In a recent seminar, I was asked what Hegel would think of Donald Trump. I was stumped at the time: how could Hegel, the greatest apostle rationality ever had, even begin to make sense of a man who, having been elected through resentment of the urban elite, went to one of America’s most expensive restaurants one week later, received a standing ovation from its wealthy patrons, told them he was going to lower their taxes, and allowed himself to be filmed doing it?
But in two early essays, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (DF), and Faith and Knowledge (FK; all paginations to Cerf and Harris translations), Hegel provides a clue. Discussing Fichte, he claims that each rational being exists for Fichte in a two-fold way: as free and rational, and as mere matter to be manipulated. This dichotomy is absolute: each side of it is precisely what the other side is not, and it cannot be transgressed (DF 144) Because of the absoluteness of this dichotomy, society must be founded on one principle or the other: the individual must be either mere matter or a free being of infinite worth.
The former case, Hegel goes on, locates reason not in the individual but above her, in the state. As FK puts it, “individuality [then] finds itself under absolute tyranny” (FK 183). The individual sinks under a mass of laws and regulations, each rationally enacted for the greater good of the whole. Such a state, Hegel tells us, is a “machine” (DF 148-9). He seems to have produced a small sketch of the Soviet Union, 115 years before its birth.
The other case will be more familiar to Americans. Seeing each individual as a free being of infinite worth, society grants her the right to determine her own life, no matter how childish, ignorant, ill, or depraved she may be. The only reason for doing anything in this kind of social order is the individual’s personal arbitrary insight, and the only consideration that justifies anything is that someone chose it:
Everything depends on reckoning out a verdict on the preferability of one duty to another and choosing among these conditioned duties according to one’s best insight…In this way self-determination passes over into the contingency of insight and, with that, into unawareness of what it is that decides a contingent insight. (DF151)
The references to preferences and choosing sound uncannily like rational choice theory, in which individuals rank their preferences and choose among them as they deem best; but here, as in Cold War philosophy, it has been elevated into the basic principle of the social order. Because each individual’s choices are absolute, such a society is incapable of uniting for a sustained attack on any social problem. Because children are individuals, and so free to determine their lives, it is unable even to educate its young, who are allowed to choose what they will learn. Its leaders, secure in their own well-paid individuality, grow sleeker and more self-satisfied as the chaos proliferates, and strut their good conscience in the slogans of the moment.
Sound like anybody? In a previous post, I argued that Donald Trump operates by the maxims of rational choice theory, elevated into the philosophy that I call Cold War philosophy. Now it seems that such philosophy provides a middle term between Hegel, the apostle of reason, and Trump, the apostle of—Trump.