Few philosophers have more obviously changed
the world than Hegel, both personally through his influence on German Nationalism, and indirectly
through the work of his most famous philosophical disciple, Karl Marx, after whom a great many
governments in our own day actually call themselves. So if we want to see some of the practical
consequences of Hegel's ideas, all we have to do is look at the world in which we ourselves live. His influence on philosophy
was correspondingly great. In fact, it's been said that the history of
philosophy since Hegel can be understood as a succession of varying
reactions against his work. He was born in Stuttgart in 1770. A teacher of one sort or another for most
of his life, he eventually became professor of philosophy at Heidelberg
and then in Berlin. As a philosopher,
he was a late developer. But by the time of his death in 1831, he was
very much the dominant figure in philosophy throughout the whole of Germany. The titles of some of his most influential
works are: The Phenomenology of Mind, The Science of Logic, The Philosophy
of Right, and The Philosophy of History. Hegel had several followers who
themselves became well known. But far and away the
most famous is Karl Marx. Marx was born in Germany in 1818, and as a
young student of philosophy, was very much a Hegelian. He didn't become a socialist until his mid
20s, when he began to develop that rich and highly original mixture of German philosophy,
French politics, and British economics which is Marxism. Together with a wealthy young
industrialist, Friedrich Engels, he wrote the Communist
Manifesto in 1848. The partnership between Marx and Engels must
be just about the most momentous collaboration in the history of ideas. Engels kept Marx for most of his life
so that he could produce his writings. And it was a life spent largely in exile
because of Marx's political activities. At the age of 31, he went to live in London,
and stayed there until his death in 1883. He's buried in Highgate Cemetery. For many years, he worked in the
British Museum, in its reading room. And it was there that he wrote his masterpiece,
Das Capital, published in 1867. Marxism isn't quite philosophy in the accepted
meaning of the term, but there's obviously a major philosophical element in it. And that element always remained Hegelian. What I propose to do in this program is to
devote the bulk of the discussion to Hegel, and then show how some of the most
important of the ideas we've been discussing were incorporated into Marxism. With me to do this is someone who has published
excellent introductions to the works of both thinkers, Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at
Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Professor Singer, Hegel is notorious for
being difficult to read, for being obscure. He's often described as the most
obscure of all the major philosophers. Yet, your little book about him has the
conspicuous merit of discussing his central ideas in ordinary plain English. I hope you're going to be able to
do the same on this program. When you're confronted with the task of
expounding Hegel's ideas, where do you find the most convenient place to start? I start with the Philosophy of History,
because the history in Hegel is quite concrete. Part of the difficulty with Hegel
is that he's so abstract. But the history, because it's concrete, is an easy
way into the more abstract parts of his philosophy. Well, that in itself, is already a new
departure in philosophy, isn't it? Because no major philosopher before Hegel
regarded history or the philosophy of history as being important.
Yes, it is a departure. Compare it with Kant, for instance. Kant had a view of human nature as human beings
eternally divided between their reasoning element and their brute desires. It's a bit like the old picture of man as
halfway between the apes and the angels. And for Kant, that was just
a fact of human nature, we would always be torn
with this division, this conflict. But Hegel said, no, wait a minute,
this isn't something immutable. Look at Greek society. Greek society,
Hegel said, was more harmonious. People were not conscious
of this gulf or division. Their desires were in
harmony with their reason. So the point that Kant is talking about
-- this division -- is something that has occurred historically, has developed with the
rise of individual conscience in Protestant Europe. And because it's happened historically,
it need not be a permanent feature. It could, in some other period, actually
again be overcome and a harmony restored. Hegel looked at all important concepts
in this historical way, didn't he? He saw them as being embedded in
human life, in ways of life, in societies. And as societies change, so the
concepts change, isn't that right? Yes, that's absolutely right. He saw that there was development in the way
history occurred, that it was always moving forward, it was always a process, never static. And he had a name for the way
in which it moved forward. He called this the dialectical process. Now can you explain exactly what in Hegel's
mind the dialectical process was? Let's go back to the
example I mentioned before. Greek society he saw a harmony, but as a simple
harmony, a simple harmony in the sense that people had not developed the alternative
notion of individual conscience. There was harmony between the individual
and society because individuals hadn't really thought about things themselves. Now, into that simple harmony there came--
in the person, in fact of Socrates, whom Hegel considered a world historical figure--there
came the idea of questioning this harmony. Socrates went around asking people
"What is justice?", "What is virtue?". And when they tried to answer, they realized
that they'd accepted certain conventions which Socrates had no trouble in
showing could not be sustained. So the simple harmony of
Greek society broke down. And because Socrates broke it down incidentally,
