Robert Pippin

Hegel on the Varieties

of Social Subjectivity

Hegel is well known for having claimed that philosophy is “its time comprehend-
ed in thought” (ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt). The implications of this claim are
immediately apparent in the Grundlinien der Philosophe des Rechts (GPR) that
follows this claim in its Preface. That is, Hegel’s Grundlinien is not a treatment
of the institutions Hegel thinks constitutive of justice for anyone, anywhere, at
any time. It is clearly an analysis of the modern understanding and realization
of contract, crime, legal and moral responsibility, moral conscience, the modern,
nuclear family, a market economy and modern political institutions. But it is also
clearly neither an empirical social analysis of how such a society actually works,
nor a pure normative assessment of these distinctive characteristics, measured
against some trans-historical ideal.
Moreover, the GPR seems to be relatively self-contained. Hegel’s argument
for the incompleteness of Abstract Right and Morality as ways of understanding
“right” (Recht) do not appear to depend on some elaborate historical theodicy, or
on any claim about some comprehensive historical development. Or, if it is, that
element appears separable in some way, not appealed to for any support in the
body of the text itself. And the argument for such an incompleteness and for the
more adequate comprehension of right within ethical life (Sittlichkeit) does not
appear to rely on systematic considerations, requiring that we understand the ac-
count of “objective Geist” within the structure of “subjective” and “absolute”
Geist, or as occupying some position within an encyclopedic account of all the
possible philosophical sciences. (This is true although Hegel does say, also in
the “Preface” to The Philosophy of Right, that that outline or Grundriss presup-
poses “the speculative mode of cognition.” This is to be contrasted with what he
calls “the old logic” and “the knowledge of the understanding” [Verstandeser-
kenntnis], a term he also uses to characterize all of metaphysics prior to his
own. He makes explicit that he is referring to his book, The Science of Logic.
But again, no such appeal to the details of a speculative logic seems explicitly
called on to do anything in the inter-related claims made in the actual course
of the Grundlinien itself.
This immediately raises the question of just how time-bound Hegel’s ac-
count of Recht actually is, and, therewith, how we should understand the bear-

DOI 10.1515/9783110498615-006
136 Robert Pippin

ing of his account on our own time, a very different time of mass consumer so-
cieties, a globalized economy, very different marriage and divorce conventions, a
highly commercialized and manipulable public sphere and so forth. Some have
argued that, even so, there are enough points of determinate contact that some
direct relevance is still possible. Some commentators refer to Hegel’s account of
the limitations of contractarian models of the state or to the limitations of liberal
notions of rights protection, or his reasons for insisting on a state/civil society
distinction. I will follow here another line of thought, highlighting instead the
fruitfulness of his approach in general, and one unusual aspect of that ap-
proach, announced in my title.
But both aspects of his original and influential claim that philosophy has a
historical-diagnostic task have proven difficult to understand. By the two as-
pects, I mean, first, exactly what is to be understood by the philosopher’s
“time,” and, second, what does “comprehended in thought” amount to? Space
is limited, so I will simply make a suggestion about each. There would seem
to be a simple, clear answer to the former question. The covering name for the
historical institutions and practices that attract Hegel’s philosophical attention
to a time is “spirit” (Geist) whether manifest in subjective, objective or absolute
form, whether Geist is the subject of a unique kind of analysis, a phenomenology,
whether understood as a Weltgeist or Volkgeist. For the sake of argument, let us
stipulate that Geist refers to a collective mindedness, the forms of which collec-
tivity, the “shapes of spirit”[Gestalten des Geistes“ change over historical time.
Further, any concrete shape of Geist is never treated by Hegel as some summary
compilation of individually held attitudes, majoritarian views, or even as the di-
rect object of intentional attitudes like beliefs. However, while there are similar-
ities, Geist does not function in Hegel as something like a presupposed “form of
life,” as it might be found in Wittgenstein, or as “Welt” might function in the
early Heidegger. Hegel clearly thinks it is possible to ascribe states and capacities
to such a collective subject in a sense identical in many senses to the way we
ascribe such states and capacities to individual persons. This goes well beyond
the ascription of common, deeply presupposed commitments and assumptions
and dispositions. We can even say that a historical form of Geist can be reflective
about itself and its commitments, can come over time to greater and greater self-
consciousness (for example, in and by means of its art works), and that it can be
said to do things, for which responsibility can be ascribed. (This last is especially
true of states that act in our name as citizens.) We can thus speak of a group
agent, or of a social subjectivity. Such a postulation of a common mindedness
is not a fiction, or a mere heuristic or theoretical posit. It has ontological status;
there are such entities. Now of course, Geist cannot be said to behave in all ways
like an individual subject or agent. It is not embodied in the same way, can be
 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 137

