Hegel's Refutation of Rational Egoism, in True Infinity and the Idea

• Author: Robert M. Wallace
• Position: PhD in Philosophy
• Pages: 155-172

Page 155

Introduction

In the history of moral and political philosophy, the apparent rationality of egoism-a lack of interest in the needs and the rights of other individuals, as such-is a challenge to which major thinkers feel called upon to respond. Plato does so at length in the Republic and the Symposium; Aristotle does so in his account of friendship (philia), in his Ethics; Hobbes does so in his response to the so-called "fool," in Chapter 15 of Leviathan; and Kant does so in his argument, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and elsewhere, that autonomy can only take the form of being guided by morality's Categorical Imperative. I am going to suggest in this paper that Hegel's response to the challenge of rational egoism extends throughout his philosophical system, beginning in his treatment of atomism in the Science of Logic's ("Logic") Doctrine of Being, continuing through his treatments of reflection and diversity in the Doctrine of Essence, and of Objectivity, Life, and Cognition, in the Doctrine of the Concept, and concluding in his famous account of Master and Bondsman and mutual recognition, in the Encyclopedias Philosophy of Spirit and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The portion of Hegel's treatment of rational egoism that occurs within the Logic of the Subject (the Doctrine of the Concept)-namely, his account of Objectivity, Life, and Cognition-is extremely rich in its implications for this issue, implications that have not been appreciated in the commentaries with which I am familiar. And when one realizes that Hegel is, in fact, treating this issue in a systematic way throughout the Logic (as well as the Encyclopedia), this puts the Logic-and its culminating glory, the Doctrine of the Concept-in a whole new light. Among the numerous ways in which the Logics importance is still onlyPage 156 beginning to become clear to us-others of which are, for example, its importance for theology and for the relation between nature and freedom-this is certainly a significant one.¹

It may seem odd to suggest that Hegel offers an argument against rational egoism, since he is often described as simply denying that a position like egoism is even possible. Hegel is said to maintain that human individuals are simply creatures of their social environment to such an extent that it is just not logically possible for one individual to declare herself independent and adopt a purely exploitative attitude toward the people around her. However, the passages in which Hegel describes and diagnoses the origin of evil-for example, as "the supreme, most stubborn error, which takes itself for the highest truth, appearing in more concrete forms as abstract freedom, pure ego and ... as Evil"² -make it sufficiently clear that Hegel does not regard egoism as obviously senseless and requiring no detailed refutation. I aim to show that a great deal of what he writes in the Logic and the Encyclopedia can be interpreted as just such a detailed refutation.

I The Need for Recognition

Hegel's best known treatment of what seems like a version of rational egoism is in his account of mutual recognition and the Master and the Bondsman in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Here, he argues that the Master's need for recognition of his freedom is not satisfied by the Bondsman's obedience, since the Master is "still far from seeing in the former himself"³ and the Master cannot value recognition of his freedom that is awarded by someone in whom he does not see a capacity for freedom. From this, HegelPage 157 concludes that both Master and Bondsman must "know themselves affirmatively in the other self and consequently participate in the mutuality of family, fatherland, state, and so forth.⁴ But why does the Master need his freedom to be recognized by anyone else, in the first place? And why is this need-the "drive ... to be present [da zu sein] for the other as a free self'⁵-strong enough to override self-centered interests that might otherwise tempt him to trample on family, fatherland, and so forth?

To explain why the Master has this need for recognition, I am going to go back, first of all, all the way to the Quality chapter of the Logic, in which I think the pattern that is at work here is ultimately rooted. This will then lead me to the Logic's account of Objectivity, Life, and the Idea, in which Hegel first spells out conclusions that are very similar to those he is drawing here in the Philosophy of Spirit.⁶

II Reality, Negativity, and True Infinity

The concept that Hegel introduces in Quality, which pervades his later work to such an extent that he calls it the "fundamental concept of philosophy,"⁷ is true infinity. To understand true infinity we must understand its relation to what Hegel calls reality and to what he calls negation. Reality refers to the aspect of a determinate quality that is immediate or in the form of being.⁸ Negation, on the other hand, is the respect in which the determinate quality is mediated: the interrelation between this quality and other qualities of the same type. For example, the quality, red, is a color; it can be determined-that is, specified- only through its relation to other colors that it is not. Red is the colorPage 158 that is not-blue, not-green, and so forth. This is the sense in which, as Hegel puts it, "ornnis determinatio est negatio" (all determination depends upon negation).⁹ But this notion of negation is by no means the end of the discussion of quality because we have not yet done justice to quality's immediacy, which Hegel called its reality. Hegel's first attempt to do justice to quality's immediacy is the something that he describes as the negation of the first negation,¹⁰ or negativity for short. Negativity makes something (as Hegel puts it later) "self-related in opposition to its relation to other."¹¹ Hegel actually identifies this self-related something as "the beginning of the subject," which will later emerge as being-for-self, the Concept, and so forth.¹² However, there are problems with this something. Its being-in-itself-its self-relatedness in opposition to its relation to others-should, Hegel says, be "in it" or "posited."¹³ It, too, should be a quality, a concrete feature of the object. If it is a quality, it must (once again) be a being-for-other, an interrelationship with other qualities; but in that case the something is no longer opposed to all relation to other.¹⁴ To avoid this problem, Hegel reformulates the something as finitude. The limit that makes somethings finite is meant to keep the being of each finite something separate from the being of others;¹⁵ but this limit becomes yet another other for the something,¹⁶ so that the something is still determined by a being-for-other-a negation-and thus, is still not an immediate reality.

To solve this problem, Hegel introduces the notion of the ought, the Sollen, by which the something "goes beyond itself."¹⁷ The ought is supposed to enable the something not to be limited and determined through negation by other somethings, or by a limit (which is other than it). Instead, the ought is to be determined only by itself. When the Kantian rational being overcomes its inclinations and obeys its ought and its reason, its determination takes place within the being, ratherPage 159 than between it and something that is other than it. The rational being determines itself: it has its quality by virtue of itself, rather than through its relations to others. In this sense, this being seems to be the first truly immediate reality; it seems to solve the problem of the relation between reality and negation.

This solution works, of course, only if the ought is not another finite thing. If it were another finite thing, the ought would simply make the finite something into yet another being-for-other. So the ought must be infinite. But Hegel argues that the ought, as Kant pictures it, is, in fact, ultimately finite, insofar as it is simply opposed to the inclinations and to finitude in general. Consequently, it is limited and rendered finite by those inclinations and that finitude. The conclusion that Hegel draws is that the ought must be replaced by a true infinity, which is not something that exists independently (in which case it would be limited and rendered finite by other independently existing things), but instead "is only as a going beyond the finite."¹⁸ "The finite is not superseded by the infinite as by a power existing outside it; rather, its infinity consists in superseding its own self."¹⁹ But just as the infinite is not a "power existing outside" this process, so also the finite is not something that exists independently of the process, as the whole argument that we have just been considering makes clear. The finite has to supersede itself because it is "only [in] going beyond itself"²⁰ that it is a reality. So this single going beyond-by the finite, of itself-which constitutes the reality of the finite and of the infinite, is the unity of the finite and the infinite,²¹ through which the duality of Kant's two worlds, or two standpoints, is overcome without eliminating either world, or either standpoint. The finite, phenomenal world remains, although it achieves reality only by going beyond itself; and the infinite, noumenal world remains, although it is identified with this transcendence by the finite, of itself. What is eliminated, of course, is the spuriously infinite opposition, the supposed incompatibility between the finite and the infinite, the phenomenal and the noumenal (which made this supposed infinite actually finite). When the resulting unitary, true...