Hegel thinks that the Athenians were quite right to condemn Socrates to death. He was genuinely corrupting
and subverting Athenian society. But that was an essential part of a historical
process, because ultimately--and Hegel fills in the gaps, the steps--but ultimately, that
led to the rise of individual conscience, a second necessary element,
and the opposite of Greek society. So we've moved from what Hegel
calls the "thesis" to the "anti-thesis." The antithesis of Greek society is individual
conscience risen to its height in Protestant Europe. But that too turns out to be unstable. It leads to the destruction of the French
Revolution and the terror that followed the French Revolution. And so that too must give way to a synthesis,
to a third stage which combines harmony and individual conscience. And very often in this process, that then
again serves as the new thesis from which a further antithesis will arise,
and the process will continue. Now, this notion of dialectical change that
you've just explained has been so influential ever since Hegel and it's enormously influential today through
Marxism which embodies it, that I think we must get it completely clear in our
minds. So let me just go over it again. The idea is, that Hegel put forward, that
the reason why we human beings are involved in a process of perpetual change is that
every complex situation contains within itself conflicting elements, which therefore
destabilize the situation. And therefore, the situation
cannot go on indefinitely. It breaks down into something else within which
those conflicts are dissolved or assuaged. But then, of course, in the new situation
you get new conflicts. And so it goes on indefinitely. So you get, as you put it just now:
a thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, which becomes a new thesis
using his terminology. And this, Hegelians--and following them,
Marxists--think, gives us the key to history, to understanding historical change,
the dialectical process. Now, up to that point in the explanation,
it would've been open to Hegel to say that the direction that this change
took was purely accidental, it could be the random outcome
of innumerable random conflicts. But he doesn't say that, does he? He actually thinks this linear process
has a direction, has a goal. That's right. And the goal for Hegel is the greater development
of mind towards freedom. We are moving always towards consciousness
of freedom, towards realizing human freedom, and understanding freedom. And that is the process of increasing awareness
of freedom and increasing knowledge of ourselves. Now, what is this change happening to? I mean, wherever we talk of change, in any
context whatever, there must be something identifiable that changes.
Now what is it that's changing? In other words, is he writing
about whole societies? Is he writing about individuals? What is he writing about in this context? The short answer is that he's writing neither
about individuals nor about societies, but about what he calls "Geist". Now that German word "Geist"
is a difficult one to translate. The easiest way perhaps would be
to say that it happens to mind. "Mind" is one normal translation
of the German word "Geist". We mean, when we talk about mental illness,
the German word "Geisteskrankheit" is "mentally ill". So, you could say it's happening to mind, to
your mind and mine, or all our individual minds. But mind also has another meaning,
which goes beyond that: the notion of spirit. We talk about the Zeitgeist,
the spirit of the times. Or we talk about "Geist" when Germans talk
about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The word ghost---"Helige geist," exactly. It also has therefore a somewhat spiritual
or religious flavor which suggests that in some sense there's a reality above
and beyond your and my individual mind. And so you could say it's happening to Mind,
but "Mind" with a capital 'M', not just "mind" in the sense of
individual human minds. So is Hegel saying then that total reality
is something mental or spiritual--or this word "Geist" may be poised between the mental
and the spiritual--and that all the processes that we're talking about are processes ultimately
of this ultimate mental or spiritual thing? Yes, that's the ultimate view that Hegel
comes down to: that reality is Geist. It's ultimately mental or intellectual. And these processes happen to Geist,
to mind, as it develops along the way. Now, to some people
listening to the discussion, this might already begin to
sound like a very bizarre idea. So I think it's worth pointing out that, in
fact, we're all very familiar with something similar to this in the case of religious beliefs,
even if we ourselves are not religious people. I mean, many religious believers, including
many Christians, believe that all of reality is ultimately spiritual. And that all of reality ultimately has
a spiritual significance or meaning. And I suppose Hegel is saying something
very closely related to that, is he? Though not necessarily religious
in the conventional sense. Yes, but the difference might be that the
Orthodox Christian view I think holds that God is spiritual but
separate from the world and the world is mundane and material,
although it has a spiritual significance certainly, but it's separate from it. But for Hegel, there's a closer
union between the two. You could present the opposite of the Christian
view by saying that Hegel was a pantheist, that he believes that God is
in the world and in everything. That's perhaps not quite true either. But it's somewhere between the traditional
Christian conception and the pantheistic one, that reality is part of God, everything is a manifestation of God,
if you want to call it that. In fact, it would be true to say that ever
since Hegel, there has been a dispute between Hegel scholars or philosophers about precisely
this question relating to Hegel's philosophy: Is Hegel's philosophy ultimately
religious or not? There are some who have said that it is.