said to “have emotions” only in a highly metaphorical way (as in a collective hys-
teria or panic, or in moments like the French Terror). It has a past it carries for-
ward and appeals to, but Geist does not remember its past as an individual does,
and so on. Nevertheless, Hegel is willing to go very far in what he is willing to
claim about such a collective subject, and we will consider one of his most am-
bitious and initially implausible claims soon.
Finally, when Hegel describes Geist as an “I that is a We,” and a “We that is
an I,” [Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist] he is committing himself to a dialectical
relation between any such collective or group subject and the individual persons
who are its participants. That is, such a collectivity is not possible except as con-
stituted in some way by the attitudes and commitments of these participants. It
would not exist were there not these attitudes and commitments. This does not
reduce in any way the reality of Geist as Geist; such attitudes and commitments
do achieve the status of collective agency. But the direction of dependence fa-
mously goes both ways for him. Individuals should not be understood as, ex
ante, atomistic, self-sufficient origins of such commitments, as if Geist comes
into being only as a result of constituting acts by spiritless (geistlose) atomic in-
dividuals. They are the individuals they are only as “formed” or gebildet always
already within such collectivities. (So, Hegel will insist: “to take conscious indi-
viduality so mindlessly as an individual existing phenomenon is contradictory
since the essence of individuality is the universal of spirit.” [Die bewußte Indi-
vidualität hingegen geistlos als einzelne seiende Erscheinung zu nehmen, hat
das Widersprechende, daß ihr Wesen das Allgemeine des Geistes ist (Hegel
2013, § 304). This is expressed in full Hegelese, but in itself this is a very old
idea, apparent in the philosopher equally as influential on Hegel as Kant; that
is, in Aristotle’s insistence that, considered outside the polis, a human being
is not comprehensible as a human being. He is either a beast or a god. But He-
gel’s bi-directionality and historicity greatly complicates such a picture. This co-
constituting mutual dependence is why Hegel can frequently say something that
would otherwise be quite mysterious, that spirit, this social subjectivity, is “a
product of itself.” (Hegel 1978, pp. 6 – 7) (Geist is this co-constituting relation;
the product of individuals who are themselves the products of their participation
in Geist. Geist has no substantial existence apart from this mutual reflection.)
All of this just introduces the first of the two elements in Hegel’s famous
claim about the task of philosophy; Geist as “its own time.” What could he
mean by the second element: the Geist of its time “comprehended in thought”?
Again a suggestion. Sometimes what he says sounds quite implausible. He will
say that philosophy gives the form of necessity to what would otherwise appear
merely contingent. When this is said about, for example, the development of the
empirical sciences (Hegel 1971, § 12 A), it can sound as if Hegel wants to say that
138 Robert Pippin

the actual course of that development could not have happened otherwise. If this
is supported by a claim about a self-transforming, underlying metaphysical en-
tity, “cosmic spirit,” or “God,” developing according to some necessary law of
internal teleology, then the claim seems hopeless. At a more modest level,
though (and this is how I think he wants to be understood), he could mean
that a significant transition in art history, or political history, or religious history,
a shift in collective ethical commitments, can be rendered intelligible by a phil-
osophical account. This account is based on a form of practical contradiction
that introduces a more familiar form of necessity, the form appropriate to: “he
who wills the end must will, or necessarily wills, the means” (otherwise we
have evidence that he has not willed the end). If a collective attempt to accom-
plish some goal can be said to learn collectively that commitment to that end is
impossible without commitment to, let us say, a broader and more comprehen-
sive end, then it must pursue such a new end or give up the enterprise. Or, if it
develops that the means chosen actually make achieving the end impossible,
then the means must be altered. They are not arbitrarily altered. They must be
altered, on pain of practical incoherence. A philosophical account, assuming
the rationality of such a teleological enterprise, can show this. It can give the
form of (practical) necessity to what would otherwise seem contingent altera-
tions. I said: “assuming the rationality of such a teleological enterprise.” I
meant to recall the Hegelian maxim announced in the Lectures on the Philoso-
phy of World History: “To him who looks on the world rationally, the world looks
rationally back” (Hegel 1971, p. 23). Here is yet another theme worth several in-
dependent lectures.

