Political Threat of Evil Consciousness
Populist temptations, sophistry, and the difficulty in preserving Plato's Revolution
This month Philosophy Portal is launching its fifth solo course on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Class starts May 18th, you can learn more or sign up here: Philosophy of Right.
This month in The Portal we are focused on the concepts of Home and Origin, and welcome three special guests, Alyssa Polizzi of The Artemisian, Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose, and Michelle Garner of O.G. Rose. You can find out more or get involved here: The Portal.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, just like Hegel’s philosophy as a whole, needs to be understood at the weird intersection between historical temporality and absolute eternity. The whole difficulty of Hegel’s work is that he is not a traditional absolutist, conceiving of the eternal as removed or at a distance from historical temporality; but he is also not a temporal historicist, conceiving the secular earthly process as removed or at a distance from absolute eternity. We must think both dimensions in their unity, whether on the level of a science of consciousness (Phenomenology of Spirit), a science of concept (Science of Logic), or a science of right (Philosophy of Right).1
The eternal moment in Hegel’s history is something that we are still struggling with today, namely, the moment of the transition from the “age of authority” to the “age of feeling”, which we could also conceive of the age of objectivity without subjectivity to the age of subjectivity without objectivity. It is common knowledge that modernist subjectivity, in the traditional demarcation (legitimate or not) between pre-modern and modern worlds, is a form of subjectivity that privileges feeling and affect over and above any notion of a transcendental authority.
Consider that many contemporary feelers and privileged libertines suggest that today we live in a “meta-crisis”, and seem to only propose non-political solutions that obfuscate the issues of authority in un-scaleable practices of dialogos. Here we should remember that philosophers like Hannah Arendt went so far as to claim that authority had “vanished from the modern world”,2 even titling her famous article on the topic “What was authority?” (italics mine).3 To consider how strange such a form of subjectivity is, one only has to compare that to a work that Hegel references frequently (by Hegel’s standard) in the Philosophy of Right: Plato’s Republic, the pinnacle and principle of pre-modern politics.4 Plato’s Republic forwards the thesis that in times of crisis the only resolution is the re-establishment of “proper authorities”.
How are we to think about this situation today? It is not obvious or self-evident, but rather a persistent philosophical problem. As many contemporary commentators have noted, Enlightenment rationality (as authority) is no match for the irrational kernel of post-modern subjectivity that continues to assert itself in populist temptations long-after the demise of traditional figures of authority (e.g. monarchs, sovereigns, patriarchal and religious figures). Philosopher Mladen Dolar, a tremendous interpreter of Hegel, proposed that today political authority presents us with an impossible task for the future.5 This impossible task is located at the level of the impossibility of subsuming “authority to knowledge” (that is, the rational Enlightenment ideal).6
Populism in all of its various forms has always screamed in the gap, or more precisely: exploited the scream in the gap, between authority and knowledge. Consider that the ultimate caricature of the populist temptation in our times, Donald Trump, represents the anti-thesis of a rational Enlightenment ideal. But he is also nothing like a traditional religious authority. He is rather this “obscene excess” of the gap between authorities irreducibility to knowledge.
And what appears in that gap?
What appears in that gap is the appeal to “casual conversation” in the form of rhetoric qua persuasive speech, over and above “technocratic knowledge”, or dead discourse. Trump uses rhetoric to speak to the “common man and woman” and appeals to their basic particularist sensibilities. And therein we find out the truth of the gap in the “Enlightenment”: it is a form of universal reason that obscures and ignores particularities of subjectivity, does not accommodate or adapt its reason to them, but rather pretends that it can by-pass the problem altogether through a reductive form of materialist determinism (whether physical or conceptual, it makes no difference).
That is why, far from positioning Hegel as an “Enlightenment thinker”, philosopher
suggests that Hegel, whose logic runs from the universality of reason through the particularity of subjectivity and into the singular and back, must be situated, along with the whole of German Idealism, as precisely the “negativity of Enlightenment itself”:7“In the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lust and divine madness; only German Idealism does the excess to be fought become absolutely immanent, located at the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for that core is the night, the “night of the world,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason dispelling the surrounding darkness).”
The ethical political question becomes: what to do with this “night of the world” which the “Light of Reason” cannot “dispel”? If we do not think this, the problem is that this “darkness” does not get mobilised towards a new “renaissance”, but rather gets exploited by populist figures who — unable to really mediate their own negativity — become the embodiment of what Hegel warned about in populist temptations: evil consciousness.
Here is Hegel who speaks perfectly on the topic of populism and evil consciousness, well aware of its dangers:8
“The particular kind of evil consciousness […] is most unspiritual, when it speaks most of the spirit. It is the most dead and leathern, when it takes of the scope of life. When it is exhibiting the greatest self-seeking and vanity it has most on its tongue the words “people” and “nation”. But its peculiar mark, found on its very forehead, is its hatred of law. Right and ethical principle, the actual world of right and ethical life, are apprehended in thought, and by thought are given definite, general, and rational form, and this reasoned right finds expressing in law. But feeling, which seeks its own pleasure, and conscience, whiff finds right in private conviction, regard the law as their most bitter foe. The right, which takes the shape of law and duty, is by feeling looked upon as a shackle or dead cold letter.”