There are some who've maintained that it isn't. Which side of that debate
do you come down on? I think that it is immensely valuable to try
and interpret Hegel as if he were not religious. Because then you find you can make good
sense of a large part of Hegel's philosophy in a non-religious way, just interpreting him as
talking about mind and the common element in mind being our common ability to reason
-- the fact that our minds are structured in similar principles. But I think I have to admit that though you
can push that a long way, you don't really make 100% sense of Hegel in that way. The last 10% perhaps has to assume that
there is some religious or quasi-religious view of mind or spirit that
lies behind what he's saying. Now, we've talked about the view of reality
as a historical process, which he introduced into Western thought.
It's a major idea. And we've talked about this notion of dialectical
change, which he introduced, and which is a living idea to this day. Another important concept which I think I'm
right in saying he coined--certainly he made it famous--and which has come back again
into what one might call intellectual fashion in recent decades, is
the concept of alienation. Hegel had a great deal to say
about alienation, didn't he? Now, what exactly did
he mean by that term? By alienation, Hegel meant the idea that
something which is in fact us, or part of us, seems to us foreign, alien, and hostile. Let me give you an example. He presents a picture of what he calls the unhappy
soul, which is an alienated form of religion. The unhappy soul is the person who prays
to a God whom he regards as all-powerful, all-knowing & all-good, and who sees himself
by contrast as powerless, ignorant, and base. So this person is unhappy because he demeans
himself and puts all those qualities into some being which he sees as separate from
himself. Hegel says that this is wrong. We are in fact part of God, or if you like,
we are projecting our qualities into God and we should take that back. The way to overcome that kind of alienation
would be to realize that we and God are one, and that we have those qualities. They are
not something separate and foreign to us. I was gonna say, he would say specifically
that these are human and perhaps only human qualities which we are projecting onto an
all-powerful being, denying them to ourselves, when it is, in fact, we who have them.
I mean, they originate with humanity. The claim that they are only human was
actually made by one of his later disciples, Ludwig Feuerbach. He wouldn't have said that, but he would've
said that we and that kind of divine spirit are all part of the same reality,
Geist or Mind. Now, you've explained very clearly I think
how Hegel saw total reality as being a process of change which was moving forward
in a certain way, the dialectical movement. What is it going towards?
What is the goal? What's the end of this movement? The endpoint of the dialectical process is mind
coming to know itself as the ultimate reality, and thus as seeing everything that
it took to be foreign and hostile to itself as in fact part of itself. And that for Hegel is simultaneously a state
of absolute knowledge, when mind knows, recognizes at last, itself as the ultimate reality. And also a state of absolute freedom when mind
instead of being controlled by external forces is able to order the world in a rational way,
because now it sees that the world is in fact itself. And it only has to implement its own principle
of rationality onto the world to organize the world rationally. Now the interesting thing about this culminating
process is that because it occurs once mind understands that it is the reality of everything,
if you ask the question "when does this actually happen?" well, it happens when Hegel's mind,
Hegel's own mind in his philosophical writings and thoughts, grasps the
idea that mind is everything. And then he's achieved this. It's not just that Hegel describes the goal,
the culmination of all this process, but Hegel's philosophy actually is the very culmination
of the whole process he's describing. So when Hegel published his main works, that
was total reality at last achieving awareness of itself, achieving self-knowledge. Yes. It's an amazing piece of, sort of, grandiose
self-projection on the part of a philosopher. I'm not sure quite that Hegel realized
that it could be seen in this light. Now, one thing that strikes one about the aim
towards which all this is moving in the way you've just put it, is that it's sometimes seen
as freedom, sometimes seen as self-knowledge. And Hegel clearly did think that those
were, in some sense, the same thing. And I think a little more needs to be said
about that because it's not at all clear I think to most people how self-knowledge
can itself constitute freedom. Well, self-knowledge becomes freedom because
of the particular nature of mind and of Hegel's idea that mind is the ultimate reality of the world. You see, in the historical process up to the
point at which we recognize that, if you like, it's our world, that we are all---up to that
point, we have really been pawns in the game. We haven't been controlling the game, we
haven't been controlling the historical stage because things have been happening to us without
us realizing or understanding why they happened. Because what we take to be foreign and hostile
aspects of the world are, in fact, part of us. But once we come to see that we are everything
in the world, then we understand the process, we grasp, if you like, the laws
of historical development. And we see that those laws
are in fact our own reason. They are the very laws of
our mind and our thinking. Was this behind the famous quotation that's
often made from Hegel: "The real is the rational and the rational is the real"? That what exists does correspond
to what is rational? That's right. And when we come to see that,
then we are free because we see the rationality of reality, and it
no longer strikes us as something contrary to our interests.