This raises again the question of the adequacy of treating a collective or a group
agent as capable of such end-setting, practical rationality, and self-correction. To
understand this, we now need a somewhat broader set of considerations. The
broadest would involve the long history of treating collective entities as agents,
or entertaining the possibility, but denying it, especially in legal contexts and in
questions of liability. It extends at least back to Innocent IV in the thirteenth cen-
tury, who left matters somewhat confused when he called corporate persons
“ficta” or fabricated. He could have meant, and was taken to mean both, mere
fictions, unreal, or he could have meant “artificial,” not natural, but nevertheless
real, not fictional. (He appeared most interested in whether such group agents,
like the University of Paris, had a soul and so could be excommunicated. He con-
cluded that they did not and could not be.) Those contemporary philosophers
 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 139

who have defended a robust view on the reality of group agents, like Philip Petit,
have pointed out that as long as something can be said to satisfy the overall con-
ditions for agency, whether as an individual or group, it should be counted as an
agent, and ascriptions of purposes, representations, and reflective attitudes are
appropriate. He argues that those conditions are three-fold and that they are met
by many groups: the capacity to hold plausible purposes as a collective (and this
means: purposes known to be held and pursued; such group agents must be self-
representing agents, not just enterprises represented with a presumed purpose),
the capacity to form reliable representations of reality and be responsive to what
is represented, and the capacity to act reliably to advance those purposes accord-
ing to those representations. This last involves the capacity to respond appropri-
ately to what is learned in the course of such a realization, and to adjust activity
in the light of learned difficulties or the discovery of incompatible commitments.
Fulfilling these conditions is compatible with a wide variety of institutional em-
bodiments, representative associations, or various steering mechanisms. More-
over, Petit goes on to argue that such groups cannot be said to be constituted
by simple majoritarian vote, as if a group agent or Geist, were simply a façon
de parler, a way of expressing what most people want or believe. Many valuable
ends can only be achieved by participation in a group and the so-called “discur-
sive dilemma” in legal theory has shown that it would irrational to participate in
such a group if the only reflective, deliberative procedure were majoritarian, a
mere sum of individual preferences. A situation can easily be shown to develop
in which such a group would have to be committed to an end that is in fact re-
jected by all the members of the group in their individual role. The details of this
argument (which depends on a series of disjunctive choices) need not concern us
here. It is another way or arguing that a genuine group agency must be subject to
some reflective procedure in a real process of coming deliberatively to form a
view or voice, all in ways not limited to a merely summative procedure.
The lesson here is that what makes a group a group agent is that it posses a
certain form of rational unity, a unity that must be knowingly achieved and sus-
tained. This means that the group is sensitive to inconsistencies in group com-
mitments, empirical facts inconsistent with shared beliefs, and a formation proc-
ess for commitments and beliefs that is genuinely formative, not merely
expressive of collected individual commitments and beliefs. In this sense some
group agent, like “the polis” of ancient Thebes, may take itself to be such a ra-
tional unity, but in an enactment of its commitments discover that it is collective-
ly committed to conceptions of familial obligation and to conceptions of political
obligations that are not practically compatible. Geist can appear to have, be col-
lectively taken to have, the required rational unity, but come to discover that it
does not have it. Tragedy ensues. A revision of the commitments is necessary.
140 Robert Pippin

The community can be said to have learned, and acted on such learning, per-
haps, to invoke another play, in the establishment of the homicide courts at
the Aeropagus, as in Aeschylus’s Eumenides.

