Impatience of the concept: the dialectic of authority in Hegel’s philosophy

A dialectic of authority traverses Hegel’s thought. Yet its reach has never been mapped, nor its motley figures appreciated. This is because the dynamism of the problem has been abridged in favor of the static antithesis of freedom and authority. Extant studies propose a compromise and call it “dialectical.” A reconciliation of freedom and authority given from outside by a theorist balancing costs and benefits, or from inside by a grown-up who comes to understand how much one’s own criticality is the fruit of one’s upbringing and one’s era, is not only unspeculative but inapt. Descartes would sooner burn his house down than live in estrangement. For Hegel, a need drives modern philosophy, a need and “ought” of spirit to be at home in the true; and therefore a constant, impatient discovering, unmasking, inventing, refiguring of authority and its relics to be cast out from spirit’s home if they cannot be saved.

Part One follows four modern figures of this impatience with authority which begin from the relativization of the lumen naturale, the certain, and the given as consequences without premises. To be at home in its own science, gods, and institutions, modern humanity must break their givenness open, that is to say, must give them back their making. But what making? Each chapter considers a verb, a figure. Faber’s making (#1) is the simplest and most unilateral: setting axioms and definitions, declaring laws, is a laborless work, a master’s work. This dialectic can be recognized in Hegel’s critique of geometry and of constitution as artifice (“bloß Gemachtes”). The two must be read together and are frequently misread together. For counterrevolutionary de Maistre, human laws are mere artifice, and a rational constitution is lifeless, just as, mutatis mutandis, Hegel is reputed to hold of mathematics, and thus to be refuted by its subsequent vitality. The successive figures of Part One—Caesar (“#2. Destroyer”), the ironist (“#3. Parabasis”), and the return to sources (“#4. Ur-”)—corroborate this dilemma, that of (taking Edward Said’s formula) the “asceticism of beginnings”: poverty or authority, life or freedom. For Hegel, however, the geometer’s flaw is not to make a new beginning, nor to rely on human artifice, but precisely to mistake their “materials” for something passive: points one might connect, sticks one happens to have bundled and called a state. The construction’s steps, the bundling of Athens, have no motor apart Euclid’s textbook, the words of an oracle, a roulette wheel, an intuitive choice. Though not every triangle is possible, none are necessary; and, just so, a constitution may hold or fail to do so, but it will never have any necessity or truth. The problem is one of synthesis, of the division of roles between the dead twigs and the copula ex machina that binds them.

In rewriting the dead-end of beginnings, Hegel brings a new, unheard-of exacerbation to the dialectic of authority. The problem is one of discourse itself; it is heard with the wrong ear. Whether it is one’s “own” discourse or the discourse of others—Plato, Aristotle, Torah, Pandects—makes no difference whatsoever. The same figure, indeed, must save both. To be at home in its Bildung, spirit must break the latter free from rote and naturalization. Part Two takes its cue from Gérard Lebrun’s The Patience of the Concept: Essay on the Hegelian Discourse, indispensable and as yet untranslated into English, which begins from Hegel’s critique of a regime of discourse which post-Kantian philosophy called Vorstellen. It is precisely the discourse of inert significations and external, “synthetic concatenations” which renders spirit foreign to itself. Two new verbs reframe the modern scenario: “to represent” and “to grasp [begreifen].” Yet Lebrun’s presentation leaves speculative discourse all but eristic, a discourse which unmoors certainties and volatilizes significations. They must, on the contrary, be saved, given life, not simply mobility.

But this binary remains abstract. New attempts, figures, verbs are called for. The final chapter of this study recognizes one such figure in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The verb is: to learn. A shape of objectivity, of truth, of spirit learns; it learns the falsehood of its truth, and becomes another. But with the conversion of this experience into a new certainty, its learning is forgotten; with it, the necessity of the given and spirit’s own, as if the errors of the past had nothing to do with it; as if it sprung up like a daisy. Concept, “grasped history” means this: spirit remembers that it was an other who became other; remembers learning. Spirit hears another music, both of its own discourse and of others. Its chapters become sociable.

The context of the Phenomenology is perhaps not generalizable. Yet it’s a story that might train another ear.