s actualization or explication of his adherence to the Samurai code is his willingness to sacrifice himself. “No doubt” Brandom writes, “even sincere and committed samurai must have hoped that such situations would not arise. But when and if they did, failure to act appropriately according to samurai practices would make it the case that one never had been a samurai, but only an animal who sometimes aspired to be one.” (5-6) To fail to make the sacrifice shows that one is not truly committed to the norm, and so cannot identify himself with it. But the demand to make a sacrifice means that you are torn between two aspects of yourself (here, animal and spiritual, but could also be particular and universal), while in Greek virtue ethics as perceived by Hegel, no conflict should arise between the body 2

and the spirit, or anywhere else. It is anything but an ethics of overcoming. Rather, it is an ethics of habit, of acquiring the habits of the good life, making the animal and the spiritual one so that “[a]t this point the opposition between the natural and the subjective will disappears, the subject’s internal struggle dies away.” (PR 159). Thus, identification is not so much a way of treating norms, but a form of life in which the subject is so submerged in the community, that its norms are “not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, his spirit bears witness to them as to its own essence, the essence in which he has a feeling of his selfhood, and in which he lives as in his own element which is not distinguished from himself.” (PR, 155) For Hegel, the immediacy of Greek ethical life is primarily the immediacy of practical knowledge, so that “[i]n an ethical community, it is easy to say what someone must do, what are the duties he has to fulfil in order to be virtuous: he has simply to follow the well-known and explicit rules of his own situation.” (PR, 157) This is why the ideal of Greek ethical life is harmony, rather than obligation or obedience (as is perhaps in samurai culture). Identification with the community is actualized not in a sacrifice for it when required, but in being in harmony with it, knowing immediately, seeing, what one should do (even if one doesn’t do it). Finally, viewing the normative as given, or as natural in Brandom’s terms, and being willing to sacrifice oneself for it, can fit perfectly with Hegel’s conception of Judaism, which is the antitheses of Greek religion. This is, as I understand it, what leads Brandom to speak of pre-modern sittlichkeit (ethical life) in general terms, without confining it to Greek ethical life. Thus, the Greeks could accept that habit, forming a second nature, is to be considered as more than a merely natural event, but an ethical one, so that the Greek could have an “ethical body”, rather than merely ethical reason or logic. This goes against the Kantian thought that whatever it is that grounds right action cannot be natural, since the natural is always heteronomous. According to Hegel, that the Greeks allowed the natural to ground their actions does not mean that these actions were heteronomous in the Kantian sense. On the contrary, the Greek ethical life is an early paradigm of a free society, and thus 3

autonomous. Rather, it means that the Greeks “elevated” nature to the spiritual through education and training, they transformed the natural so that it could be seen as rational in itself, rather than merely matter which is fitted into other-than-natural rational form. So, going back to Brandom, it is not only that norms appear “natural” as he puts it, but that nature itself is in some sense normative. I will say more on this when discussing passivity. But before, I want to point to a consequence of the Greek notion of second nature as put forth by Hegel. According to an Aristotelian tradition, passing through David Wiggins and John Mcdowell, virtuous character (and, I think, character as such) is in essence noncodifiable. That is, it is not the Greeks simply did not know the rules of their virtues, but that these virtues could not be codified as rules. Hegel never explicitly acknowledges this, but I do believe it is implied in his concept of character and Greek virtue as fundamentally natural. And, since acting according to laws entails for Hegel a split between the thinking subject and nature, then virtue cannot be a law. But we could still say that although the ancients themselves could not see virtue as acting in light of rules, these virtues can still be made explicit in the form of codifiable rules. This misses the point. What Hegel is after is not what the Greeks “actually” did from a neutral point of view, but how they perceived their own actions, and that they had the idea of an action which is justified without being grounded in a rule. That there is no way to codify these norms, to make them explicit as laws, for instance for the purpose of education, does not mean that they cannot be made explicit at all. This makes art, as the presentation of a concrete individual act rather than a list of laws, the proper form of explicating that which is essential to Greek ethical life. The hero acts as an exemplar, and accordingly Hegel refers to the poets as teachers of the Greeks, teaching them who they really are. But to understand what it is that the hero exemplifies, we will need to understand a certain kind of passivity found in the Greek worldview.