To be sure, Hegel outlines the problem, but it is not so clear that he resolves it (certainly not in this passage, he is more framing it as a tension for thought in the excess of Enlightenment rationality). What we see here is that “evil consciousness” exploits the gap between law as expressed in a “rational form” (knowledge) and the negative affects/feelings of the “people”. Again, what is unleashed in the transition between the pre-modern to modern form of subjectivity, is precisely that these negative affects/feelings of the “people” start to matter (they are “material” that we have to “work with”), and cannot be merely ignored with recourse to external authority.9 Thus populism can precisely be understood as the symptom par excellence of modernity. As Dolar states:10
“The populist masters […] emerged after the demise of monarchs, sovereigns, patriarchal and religious figures of authority. […] The very term “populism” appeared in general use at precisely that time.”
And so this problem persists: the problem of the limitation of rationality as reasoned form of law expressed in authorities, and the negative excess, the “night of the world” of the populist masses. Hegel expressed this problem, not in the transformation of the night of the world into an empowered proletariat class destined to take over the means of production and institute a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but rather deepened the problem in the category of the “rabble”. As Žižek notes:11
“There are, in Hegel, traces of the logic of [displacement] of a fundamental principle — such a logic is inscribed into the very heart of the Hegelian notion of totality, which is a Whole plus its constitutive distortions, symptoms, excesses. There are, in Hegel, traces of the “compromising” logic — its main case, significantly, is the necessary production of the rabble in the modern bourgeois society. Hegel outlines a fundamental deadlock (the more a society is rich, the less it can take care of the rabble), and then outlines three main strategies to deal with the problem (public works, private charities, export of the surplus rabble to colonies), making it clear that, in the long term, these procedures only aggravate the problem, so that all one can do is more or less successfully contain it — there is no clear logical solution here, just a compromise limiting the problem. In such cases, the only reconciliation is the (resigned) reconciliation with the fact that the problem is insoluble (within the framework of the “rational state” outlined by Hegel)—as market advocates would put it, the excess of the rabble is the price we have to pay for living in a free rational state.”
The issue of the logic of displacement is perhaps expressed well also in texts by contemporary Hegelian theorist Todd McGowan, who writes books on Hegel with titles like Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution12 and Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try To Find Ourselves,13 as well as coining the term the “universality of non-belonging” in his book Universality and Identity Politics.14 What all of these titles and themes have in common is positivising the logic of displacement: of “contradiction” as our “freedom”, of “alienation” as our “home”, of “non-belonging” as our “belonging”.
For our purposes: McGowan’s work represents the opposite of populist temptations. McGowan does not exploit the gap between authority and knowledge and offer a populist vision of “freedom, home, belonging”, but rather affirms the gap in favour of a vision of freedom, home, and belonging in the negativity of the excess as such. Importantly, this is also the key to the way Žižek links Hegel and Freud by way of the “negative core” of the dialectic in Hegel, and the “negative core” of the drive in Freud as the “founding impossibility” of the social field.15 It is this impossibility that is at once both eternal and historical.
Thus, what Žižek achieves — and which so many post-Hegelian or anti-Hegelians fail to achieve in making central the “positivity of real life” with a poetic and romantic over-emphasis on the “organism” and “embodiment” — is a focus on the strange negative excess of organic embodiment itself, which we can never cover over with a universal “Light of Reason”.16 It is this negative excess which populists exploit, and which modernist technocratic rationality obfuscates.
So back to Dolar’s question about the impossible task of subsuming “authority to knowledge” in the transition from the age of authority to the age of feeling. If Hegel’s political project is to be followed, a project that clearly involves lifting the age of feeling to the level of thought and the concept, the task seems to involve at base a simple question: can we really think the negative excess of organic embodiment without exploiting or obfuscating it?
If the populist, an expression of evil consciousness, exploits it (the negative excess of embodiment), can we call the rationalist obfuscation of it ignorant consciousness? The ultimate paradox would be what seems to me increasingly true: that Enlightenment rationality, the “Light of Reason” “dispelling the surrounding darkness” is in fact the highest form of self-censorship and self-ignorance, the highest form of denial and displacement of the displacement itself. We must confront the fact that there is no “sphere” or “orb” or “one” that can hold us all and make things right.