We no longer struggle against it. We understand it as, in fact,
our own rational principle. And we are free to flow along with it, and
indeed, to order it and direct it in accordance with those laws of reason. Now, one characteristic of Hegel's thought
which you've made very clear is that he always sees ideas not just as existing in the abstract
and certainly not being timeless and unchanging in the way that, say, Plato saw them, but as
being embodied in societies and institutions and historical realities which change. Now, given that fact, what sort of society does
Hegel see this whole process as culminating in? What sort of society is it leading towards? Well, as you'd expect from what we've
been saying, it's a rational society, a rationally ordered society. But I must make clear what that is for Hegel
because it's not the society of pure reason. Hegel saw the society of pure reason as typified
by the kind of thing that the French revolutionaries wanted to do. You know, they didn't just get rid of
the king and the nobles and of religion, but they tried to make everything rational. They said: Why have months of irregular days?
Why not make them all the same number of days? Why have weeks of 7 days? Let's make them 10,
like our decimal system of measurement and so on. Now Hegel saw that as leading to a kind of
madly abstract notion of reason, rather like, for instance, the view of a town planner
who might look at a map of London and say: Well, you're streets all run crooked and
traffic has to make detours and so on. Let's get rid of this. Let's tear all the buildings down,
make nice straight streets. In each block, we'll put a big high-rise
apartment, we can fit more people in. You can have a smooth green lawn
outside for the children to play, and it'll all be beautiful,
ordered and rational. Well, we've actually had that in London
and it's been catastrophic. That's right. And Hegel would have predicted that it
would've been catastrophic because it was abstract reason taken to an extreme. For Hegel, what a rational ordering of London
town planning would be would be to look at the real--that is, London as it exists--find
what's rational in the real, and of course, it has developed the way it did for certain
reasons, and there's the rational element. And then try and follow those reasons through
in a way that fulfills the rationale behind London's development without trying to raze
it down and start anew, to get rid of some of the arbitrary and capricious points
perhaps that are particular problems. But basically, to find what's rational in
what's real and enhance it and develop it and allow it to fulfill itself. One criticism that's always been brought forward
against this conception of the state--- the rational state--by liberal philosophers
in the Anglo-Saxon tradition especially is that by seeing the state as an organic whole
which behaves rationally and orders everything rationally, Hegel leaves no room at all
for individual dissent, criticism, freedom one could say, eccentricity. There's no room in the system for
the individual to behave as he likes. What's your comment on that? I don't think there's any evidence that Hegel
was opposed to some individual freedoms. But what is true is that his view
of freedom was not the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal view of freedom. To look at the difference between the two,
let's shift to a somewhat different area, economics and the idea of freedom in the
economic sphere, in the market. According to one view, the liberal view, freedom
consists simply in people able to do as they prefer. If I prefer to wear an orange shirt this spring,
for instance, then I'm free if I can do that. If I prefer to buy deodorant,
I'm free if I can do that. And that's all the liberal economists will
ask: are you free to choose the preferences that you have, to fulfill them? But some of the more radical
economists have questioned that. They've said that's a very superficial
notion of freedom. You should ask: why do you want
to wear an orange shirt this season? Why do you want to use a deodorant? Why don't you accept that a certain amount
of natural body odor isn't a problem or whatever? And the radical economists will say: the
reason is that you've been manipulated. There are people who want to make a profit
out of you buying their deodorant, out of you thinking that the clothes and the colors you wore
last season are no longer good enough this season. So you've been manipulated,
you are not free. You have to ask not only can you do what you
prefer, but why do you prefer what you prefer? Are they rational preferences? Are they
preferences that satisfy your needs? Now, Hegel would've been in the latter camp. He would've said freedom is more than
just ability to follow your own caprice. Freedom must consist in fulfilling
yourself as a rational individual. Well, that sounds all very well, but surely what it's going to mean in
practice is that I think I know what I want, I want to wear an orange shirt this spring and