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Passivity According to Hegel, the modern understanding of intention and responsibility is such that the agent denies responsibility for the aspects of his action - as it turned out in reality - of which he did not know: “a man nowadays does not accept responsibility for the whole range of what he has done; he repudiates that part of his act which, through ignorance or misconstruction of the circumstances, has turned out differently from what he had willed, and he enters to his own account only what he knew, and, on the strength of this knowledge, what he did on purpose and intentionally.” (187-188) This view, Hegel claims, stands in contrast to the view held in classical Greece, particularly at the time of Homer and the tragedians. “The self-consciousness of heroes (like that of Oedipus and others in Greek tragedy)” Hegel writes in the Philosophy of Right, “had not advanced out of its primitive simplicity either to reflection on the distinction between deed and action, between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to the subdivision of consequences. On the contrary, they accepted responsibility for the whole compass of the deed.” (PR 118) The modern distinction between deed and action, which results in a concept of responsibility which is confined to intended actions, is tied with the modern separation of the thinking subject from the external world. The subject’s will and knowledge become the determining factors of what ought to be imputed to him as his action, rather than elements of the external world, i.e. of nature. It is not that the Greek hero did not think of himself as having intentions, Hegel is very clear about that. Rather, he did not see why should these intentions have the final word in deciding what he is responsible for. This is because the ethical sphere was not immune to determinations not traceable to the subject’s will, as is exemplified in the concept of character. The importance of character in Greek ethical life, connected to the importance of virtue and habit, shows how a natural constitution beyond the agent’s control can have the most fundamental ethical meaning. Character is not thought of as being the result of choice, 5

but is rather a (first or second nature) natural given. As a result, someone can be good, or more correctly virtuous, thanks to external factors she had no control over. Despite Hegel’s talk of “primitive simplicity”, being responsible for external factors outside our control should not be seen as a result of primitive religion or of stupidity. In fact, it is not an idea foreign to our own modern worldview, as Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel had shown in their work on moral luck. In contrast to our common modern philosophical views on what someone should be responsible for, in our everyday lives we hold people responsible for what is just a matter of luck, like character or the consequences of an action. Like the Greeks, Williams claims, in actuality we do not hold ourselves morally immune to luck. The difference is that for us this seems to be in tension with our worldview, while for the Greeks it is not. For the Greeks, as is seen in the paradigm of the human body, the external is not something from which the internal, or the spiritual, can detach itself and regard itself as self-sufficient. Rather, the external and the internal are a unity, where one is unthinkable without the other. The soul is expressed in the eye, but it does not control this expression. In the same manner, who the agent is, what is his value and essence, is discovered through his deed. Thus, in the epic “circumstances and external accidents count just as much as the character's will, and what he achieves passes before us just as what happens from without does, so that his deed must prove to be conditioned and brought about just as much by his entanglement in external circumstances.” (1070) Yet nature becomes spiritual only in the context of an ethical community. The Greeks are not pantheists, they do not believe nature to be spiritual in itself, rather they take nature to be involved in value and meaning only for them. This can be put in terms of activity and passivity. The modern subject takes herself to incorporate the external in the spiritual (in making the deed his act) actively, i.e. she controls the border between the internal and the external. The Greek, on the other hand, takes herself to be passive in relation to this border, for her the spiritual is given, though not independently of her own presence in the natural world. That is why the world in the epic 6

appears meaningful without owing this meaning to the hero’s subjectivity, while at the same time it is centered around his act. So, for example, “it is the wrath of Achilles which is to be sung in the Iliad and to provide the unifying point.” (1089) The spiritual world concentrated around the hero is the divine mythological world, the world of the gods.

