The impossible overcoming of difference and conflict in Universal History: On Hegel´s deduction of absolute spirit

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Brasilia

Congreso; XII Congresso Internacional da Sociedade Hegel Brasileira; 2023

Universidade de Brasília

Unlike mere things and animals, human beings actively determine themselves in whatever determines them, that is to say, they are free agents. At first sight, their freedom seems to be identical to their power to adapt the natural world to human needs through work as well as the needs of each human being to the needs of the other human beings through contracts, marriage, commerce and political activity. Such process defines Universal History. But Universal History as the development of human actions carried out within the general framework of national states and within the even more general framework of international relations is for Hegel the realm of a bad infinity. Indeed, experience shows that through work, contracts, marriage, commerce and political activity at a national and international level it is not possible to bridge the chasm between the drives of human beings and the natural world nor the chasm between the drives of each human being and the drives of the other human beings. With respect to each particular subject, the natural world and the other subjects are always –to a lesser or greater degree, as the case may be– an irreducible otherness: the attempt to sublate that difference into an identity differentiated in itself derives in a ceaseless search that ends in a deadlock. Universal History is an infinite process in which the activity of human beings fail to configure determinacy according to their own free substance. The overcoming of the onto-logical realm of action proper to singular subjects as singular –i.e., the sublation of “objective spirit”– cannot be achieved by a further expansion of the specific logic and dynamics of that realm. Indeed, the action of free agents on the natural world and the interaction of free agents between each other cannot sublate the difference between human beings and the world nor their difference with each other, even if they organize their interaction in ever more universal systems that increasingly respect their respective freedom of self-determination. Since the activity of singular free agents is not capable of reshaping the world and the relationships between them according to the nature of their freedom, Universal History falls, as stated above, into a never-ending process. According to Hegel, it is only through the cultural activities of art, religion and philosophy how human beings act within a field in which they finally become able to sublate the difference between each universal I and determinacy as such. “Absolute spirit” is the human mind insofar as its activity of knowing produces in its own image and likeness the very determinacy of what it knows and, by doing so, sublates all difference between itself and its other. In my talk, I will reconstruct Hegel´s criticism of Universal History as the realm of the true realization of freedom as self-determination and thus shed light on his deduction of the following general form of spirit, that is, absolute spirit.