Ruse of reason
The ruse of reason is an expression coined by Hegel . Hegel understands it as a process through which a certain purpose is realized in the history of humanity, which the acting people are not aware of.
Content and meaning
Hegel applies the term ruse of reason to the ultimate end of the world, the consciousness of the spirit of its freedom. The purpose represents the reasonable in world history and is realized through different human actions, which can also be driven by passions and particular interests. In this case, reason is so “cunning” as to allow the passions to work for itself that what “through what it sets itself into existence loses and suffers damage”. The "idea pays the tribute of existence and transience not of itself, but through the passions of individuals".
The purpose puts itself “in the indirect relationship with the object” and inserts “another object between itself and the same”.
The ruse of reason in history
According to Hegel, reason dominates the world and is gradually realized through the development of its concepts in world history, which, despite all adversities, is viewed as a reasonable, necessary course of the unfolding world spirit . It is "progress in the consciousness of freedom", yes "God's work itself". The individuals act in the service of a higher necessity which they themselves do not understand and thus the absolute right to establish true morality. So it is the " ruse of reason that the interests and passions of individuals work for their own ends, to have the will of the world spirit fulfilled."
According to Hegel , the world of concepts develops dialectically , the concepts are interwoven in that one includes the other and is determined by his relationship to him, his otherness . According to this development theory, the absolute unfolds as self-realization within history via the stages in itself , for itself and in and for itself . The absolute spirit reveals itself over the millennia, as it is brought to light bit by bit by science as knowledge as the "being in and of itself", as the rulings of the divinity.
The nature is spirit in his selbstentfremdeten otherness, and God reveals himself in human history. Through the state to which he belongs and for which he works, man is subject to a historical fate . History-shaping personalities - such as Napoleon , the “world spirit on horseback” - only vaguely sense what is objectively “about the time”. In this way, people in the state have their task inscribed and they become their tools.
The ruse of reason is therefore usually spoken of when the individual is not aware of being an instrument for these higher purposes and of being absorbed by the history that uses him. Man can even believe that he is following his personal inclinations and purposes, such as his honor, his career, and even acting “freely”, but actually acts as a tool of the absolute, of objective historical reasonableness.
The objective spirit is realized in world history , which, along with law and morality, is one of its forms. Even if in the course of history the states wage wars against one another, perish or rise again, their world historical representatives are nothing more than organs of the world spirit, whose purposes they implement, even if they believe they are acting in a different interest. In this way the ruse of reason lets the passions work for itself.
Freedom and necessity
Depending on his insight into the processes, the acting person thus becomes a knowledgeable or unknowing tool of intentions above him. Its purpose in itself, as it still plays a major role in Kant's ethics , takes a back seat.
Hegel was accused from different directions of absolutizing the state and neglecting people as individuals. Reference was made to differences compared with the philosophers of the Enlightenment , such as Rousseau and Kant, for whom the human being was never to be seen as a means but always as an end.
Since in world history the subjective motives and objective purposes of action diverge and the deeds, determined by the world spirit , are interwoven in overarching interdependencies (like in the noses of Norns ), freedom also has a different, less emphatic status with Hegel than with Kant .
While Kant defined practical freedom individually and negatively as independence from heterogeneous determinants to the “arbitrariness” and positively as self-determination of the individual, for Hegel it was objectified and generalized in the state: the state is the “reality of the moral idea”, the “idea of the Freedom is real only as the state ”. In contrast to Kant, Hegel's idea of freedom thus relates to society, the state, in which freedom can only be realized for everyone. After the French Revolution, the principle of freedom can only become real for all people in modern states. In the course of history peoples and individuals have been sacrificed to this goal of the liberation of man, and in this sacrifice the ruse of reason is expressed . General reason asserts itself inherently and necessarily against the interests of the individual.
Against the idea of Hegel to regard the particular as negligible "against the general", the individuals as "sacrificed and abandoned", there was as much resistance as against his consideration that the idea "does not pay the tribute of existence and transience from itself," but from the passions of individuals ”. The criticism of the left Hegelians as well as that of Karl Marx sparked off from the objectively reconciling view of history . Roughly speaking, he took over Hegel's dialectic as a historical principle, but freed it from the mysticistic notion of a world spirit and emphasized the social and material conditions. Not the ruse of reason or the world spirit, but the people determine the course of history.
Adorno's criticism of Hegel and his rejection of the concept of the ruse of reason would later build on this.
Despite all criticism, for Hegel the human being is not a mere puppet; his personal conscience remains decisive and untouched , as that in which his guilt and his worth are included.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Historical Dictionary of Philosophy List der Vernunft Vol. 5, p. 343
- ^ Hegel lectures on the philosophy of history , vol. 12, p. 49, theoretical work edition by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel in twenty volumes, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1970
- ↑ Hegel Science of Logic , ibid. Vol. 6, p. 452
- ^ Rudolf Eisler, Philosophen-Lexikon Life, Works and Teachings of the Thinkers , Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm
- ↑ Ernst von Aster, History of Philosophy , Stuttgart 1980, Die Deutsche Nach-Kantische Philosophie p. 325
- ↑ Ernst von Aster, ibid. P. 326
- ↑ Briefly unfortunately, Philosophers of speculative idealism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, p. 147, Lübeck 1974
- ↑ Ernst von Aster, ibid. P. 327
- ↑ Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Vol. 7, §257
- ↑ Hegel, ibid. §57
- ^ Historical dictionary of philosophy: Geschichtsphilosophie, Vol. 3, p. 429
- ↑ Historical Dictionary of Philosophy: Action, Action, Action, Vol. 3, pp. 993–994