The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

Of course, no comparison is quite precise, and it may be urged that the State is more artificial than a human body. However this may be, [1] we shall at least understand Hegel’s attitude better, and, as I venture to think, adopt by far the most fruitful standpoint for ourselves, if we look at political philosophy like one who is trying to ascertain what is the nature of human life as he observes it in any or every human body. If the life is there, its essentials are there, and his aim is to understand them. No doubt a door is here opened to argument with regard to what logicians call a “pure case.” In understanding life “as such,” you must, it would seem, purge out its mere defects, in regard to which it is not “life,” and the remainder, what you pledge yourself to as essential, must be ex hypothesi your “ideal” of life. And perhaps there is no reason to reject this responsibility if confined to the emphasis of elements and interconnection of facts. It cannot apply to more.

[1] The comment will probably betray the type of pessimism indicated by Rousseau. See p. 95 above.

We cannot construct an ideal body by reducing life, nor an ideal polity by reducing mind, to its pure case or essentials, since we cannot construct {252} organisms [1] or history at all. And it is because this is always being forgotten that the duty of understanding rather than constructing has to be insisted upon. It is true that in understanding, as in constructing, we imply essential relations, and so incur responsibility, and are liable to betray a bias; but still, life can be understood by help of any creature that is alive, and therefore it is not the example with which the student works, but the insight which he shows, that is the decisive point.

[1] “No human mind has ever conceived a new animal.” Ruskin, Modern Painters, ii. 148.

4. We have to begin by realising what is involved in the fact that we are about to treat the analysis of a Modern State as a chapter in the Philosophy of Mind. For Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (or of Law), though published by him as an independent work, is essentially an expansion of paragraphs which form one sub-division of his Philosophy of Mind, itself the third and concluding portion of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, of which the two earlier portions are the Logic and the Philosophy of Nature.

We saw in the second chapter of the present work that the mere force of facts has driven modern sociologists to handle their science in a more or less intimate connection with Psychology. The differentia of society, we saw, has been stated in various formulae of a psychological character. But it seemed to us that, owing to a neglect of the logic of identity, the nature of mind was broken up by such unreal distinctions as that between invention and imitation, varied by the unreal {253} reduction of the one to the other, [1] and also that an unexplained separation and parallelism survived as between the individual and the social mind, bearing witness to the vitality of the superstition which Rousseau’s insight picked out for condemnation. [2] We do not deny that mind may be more than social; but in as far as it is social it is still real mind, and that means that it is not something other than what we know as individual lives, [3] a pale and unreal reflection of them, but it is a characteristic which belongs to their most intimate constitution. This was Plato’s analysis of moral autonomy, and his work remains classically valid, needing only expansion and interpretation in applying it to modern free intelligence and social self-government.

[1] Prof. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretation, p. 105, at least suggests this unreal reduction.

[2] See p. 95 above.

[3] “Lives,” and not merely “consciousnesses,” as objective mind is largely in the form of habit.

The position of the analysis of a State in the Philosophy of Mind may be briefly indicated as follows. When we embark on the study of ordinary Psychology, we take the individual human being as we find him to-day. We accept him as a formed individual, distinguishing himself from external things, and possessing what we call a will—a capacity of seeking his own satisfaction, which he represents to himself in general ideas by the help of language. We analyse the self and will with their aspects of memory, attention, association, impulse, and emotion. But all modern psychologists are aware that this formed self and will has much history behind it, and presupposes a long genesis connecting it with simpler forms of {254} soul-life. Hegel, indeed, was among the first in modern times to see how far back the story of mind must be taken. The human intelligence, as the psychologist assumes it, is for him a middle phase in the romance of which mind is the hero. Before it come the chapters of Anthropology, which treat of the fixation of a soul in the disciplined powers and habits of a human body, and then the account [1] of a consciousness which gradually rises from a struggling perception of objects around it to a moral and scientific certainty of being at home in the world.