In contrast to this, what we should call “Hegelian reason” is, not the application of reason to thinking “positive life of the body and nature”, but rather the application of reason to thinking the non-rational truth of negative excess as such.17 Here what makes the Lacanian tradition such a strong ally to the Hegelian tradition, and perhaps the “true embodiment of it”,18 is that this dimension appears in categories like the “non-All”, “sexual difference”, “the real”, “non-relationship” and so forth and so on.19
Thus, and here is the challenge for those reading the Philosophy of Right, if we are to preserve our existence in a “free rational state” (which is by no means secure or guaranteed in light of populist temptations or regressive collectivisms), what we must do is secure spaces for rational thought, that do not exploit the negative excess of the body, nor obfuscate the negative excess of the body, but rather raise from feeling to concept by way of thinking concretely with categories like “non-All”, “sexual difference”, “the real”, “non-relationship” and so forth and so on.20
And if we do not?
What seems to be at stake if we do not involves a “free rational state” that is not only exploited by populists, but also drowning in its own negative excess by way of “woke” subjective aims, opinions and feelings that result in not only the total destruction of public institutions and the ethical system, but also the destruction of upright conscience and love. Hegel warned of this in his meditation on the relation between a politics of sophistry and a politics of truth (with reference to Plato’s Republic):21
“Yet this shallowness, notwithstanding its seeming innocence, does bear upon social life, right and duty generally, advancing principles which are the very essence of superficiality. These, as we have learned so decidedly from Plato, are the principles of the Sophists, according to which the basis of right is subjective aims and opinions, subjective feeling and private conviction. The result of such principles is quite as much the destruction of the ethical system, of the upright conscience, of love and right, in private persons, as of public order and the institutions of the state.”
Do we not see the contemporary “free rational state” drowning in subjective aims, opinions and feelings that are destroying the basis of an ethical system, public institutions, as well as upright conscience and love? I would say that such a phenomenon so dramatically marks our contemporary political world, it is all the more shocking that we read this so clearly in Hegel’s own words here published originally in the early 19th century. Do we need any more evidence that Hegel is our contemporary? That Hegel’s logic does bear within itself a mark of an absolute eternity that speaks to the historical temporality of our age? Or that the historical temporality of our age is itself marked by an absolute eternity of an impossibility that Hegel saw clearly?
If we do not really confront this problem, we are at stake of losing what Hegel saw as the “worldwide revolution” of Plato’s original philosophical political gesture (against the Sophists), that is the “free infinite personality” as the ground of the “ethical state”.22 To embody our “free infinite personality” in an “ethical state” also brings with it a huge responsibility to think the negative excess of embodiment. As in Hegel’s time, the ideals of Plato’s Republic are now regarded as “empty”, one might even say “disembodied” and “non-organic”. Perhaps contemporary consciousness thinks this because it is not really willing to think through the negative excess of the body itself? Perhaps contemporary consciousness would rather exploit or obfuscate this negative excess as opposed to thinking and mediating it conceptually towards the truth of the ideal that can only emerge retroactively, surprising us as a transcendent “beyond” that is right here and right now?
It is in this context, that of thinking the truth of the negative excess of the body itself, that we should understand Hegel’s notion “What is rational is real; And what is real is rational”.23 Rather than exploiting or obfuscating this truth, why not see it as the real that needs rational mediation, and the reason that screams of its reality?
This month Philosophy Portal is launching its fifth solo course on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Class starts May 18th, you can learn more or sign up here: Philosophy of Right.
This month in The Portal we are focused on the concepts of Home and Origin, and welcome three special guests, Alyssa Polizzi of The Artemisian, Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose, and Michelle Garner of O.G. Rose. You can find out more or get involved here: The Portal.
Arendt, H. 1958. What was authority? NOMOS: Am. Soc'y Pol. Legal Phil. 1: 81.
Ibid.
And which political scientist Benjamin Studebaker suggested to me we should not see in sharp discontinuity with modernist political philosophy, see: Benjamin Studebaker and Nina Power join Dave, Nance, and Cadell via
.Dolar, M. 2022. The Future of Authority? The Philosopher, 109: 2.
Ibid.
Žižek, S. 2012. Fichte’s Choice. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 166.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 15.
Consider the difference between a traditional father and a “post-modern” permissive father, an example Žižek resorts to frequently.
Dolar, M. 2022. The Future of Authority? The Philosopher, 109: 2.
Žižek, S. 2012. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 489.
McGowan, T. 2019. Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. Columbia University Press.
McGowan, T. 2024. Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try To Find Ourselves. Repeater.
McGowan, T. 2019. Universality and Identity Politics. Columbia University Press.
Žižek, S. 2012. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 490.
Ibid. p. 491.
I do see this application in the artistic work expressed extremely well by a member of The Portal, the talented
Rosenstock.Lacan suggested that psychoanalysis was the true “paradigm” of Hegelianism, see: Lacan, J. 2005. The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 242.
Here we should re-read: Žižek, S. 2012. The Non-All, or, the Ontology of Sexual Difference. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 739-804.
The Portal strives to be such a space.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 16.
Ibid. p. 17-18.
Ibid. p. 18.