Admittedly, the institutions and issues that Petit is concerned with are multiple
in a society and need have no particular relation to one another. That is he takes
no position on the question on whether various group agents, like corporations,
universities, hospitals, armies, states, churches, could also be said to be, must be
understood to be, themselves elements of one “common mind,” to borrow the
title of one of Petit’s books, much like the way individuals are determinate indi-
viduals at all only within purposive groups. But it is not much of a leap to claim
that this would be a necessary extension of the account. For one thing, many in-
dividuals are often members of several such groups and they would be subject to
conflicting or incompatible commitments. The awareness of such conflicts would
be unavoidable and so practically incoherent, were there no way of thinking of
such several group agents as at least compatible. “Compatible,” though, would
still not get us to the more ambitious status of Geist. To reach that, we need a
common like-mindedness in which institutional commitments are also not indif-
ferent to one another even if logically compatible. Rather, they must genuinely
cohere, or make some sense as enterprises that belong together. These art prac-
tices, for example, would be the art practices engaged in by persons engaged in
those religious practices, that civil society, those sorts of universities, that con-
ception of the purposes of an army, that political constitution and so forth.
That overall unity would be yet another name for “Geist.” Universities must
take account of the religious preferences of their students. Religions must take
account of the needs of an army, and so on. We can consider Geist the highest
level, self-unifying rational form of unity in a community at a time.
There is little doubt that Hegel thinks of such a super-structural subject as
such a substantial unity. In the passage where he introduces the notion in the
PhG, he calls Geist,)

…this absolute substance which constitutes the unity of its oppositions in their complete
freedom and self-sufficiency, namely, in the oppositions of the various self-consciousnesses
existing for themselves: The I that is we and the we that is I. (Hegel 2013, § 174)

It is at this level of abstraction that Hegel wants to portray one such collective
subject, Western Geist, the distinct inheritor of its Greek beginnings, as engaged
 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 141

in a practical, purposive project, a struggle for full self-understanding across his-

torical time, propelled forward in that attempt by a series of breakdowns in the
coherence of its self-consciousness. These breakdowns reflect the practical con-
tradictions that we have discussed. We are now at such a high level of abstrac-
tion that nothing interesting in any overall defense of this suggestion can be
said. But there is a smaller, more manageable topic left.

The Platonic Socrates long ago introduced the idea that there is a revealing anal-
ogy between the parts of, and the inter-relation between the parts of, the soul
and the corresponding parts and inter-relations of the polis. But just how far
can we go in extending the categories of assessment and analysis at home
with individuals in understanding Geist? Psychic and political unity (and so
health) is the main issue in the Politeia, and Hegel certainly focuses on that
issue too. But he seems to go much farther.
One phenomenon (one that Petit has also devoted attention to) is collective
akrasia, weakness of the will. It is easily conceivable that at the requisite level of
abstraction, a community might express its allegiances to various courses of ac-
tion; equality before the law, for example. Each person accused should have ex-
actly the same status, entitlements and other freedoms as anyone else. The com-
mitment is formally enshrined in a basic law and is implicitly and explicitly
affirmed in various rituals and pronouncements. In practice however, wealthy
people turn out to have an enormous advantage, and rates of conviction for per-
sons above a certain income level are strikingly lower. Everyone knows this, and
knows of, even affirms, the collective commitment, but no one does anything.
The irrationality occurs, we could plausibly suggest, because while the commit-
ment may be sincere (or at least not held hypocritically or in cynical fraudu-
lence), the costs and efforts of realizing it are so high that when occasions
emerge to address the problem, it is easier to hedge, dissemble, plead unavoid-
able constraints, one-time exceptions, etc. If we conceive of both individuals and
Geist as some sort of unity among multiple motivational voices clamoring for at-
tention and allegiance, it is not difficult to imagine incentives to attend to one or
another voice at the expense of others, the one that provides the easiest or most
self-interested path forward. How this exactly happens in either case might not
be easy to understand, especially since this contradiction is available to con-
sciousness or public explicitness. In various contexts in the Phenomenology,
like Virtue and the Way of the World (die Tugend und der Weltlauf), or the Beau-
tiful Soul (die schöne Seele) that cannot bring itself to act, Hegel appears to be
142 Robert Pippin

thinking of something like this. The standpoint of Tugend demands that the
agent “sacrifice” everything of his individuality, his role in the Weltlauf, but
when it comes to acting on such a complete self-denial, it cannot. It cannot
live up to its principles without practical incoherence. (Here we have to say as
well that what might look like “weakness” might actually be the result of an in-
complete and distorted practical self-knowledge.) And Hegel uses the language
of strength or force to explain the dilemma that die schöne Seele is caught up
in. (2)