I want to go out and buy deodorant in hot weather. But we have a state, perhaps,
which says, no no. You think you want those, but those are
not rational preferences on your part. We know what's best for you, we know even what you would want
if your preferences were rational. In other words, you get a state that not only knows
what's good for you better than you do yourself, you actually get a state that knows what
you want better than you know yourself. And surely, that's authoritarian in the
extreme in its relation to the individual. I think in practice you're probably right. And I don't know that Hegel
has any reply to that objection. The only thing he can say is that, while it
might be very difficult in practice to work out how you could have a society in which
individuals genuinely realize their rational self without an authoritarian state, that
doesn't mean you overcome the problem by the liberal laissez-faire notion. I mean, we still do have to face that problem
that people's wants and desires might be being manipulated, and to the extent that they are,
it's perhaps misleading to say they're really free. In other words, it's still a problem even if Hegel
doesn't necessarily have the right answer to it. Let's just take stock for a moment
where we've got in the discussion. Right at the very beginning, I asked you what you
thought was the easiest way into an understanding of Hegel's philosophy as a whole, and you replied that you thought the best
starting point was with the philosophy of history. So we started there and in fact we've continued
our discussion in a straight line, so to speak, to the point that we've now reached. Well now, are we now in a better position to understand
other aspects of Hegel's philosophy than we were? I think we've already, in fact, grasped some
of the essentials of Hegel's logic, for instance, one of his most abstract points. Because we've grasped the dialectic
which is part of logic, the idea of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now, in the Logic, one of the points Hegel
makes is that logic is not just a matter of form as separate from content, which is the way
the traditional logic of Aristotle was interpreted. He says that form and content are together. And we can see why he says that because
he thinks that this dialectic is something that is realized in the actual process of history. In logic, he says, you study that, in the sense
of you study truth without a tusk, he put it. That is, the eternal, immutable form of it
irrespective of a particular historical content. But in fact, it's always linked to that content. So that's one of the key ideas of the logic. And another point that we've also just touched on
is this notion of ultimate reality, and the way in which it's, in some sense, a matter
of mind rather than a matter of material things. It seems to me, looking at the exposition of Hegel's
ideas that you've put forward up to this point, that there's one central concept out of which
almost all the important other ideas naturally arise. The central concept is that understanding
reality isn't understanding a given state of affairs, it's understanding a process,
a process of perpetual change. The other concepts arise in the following
natural order, it seems to me. If one asks oneself "What is it that's changing?"
Hegel's answer is: It is Geist which is changing, and you've explained what he means by that rather
difficult concept: mind, spirit, whatever it may be. If one says "Why is it changing?"
the answer is because to begin with it's in a state of alienation,
and you've explained that. If one says "What is the process of change,
what is the pattern of change?" the answer is it's the dialectical process. If you ask "Where is all this change heading?"
the answer is: At the political and social level, it's heading towards an organic
society, which we've discussed. At the philosophical level, it's all heading towards
absolute knowledge, which you at least touched on. So in this way, all these central concepts
of Geist, alienation, dialectical change, the organic society, all arise out of a consideration
of this central idea of reality as a process, as a historical process of change. Now,
we've been able to put this very clearly and the next question I want
to ask you is: Why didn't Hegel? We said right at the beginning
that he's notoriously obscure. Sometimes philosophy students read out passages
of Hegel aloud just to make everybody laugh, because it sounds like such gobbledy gook. You can read page after page of Hegel sometimes
and think: What the hell is he saying? Now, why wasn't he clear, when it's possible
to be clear about his ideas, as you indeed in your book have shown? Some of his less charitable critics thought
that he was deliberately obscure in order to appear more profound, in order to cover
what they took to be the shallowness of his ideas. But I don't think his ideas are shallow. I think they're very deep and profound.
