The first instalmment then is the opening paragraphs from Ch. 2. The chapter is called Politics in the Severe Style.
Tahir
"In general religion and the foundation of the state is (sic) one and the same thing; they are identical in and for themselves. (Hegel)
We may understand the proposition or judgement that religion is identical with the state in several ways. We may read it as a contingent generalization based on induction from experience. In this case we might argue, on empirical grounds, that it is wrong. We may read it as a prescription, as a recommendation that the state and religion should be identical. In this case we might disagree, and argue that such an identity is inconceivable, undesirable or impossible. We might protest, on the basis of yet another reading, that the proposition is neither empirically wrong, nor undesirable, but unintelligible. For how can religion and the state be identical, unless ‘religion’ and the ‘state’ are so defined that the proposition becomes an uninformative tautology? If the proposition is made tautologically true, there is no point in our assent or our dissent.
All of these readings are based on the same assumptions. They divide the sentence into a grammatical subject and predicate joined by the copula ‘is’. The grammatical subject is considered a fixed bearer of variable accidents, the grammatical predicates, which yield the content of the proposition. Hegel knew that his thought would be misunderstood if it were read as a series of ordinary propositions, which affirm an identity between a fixed subject and contingent accidents, but he also knew that, like any thinker, he had to present his thought in prepositional form.
He thus proposed, in an unfortunately schematic statement, that the prepositional form must be read as a ‘speculative proposition’. This use of ‘speculative’ is not the same as Kant’s use of it. It does not refer to the illegitimate use of correct principles, but embraces the impossibility of Kantian justification. To read a proposition ‘speculatively’ means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate. This reading implies an identity different from the merely formal one of the ordinary proposition. This different kind of identity cannot be pre-judged, that is, it cannot be justified in a transcendental sense, and it cannot be stated in a proposition of the kind to be eschewed. This different kind of identity must be understood as a result to be achieved.
>From this perspective the ‘subject’ is not fixed, nor the predicates accidental: they acquire their meaning in a series of relations to each other. Only when the lack of identity between subject and predicate has been experienced, can their identity be grasped. ‘Lack of identity’ does not have the formal meaning that subject and predicate must be different from each other in order to be related. It means that the proposition which we have affirmed, or the concept we have devised of the nature of an object, fails to correspond to the state of affairs or object which we have also defined as the state of affairs or object to which it should correspond. This experience of lack of identity which natural consciousness undergoes is the basis for reading propositions as speculative identities. The subject of the proposition is no longer fixed and abstract with external, contingent accidents, but, initially, an empty name, uncertain and problematic, gradually acquiring meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences.
Thus it cannot be said, as Marx, for example, said, that the speculative proposition turns the predicate into the subject and therefore hypostatizes the subject. ‘The important thing is that Hegel at all times makes the Idea the subject and makes the proper and actual subject, like “political sentiment”, the predicate. But the development proceeds at all times on the side of the predicate.’ But the speculative proposition is fundamentally opposed to the kind of formal identity which would still be affirmed by such a reversal of subject and predicate.
The identity of religion and the state is the fundamental speculative proposition of Hegel’s thought, or, and this is to say the same thing, the speculative experience of the lack of identity between religion and the state is the basic object of Hegel’s exposition. Speculative experience of lack of identity informs propositions such as ‘the real is the rational’, which have so often been misread as ordinary propositions.
Some of Hegel’s works present experiences of both religion and the state, or, in other terms, which Hegel uses, of subjective disposition (die Gesinnung) and absolute ethical life. The Philosophy of History and the Phenomenology of Spirit present experiences of both religion and the state. The Philosophy of Religion is mostly concerned with meaning of religion and has important sections on the relations between religion and the state. The Philosophy of Right and the earlier political writings from the Jena period refer least of all the religion and history. These writings concentrate on ethical life and less on forms of subjective disposition, although it is the relation between the two which makes up the whole of ethical life. Thus in these political writings the presupposition of absolute ethical life is more explicit that it is in those works where the relation between the different illusions of natural consciousness (religious, aesthetic, moral) and absolute ethical life is presented.
This is not to say that the earlier works consist of ‘regional ontologies’, as Habermas has argued, that is of examinations of distinct realms of social life, not unified by any absolute identity. On the contrary, I am arguing that the unifying presupposition is more explicit in the earlier works, and hence the lack of unity in political life is more explicit too.
However, the earlier political writings and the Philosophy of Right are not ‘shot from a pistol’. They are phenomenologies: the illusions and experiences of moral and political consciousness are presented in an order designed to show how consciousness may progress through them to comprehension of the determination of ethical life. Hegel starts from what appears to ordinary consciousness as the most ‘natural’ and ‘immediate’ ethical relations, the family, or the sphere of needs, civil society. The order of exposition is therefore not necessarily the order in history. The family and sphere of needs are not autonomous realms antecedent to the state, and to see them as such would be to produce an anthropological reading. But it is even less correct to understand the family or civil society as emanations of an hypostatized state, and to see them as such would be to produce a panlogical reading. Hegel is stressing, in opposition to liberal natural law, that the institutions which appear most ‘natural’ and ‘immediate’ in any society, such as the family or the sphere of needs, presuppose an overall economic and political organization which may not be immediately intelligible. Unfortunately, the mistakes of natural consciousness which Hegel was exposing have frequently been attributed to him.
Absolute ethical life is more explicit in the political writings than in other writings. In the Philosophy of Right this is because the other illusions which made Hegel despair of any reunification of political and religious life are not prominent. Yet he could not ‘justify’ in the Kantian sense the idea of absolute ethical life; he could not provide any abstract statement of it apart from the presentations of the contradictions which imply it. For an abstract statement would make manifest that this ethical life does not exist in the modern world. This would be to turn ethical life into an abstract ideal, an autonomous prescription, a Sollen, which would be completely ‘unjustified’ because not implied by the contradictions between political consciousness and social and historical bases. Hegel’s solution to this dilemma was to emphasize the presence of ethical life, not the task of achieving it. Ironically, as a result, the Philosophy of Right has been read as the justification (sic) of a status quo, instead of the attempt in speculative (dis)guise to commend the unity of theory and practice."
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