Inasmuch as the self-certain spirit as a beautiful soul does not now possess the strength to
empty itself of the self-knowledge which it keeps to itself in itself, it cannot achieve a parity
with the consciousness it has repulsed, and thus it cannot achieve the intuited unity of it-
self in an other, and it cannot attain existence. Hence, the parity comes about merely neg-
atively, as a spirit-less being. (Hegel 2013, § 670)

But how could one be “pulled” in one way by one of the possible motives at
hand, and not be just as aware of the demands of coherent rationality just as
clearly as if one were not so “pulled”? But whatever problem there is, it does
not appear greater in the group than in the individual case, and it seems equally
familiar in both.
At one point in the Phenomenology, Hegel also begins to discuss what he
calls “the world of self-alienated Spirit” [die Welt des sich entfremdeten Geistes]
(Hegel 2013, § 793) and he returns to that characterization in accounting for sev-
eral phenomena. These are cases of collectively held ideals, like state power and
wealth [Staatsmacht und Reichtum], or the availability and inevitably of a per-
spective on every action of both the valet’s lower, unmasking, deflationary per-
spective, what Hegel calls baseness or Niederträchtigkeit (seeing corrupt motives
and weakness and hypocrisy everywhere) and yet also a more generous or mag-
nanimous perspective, what he calls noble-mindedness, Edelmütigkeit (some-
thing like an ability to see the genuineness with which the ideal is held, despite
the failures). Both are equally possible reactions to the lack of fit between pro-
fessed ideal and what is actually done, a drearily familiar and frequent phenom-
enon is ordinary life. He wants to raise a question that is difficult address in tra-
ditional philosophical terms: what accounts for the attraction of one attitude as
opposed to the other? This is similar to the situation described when Hegel as-
sesses the philosophical significance of tragedy, but in a state of greater Bildung,
or cultural maturation, the conflicting commitments do not force a tragic choice,
one whereby acting well must also be acting wrongly. In effect they can be “hid-
den” more successfully, something that requires a more complicated psychology
than available to the ancients. Such a state of alienation is a state of irrationality,
but at the self-reflective level, in which, given the level of self-knowledge at-
 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 143

tained by some community, reflective coherence is not possible and a certain

kind of dissemblance is needed and is possible. (It is this dissemblance that
has replaced tragedy in the modern world.) It is also important that Hegel de-
scribes this situation as self-alienated Geist. This means that it is not a contingent
manifestation that just happens at some moment in time. The situation has not
happened to Geist; Geist has done something to bring it about, alienated itself.
The phenomenon can thus be rendered philosophically intelligible, along the
lines of practical necessity and contradiction discussed before. The situation
also means that not only is Geist alienated from itself in this reflective sense,
but individuals can not be said to be able experience as coherently satisfiable
the claims made on them by their membership in the group unity. They are
thus alienated from their own collective identity, bound to it but repelled by it
at the same time. Moreover, the processes by which the mutual interdependence
of individual and collective identity come to be formed are certainly not neces-
sarily fixed, can be as much in dispute as any result of this formation process.
One might well find oneself confronted by possibilities of work, or options
among ideal general commitments, or political choices, none of which are expe-
rienced as possible expressions of one’s own commitments and talents. They are
the only ones available but they can appear “strange,” foreign, merely positive,
and so forth, even though one might voluntarily and effectively affirm them by
what one says or does. As with akrasia, though, none of this need be evidence
that the group identity or agency is really not what it presents itself as, all be-
cause of this alienation. The experience itself suggests rather that something is
going wrong, some necessary unity is lacking, something essential to one’s prac-
tical identity and the realization of that identity is not possible.
But if that phenomenon can be borne only by a kind of dissemblance, there
is a natural link with the next phenomenon. For he says such things as the fol-
lowing. In his initial discussion of “True Spirit, Ethical Life” [der wahre Geist, die
Sittlichkeit], Hegel first points out that the commonly shared ethical substance of
the polis in the classical period