And that, in fact, the difficulty comes from the nature of the ideas. One of his students said that whereas an eloquent
lecturer might have had everything off by heart, and would arrange it well and trot it out
clearly, Hegel was always dredging up difficult ideas as he went along, as he lectured. He was bringing these ideas to
the surface with great difficulty. And that's the style. The style is one of someone who is thinking
aloud and having difficulty with the material. We may very well regret that he
didn't then revise and polish it, but in the context of German philosophical
style at the time, it's not so surprising that he didn't feel the need for clarity
that you just mentioned. Because, after all, Kant and Fichte, other
contemporaries, were also very obscure. And they were still regarded
as great philosophers. The next question that that gives rise to is:
How did it come about that a philosopher who was so obscure and so difficult to understand
acquired even in his lifetime such immense influence? I think that's partly due to his situation
at the University of Berlin, which was the capital of Prussia, which was then
the rising state in Germany at the time. And also due to the fertility of
his ideas in a variety of fields. You see, the influence that Hegel had
is not just an influence in philosophy, it's an influence in theology, in history,
in politics, in economics even, in law. Now, the fact that Hegel's ideas could be
applied in those ways shows how fruitful his approach, and particularly, the
historical elements of his approach were. Because it was that historical idea of things
as having developed, as being a process, that could be applied by scholars
in all these different areas. Let's comes now to the immediate
afterlife of Hegel's ideas. One of the first things that happened when
he died was that his followers split into two movements, didn't they? They were known as the young Hegelians
and the old Hegelians, or alternatively, the left Hegelians and the right Hegelians. Can you tell us something about this division? The right Hegelians were the people who thought
that Hegel's philosophy implied that something like the Prussian state was the organic
state which Hegel was pointing to. They thought that Hegel had himself
said this in The Philosophy of Right, his most explicitly political work. He described the state, a constitutional monarchy
not very different from the Prussian state. And so they thought that there was
no need really for further change. They were the conservative
or right-wing Hegelians. The left Hegelians said, the basic thrust of
Hegel's philosophy is much more radical than that. You see, Hegel talked, as we said at the beginning,
about overcoming the division between reason and desire, or between
morality and self-interest. That's a very fundamental change to bring about. You can't say that that's occurred
in the Prussia of 1830 or whatever. So, they said the thrust of Hegel's philosophy
is for a much more far-reaching change, a revolutionary change. Now they had to admit that in the Philosophy of Right,
Hegel hadn't written as if he were a revolutionary. But they pointed out the fact that Hegel's
salary was paid by the state of Prussia. So they said Hegel compromised,
he sold out. But we must be truer to Hegel
than Hegel was to himself. We must carry the ideas forward, until we
get to the point at which these thesis-antithesis of reason and desire, morality
and self-interest, are overcome. And we reach the synthesis of a harmonious
society in which those gulfs and divisions in human nature are reconciled. And of course, as soon as you talk about the
revolutionary followers of Hegel, onto the scene marches the greatest revolutionary thinker
of the modern era, Karl Marx, because he was one of the young Hegelians. And I think it's very striking, after the
whole of our discussion up to this point, to list the fundamental ideas of Hegelianism
that we've talked about, which Marx simply took over and incorporated into Marxism. Among these are, first, the idea
that reality is a historical process. Second, that this process changes by a dialectical
movement, dialectical change, historical dialectic. Third, that it's all going towards a goal. Fourth, that that goal is a conflict-free society. And fifth, that until we get there, to the
conflict-free society, we are condemned to remain in one form or another of alienation. Now, all these absolutely central ideas of
Marxism were taken over lock, stock, and barrel from Hegel. One has to say that there's one
huge difference, and it's this: Whereas Hegel, as we've been saying
all along was an idealist, and to Hegel, all these things were seen as happening
to mind or spirit, to Geist as you said. In the case of Marx, he saw all these things
as happening to something material. Marx was a materialist. But the whole pattern of ideas remains the same. It's as if Marx has taken over a great long
set of equations from Hegel, substituted a different value for x in the equations--matter
instead of mind--but kept the whole set of equations in every other respect the same. That's right. And you can see this, for instance, in Marx's
materialist conception of history, the key thing in Marxist thought, where history develops
by the economic base--the material side, the forces of production--
as dominating the mental. So that our ideas, our religion, our politics
all flow from the kind of economic structure that we have in our society. And that's an inversion of Hegel's idea. Marx himself said he stood Hegel on his head. Because for Hegel, it was the development
of ideas--of ideas of freedom and so on--that led to the formation of particular societies
and particular historical epochs. Do you think that Karl Marx could be said to