The Gods The gods, Hegel claims, “are made or poetically created [gedichtet], but they are not fictitious [erdichtet]. To be sure, they emerge from human phantasy in contrast with what is already at hand, but they emerge as essential shapes, and the product is at the same time known as what is essential.” (LR 658, fn.409) That is, the Greeks did not think that the gods exist in the empirical sense, but neither did they see them as fictions, as something that is not. Although they are products of phantasy, they are not arbitrary nor allegorical. They are the ideal representation of an essential content, one which, for the Greeks, could only be made explicit in the form of a human individual. The question of whether the gods really exist should have stricken a Greek as ridiculous as the question of whether the god of modern monotheism is empirically above us. Clearly, no one thinks that we might see him from the window of an airplane, but is someone wrong to look up when she is praying? And will it not be nonsensical to point down while speaking of God? I have tried to show that according to Hegel, the Greek hero is passive in such a way that makes the external - nature - internal to his action. Elements outside the agent’s intention and control are considered as determining of the value and meaning of the action, so that nature is taken in itself to express the rational and the universal, the way that an anatomical organ such as the hand and the eye, which are in themselves mere things, express the soul of the individual immediately. The universal we find expressed in the Greek world which is comprised of the unity between an agent and his environment, is presented as the Greek gods. The content of the gods is drawn from Greek ethical life, which for Hegel is an actualization of the formal notion of self-determination or freedom. According to Hegel, ethical life is 7

composed of essential elements, which at the stage of antiquity, lack structural unity and are external to each other. These elements are “the substantive powers, the essential fulcrum of the natural and spiritual universe, the universal.” (LPr 478) Hegel’s usual examples of these powers are justice, knowledge, civic and political life, and the family. “These essentialities”, Hegel writes, “are what is true, they are the bonds that hold the world together; what is more, they are the substantive [frame] in which all else subsists.” (LPR 479) Accordingly, these are the different domains of the Greek gods, as Athena is justice, Apollo is knowledge, Zeus is the state or political life, Juno is the family, and Hegel’s list goes on. The plurality of the gods has to do with the fragmentation of Greek ethical life, where the different powers still lack systematic organization and a unifying element. (Hegel claims that such a unity will later be achieved through the modern (i.e. Christian) concept of selfconsciousness.) Such a fragmentation is the cause of the instability which gives rise to Tragedy as the form which makes explicit the collision between essential powers, where each one is taken to be justified, but are found to be incommensurable and the collision irresolvable under the Greek worldview. The different elements of the gods, what constitutes their characters, then, are forms of ethical relations, which can be taken as fundamental to our human essence, as moving beyond the natural condition of urges and self-interest. To be moved by these powers to action is to be moved by the universal itself, by our own humanity. That we would find it hard to see a dead man’s body thrown in the trash, and so would seek to give it a proper burial is the result of our seeing the human body as something more than mere matter, and burial as ceremoniously acknowledging it. So, when Antigone seeks to bury her brother (through her motivation is more complicated) she is moved by something we recognize, by the spirituality of humanity. The Greek gods, then, are the “universal content of what drives human individuals to decision and action.” (232) This motivating content is referred to as ‘pathos’, which is “an inherently justified power over the heart, an essential content of rationality and freedom of will.” (ibid.) This is why, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel refers to such action as proper 8

virtue, as opposed to the virtues suggested by Aristotle. The hero as exemplar, then, exemplifies the form of being a free being, a human being, which is adequate to the worldview of the Greeks. As such, he explicates what was implicit, and thus only potential, in the everyday life of the Greeks, giving them the image of who they are. As such, the hero is the concentration and expression of the different universal powers.

To conclude, the Greeks understanding of the concepts of character and responsibility is involved with a view of nature as spiritual. This has effect on the form of their selfunderstanding, the presentation and explication of they are to themselves, and so an effect on their religion and art. The paradigm of presentation of the spiritual in the Greek world is the body, which means that nature expresses the spiritual directly rather than through a third term. Furthermore, presentation must be of an intuitive and individual form, so that the spiritual is presented in the action of an exemplary individual, the hero. What the hero exemplifies is the essential elements of ethical life as a form of life which takes the category of the human as foundational. This is done by poetically placing the action in a mythological context, grounding the act in these essential element present as the divinities.

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