… breaks itself up into a differentiated ethical essence, into a human and a divine law. Like-
wise, in terms of its essence, self-consciousness, in confronting substance, assigns itself to
one of these powers, and, as knowledge, it divides itself into both an ignorance of what it is
doing and a knowledge of what it is doing, and it is thus a deceived knowledge. (Hegel
2013, § 444)

He is talking here, ultimately, about the way Creon and Antigone argue with each
other, as if wholly ignorant of the credibility of counter-claims expressed by the
other, but not really ignorant. This is an aspect of Hegel’s account that is strik-
ingly modern and not much attended to. Each knows what he or she is doing
144 Robert Pippin

in defending the position, but in pretending not to understand such a claim’s re-
lation to credible counter-claims, he or she does not know what he or she is ac-
tually doing with its absolutism, and is, in a remarkable phrase, not making a
false claim to know, but expressing a deceived knowledge (betrogenes Wissen).
He thus introduces all the classic problems of self-deceit. How is it possible
for some individual manifestation of Geist both to know what it knows and be
ignorant, in some way, make itself ignorant, of what it knows?
This expression is hardly a hapax legomenon in Hegel. He had introduced the
general topic of decet in the section in Reason called, “The Spiritual Animal
Kingdom and deceit, or the Heart of the Matter”¹ (Das geistige Tierreich, und
der Betrug, oder die Sache selbst.” It is in this section that he insists on the so-
cial – that is the public and performative, and thus socially dependent – charac-
ter of actions. At one point he notes,

Since within this alternation consciousness has one moment for itself as
essential in its reflection, while it has another merely externally in consciousness, or for
others, what thus comes on the scene is a game individualities play with each other; in
this game, each finds himself to be
deceiving himself as much he finds each to be mutually deceiving each other. (Hegel 2013,
§ 415)

This seems like a kind of riot of deception and self-deception. And it is important
to note again that Hegel is not talking here about individual pathologies. As with
collective akrasia, there is some general disconnect between a collective self-rep-
resentation, and what such a group or super-group agent actually does. In all
three cases we have seen, the problem is the achievement of the rational unity
necessary for rational action. In fact, these appeals to self-deception appear to
be much more important or inclusive than akrasia. Our case of an expressed
commitment to equality before the law, matched by no effective action, is
much more likely an indication that there is no such commitment. In this
sense, there can clearly be collectively self-deceit. Accounted for this way, it
means that the interesting originality of Hegel’s account of self-deception in
this and many other cases is that it is not exclusively psychological, not a matter
of a subject “hiding” something from, and inside, itself, prompting a hunt for
deeper and real motives. The actuality of a motive is apparent only in action,
in what one is willing to do. It is in this enactment that self-deception, that
this disconnect, manifests itself. If we think of both individual and group agents
as multitudes of possible voices for different motives, we will then look to how

 Pinkard translates die Sache selbst as “the salient thing.”

 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 145

any agent might avow one intention that is possible but not manifest in deeds,
and then dissemble. This might involve a plausible but still false description of
the act content itself. At any rate, such appears to be the central claim in the die
Sache selbst section. The Beautiful Soul could just as easily be said not to be
committed to his view of action, because he does not act on it. He is self-de-
ceived, not weak.
In discussing Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and what is the height of self and
social alienation in the Phenomenology, Hegel again invokes the concept of de-
ception. In discussing “the musician,” he means to say that the nephew’s claim
to be identity-less, and so capable of theatrically enacting any role, that there is
no difference between such theatricality and the real social functions, is not only
false, and not only deceives others, but is a case of self-deceit. (5)

The content of spirit’s speech about itself and its speech concerning itself is thus the inver-
sion of all concepts and realities. It is thus the universal deception of itself and others, and,
for that very reason, the greatest truth is the shamelessness in stating this deceit. (Hegel
2013, § 521)