have made any important original contribution of his own to philosophy? I don't think Marx made important contributions
to philosophy in the narrow sense in which we talk about problems of
the ultimate nature of reality. I think that Marx was certainly a materialist, but
he didn't argue for his materialism as a philosophy. He really accepted it as something that was
pretty obvious, that what mattered was the material world, this kind of thing, and not
something remote like Geist, which he more or less dismissed as a kind of
speculative German metaphysical abstraction. So, he didn't argue for that. And he didn't, therefore, make contributions
to that philosophical discussion. But what he did do was give us a kind of a
vision, a vision of a world in which we are controlled by our economic circumstances,
and in which we are therefore not free. It's still rather like Hegel in that
we are pawns in the game of history. And, in order to become free, we must control the
economic forces, which after all, are our own forces. What is economics, after all, but our
own ways of providing for food, providing for shelter, and so on. So it's a vision in which the things
that we do control us. And we instead must control them. That's a powerful and broadly philosophical
vision of the human situation. But it's not an important philosophical discovery in
the narrow or academic sense of the word philosophy. Now taking the two very closely linked philosophies
of Hegelianism and Marxism together, what would you say has been their most
important or some of their most important positive contributions to human thought? What have they given us that's really useful
in our understanding of the world? Well, it's clear from what we've said that
the idea of history as a process, which affects every aspect of our thinking and our ideas,
is a crucial thing that's come from Hegel and Marx. It became almost a dominant thing in the
19th century, didn't it, as with evolution, seeing everything as having evolved,
having developed? We can't now imagine looking at societies
or ideas as timeless entities independent of their histories. And that's something
that we owe to Hegel and Marx. So that's one very important thing. The other thing is this notion of freedom,
the idea that is distinct from the liberal notion, that we cannot be free unless we control
our destiny, unless we, instead of being blown about by the winds of economic circumstances
for Marx, or the unseen hand of reason for Hegel, unless we actually take control of it,
realize our own power, realize the capacity of human beings collectively to
control our destiny and grasp that. That may, as you said, have some
dangerous tendencies in it, but it's a very important idea and I don't
think it's one that we can ever give up once we've been presented
with it by Hegel and Marx. Now, I do have to ask you about
the minuses as well as the pluses. The ideas of both these philosophers have
become associated in the 20th century since their deaths with totalitarianism: Hegel
with German nationalism, culminating in Hitler, and Marx with communism, which was seen
at its most horrific in the state created by Stalin. Both of these societies were societies
that murdered millions of their own people. Now, I'm not suggesting that either of the
two philosophers would ever have expected that or certainly not that
they would have wanted it. But they were both philosophers who regarded
the embodiment of ideas in history, in institutions, in social reality as being an
essential feature of ideas, yet when their own ideas were so embodied,
they had these catastrophic results. Why was that? Well, I think their own ideas were mis-embodied. I don't think you can really trace Hegelian
ideas at all in Hitler's kind of racist nationalism. You can't find that kind of racism. They said so, but you think that was
a complete misrepresentation. It was a complete misrepresentation
of Hegel in that case, certainly. And also, it's perhaps the ultimate irony in what
happened to Marx. Marx, as I've been saying, was a philosopher of freedom.
He cherished freedom. He hated subordination. He was once asked by his daughter to write
down what the vice that he most detested was. He replied: servility. Servility, the very thing
you needed to survive in Stalin's totalitarianism. And yet, it's true that these ideas
did get misapplied, did get distorted. Well now, why? What is there about
the ideas that led to this outcome? I think, in the end, there's a
faulty view of human nature. Partly, there's an attempt to show a greater
unity than really exists between human beings. And we could trace this to Hegel's notion
of mind or Geist, as something which is above and beyond the differences
between individual minds. But we find it also in Marx, and in the idea
that if you change the economic circumstances, you'll change human nature. And then, we will all overcome the divisions
between one and another, the division between my interests and your interests, and our individual
interests and the interests of society. They will all disappear once we get rid of
the economic structure, which leads us to compete in the marketplace for
money and wealth, and so on. Now, it seems, unfortunately, that that has
proven false, that you can change the economic basis, but you don't get rid of the divisions
between reason and desire, between my interest and yours, or between individual and society.
That in fact, what happens once you make it impossible or very difficult for people to
compete with each other for wealth, is they then start competing for status or
for power, or something of that sort. And that's not better than it used to be. In fact, you could say that, in the case of
Stalin's society, it proved to be worse. So I think that Marx was mistaken in thinking
that human nature would change. Thank you very much, professor Singer.