Finally, there is Hegel’s most pointed example, that of modern moralism. This
occurs when some agent, or group agent, or super-structural group agent,
Geist, assumes the role of moral judge and subjects everyone to a rigorous
moral accounting, one in which they are always found wanting, never truly act-
ing dutifully but always self-interestedly. (Again to say that Geist can assume the
role of moral judge is just to say that there is a means of collective self-represen-
tation that is not a mere summative result, and avows adherence to such ideals.)
Such rigoristic condemnation is, Hegel thinks he can show, irrational, self-con-
tradictory even, and Hegel suggests that no one can be presumed to have adopt-
ed such a stance without also being aware that it is so. It demands that individ-
uals not be the individuals they are, that morality is asking for some conformity
to strict standards that are impossible to fulfill. He suggests also that this reali-
zation will eventually win out, that there will be something equivalent to the
Christian confession that “we are all sinners,” and this confession will occasion
some mutual forgiveness. This is a strange moment in the Phenomenology, as if
he thinks that the burden of this rigoristic moralism and the self-deception it re-
quires, is impossible to bear. Whereas many of the other transitions in the book
seem to follow some intellectual or conceptual realization of a practical contra-
diction, this one seems more existential and dramatic. But no matter for our pur-
poses, he was obviously wrong in any sense about this. Such self-deception can
clearly be borne quite well. Indeed, self deceived moralism has reached some-
thing like epidemic proportions in the post-Hegelian world, our world, some-
146 Robert Pippin

thing that is not merely the “fault” of the self-deceived, but also of their audi-
ence. Gullibility is also a form of self-deceit (“hearing what one wants to
hear”) and is as culpable. As Bernard Williams pointed out, in such cases deceiv-
er and deceived are actually “conspiring” with one another.

This leaves us with many questions. For one thing, while Hegel invokes the con-
cept of self-deception in an ancient context, it is not an ancient notion, does not
it seem to have any resonance in that literature. Hence the question: when did it
first become an important analytic tool, and might this show us some character-
istic of the modern condition itself ?
There is also the question of its possibility, or how one might dispel the aura
of complete paradox that surrounds it. I have already suggested one way in
which that might go, given Hegel’s unusual understanding of the inner-outer re-
lation in action. But the larger question involves a return to our earlier reflections
on the bearing of Hegel’s treatment of historical Geist
In fact, there is, from Hegel’s point of view, reason to believe that the com-
plexity of our situation has created something quite unprecedented that only his
philosophy, with its ability to explain the “positive” role of the negative, and the
reality of group agency and collective subjectivity, can account for. Life in mod-
ern societies seems to have created the need for uniquely dissociated collective
doxastic states, a repetition of the various characters in the drama of self-deceit
narrated by the Phenomenology. This is one wherein we sincerely believe our-
selves committed to fundamental principles and maxims we are actually in no
real sense committed to, given what we do. (This would be the sense in which
Kierkegaard thought most modern people were (that is, were not) “Christians.”
This is not an idle reference. How else might we explain something like some
“association of wealthy robber baron Christians” (which must exist somewhere),
or billionaire Communists?² The principles can be consciously and sincerely ac-

 For all of Kierkegaard’s explicit and contemptuous anti-Hegelianism, this situation is perfectly
Hegelian, given that Hegel claims that determinate negation is equally also positive. In Kierke-
gaard’s terms, those who take themselves to be Christian are really not Christians, where this
does not mean they are Muslims or Jews or atheists; they are Christian non-Christians. And con-
versely, there is also a principled way of not-being a Christian (realizing its enormous difficulty,
perhaps its impossibility) which is the only way one can be a Christian. (This touches on a well
known objection to Hegel: that he confuses contrariety with contradiction.) I use Kierkegaard as
 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 147

knowledged and avowed, but, given the principles they are, cannot be integrated
into a livable, coherent form of life. (The social conditions for self-deceit in this
sort of context can help show that the problem is not rightly described as one
where many individuals happen to fall into self-deceit. The analysis is not a
moral one, not focused on individuals. It has to be understood as a matter of his-
torical Geist, in the sense in which it is the point of this paper to make plausible.
Or we are committed to various policies that, nevertheless, we would, again in all
sincerity and by means of the various representative practices available to Geist
at a time, disavow, even though our actions again betray us.³ In his early works,
Hegel claimed that the need for modern philosophy itself arises as an attempt at
a reconciliation of what modern philosophy had left in “disunity.” [Entzweiung]
(Hegel 1968, p. 9), and a striking sort of disunity is this dissociated relation to
ourselves. This seems especially to be the case in the political world.
Of course, it is also the case that there is in modern politics, as perhaps there
has always been, massive outright, deliberate deception and fraud. This is some-
times even praised, not just admitted as necessary. I mean Machiavelli’s famous
case that the needs and interests of government are sufficiently different from
those of individuals as to justify, even to regard as virtuous, practices of decep-
tion (Williams 2005, p. 607). So the NSA claimed not to be doing what Snowden’s
documents showed they were doing, and they certainly knew that. No doubt
there was some self-deceit involved in the justification, but they knew they
were lying through their teeth. There are also many other examples and they
are not limited to politics. Cigarette companies discounted the risks of smoking,
even as they knew otherwise. One could go on almost infinitely.
But collective self-deceit of the kind explored – and I would say, for the first
time explored – by Hegel is a different and arguably an even more widespread
phenomenon. As Williams pointed out, the entire political world now seems in-
conceivable without it, with politics understood as the field on which what plays
out is an externalization of a particular sort of group agent, government. Politi-
cal actors are presented, and present themselves, Williams suggests, like actors
in a soap opera, playing roles in which they neither cynically pretend to repre-
sent positions they know to be false (not always or mostly, anyway), nor,
given the theatricality, exaggeration, “posing,” and the “protest too much” rhet-

a dramatic example, but there any number of ordinary ones. “We all believe” that global warm-
ing is precipitating an unprecedented catastrophe. Do we?
 In (Pippin 2008) I try to show what conception of subjective mindedness and objective, public
deed we need, according to Hegel, in order to account for such states, and suggest why they
should not be seen as exceptional, or isolated puzzle case. See Chapter Six of that book.
148 Robert Pippin

oric, do they comfortably and authentically inhabit those roles. Williams’s de-
scription is memorable.

They are called by their first names or have the same kind of jokey nicknames as soap
opera characters, the same broadly sketched personalities, the same dispositions to tri-
umph and humiliations which are schematically related to the doings of other characters.
One believes in them as one believes in characters in a soap opera: one accepts the invi-
tation to half believe them. (Williams 2005, p. 615)

He goes on to say that

…politicians, the media, and the audience conspire to pretend that important realities are
being considered, that the actual word is being responsibly addressed. (Williams 2005,
p.615)

And of course it is not being addressed. The whole strategy is an attempt to avoid
doing so.
Despite everything that has been said here, I realize that it may still strain
credibility, even plausibility, to say that this is all best accounted for by saying
that Geist, in this case, the communal Geist of a nation, is, in its self-representa-
tions, engaging in collective self-deceit. But if it is initially plausible, it means
that there is perhaps a different and better way to assess the contemporary rele-
vance (what is in German the “Aktualität”) of Hegel’s social and political philos-
ophy than the “remaining points of contact,” institutional approach. In point of
fact, this issue of contemporeneity is tightly connected with the general issue of
collective self-deceit. As presented here, such a phenomenon is a means for
avoiding the acknowledgment of what one nonetheless knows to be true: that
there is a disconnect between consciously held principles of action, and the ac-
tual actions that result. The need for such a strategy can be understood by under-
standing that the basic claim of the GPR, about the practical irrationality that
would result were not the institutions of Abstract Right and Morality understood
as moments within an over-arching, common ethical life or Sittlichkeit. If it is
true that without such an ethical commonality, and, crucially, its distinguishabil-
ity from civil society, various collective principles would appear insufficient, irra-
tional, subject to practical contradictions, then understandably, the temptation
to collective self-deceit would be great; greater and greater even.
I would suggest that this is exactly the situation we find ourselves in, in
anonymous mass societies, in which the absence of what, according to Hegel,
amounts to genuine commonality, Sittlichkeit, is a felt absence, not merely an
indeterminate absence. Understanding such a situation as something essential
to understanding the prevalence of collective self-deceit is preferable, I suggest
 Hegel on the Varieties of Social Subjectivity 149

in conclusion, to pointing to some sort of moral decay in individuals, inauthen-

ticity or moral cowardice, something that would itself be an instance of the self-
deceit Hegel detects in the institution of morality.

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