I. The despair of self-consciousness: madness or alienation?

It might seem that for Hegel, a systematic thinker often characterized as subsuming all particularity under a rational and totalizing universality,Footnote ⁹ the problem of madness—a state of being often characterized as the negation of rationality—would be elusive. Indeed, some have even questioned whether Hegel's dialectics are compatible with his ontology of madness or the existence of madness more generally.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, Hegel not only sought to incorporate a rigorous account of madness into his system, but he did so without relegating it exclusively to the domain of irrationality or isolated idiosyncrasy. Unlike Plato, madness for Hegel is neither a problem to be forcefully confined away from the affairs of public life (Plato Reference Schofield and Griffith2016: 934c–e) nor, in its divine forms, an arbiter for otherwise inaccessible philosophical truths (Plato Reference Scully2003: 244a). Nor is Hegel committed to some form of radical social constructivism.Footnote ¹¹ Rather, Hegel asserts that madness has an ontologically substantiated existence that poses a real threat to freedom for which practical solutions must be sought.Footnote ¹² The primary assertion of this article pertains to the breadth of Hegel's concerns about pathology. I contend that Hegel's Encyclopaedia account of the feeling soul's madness describes only one form of freedom-disabling pathology. Hegel curiously employs a variety of terminologies of pathology in the Phenomenology, which I propose warrant a closer look. Most notably, Hegel uses the term Verrücktheit (translated as ‘madness’ or ‘derangement’) for describing certain moments in the development of spirit (Geist). The soul, as described in the ‘Anthropology’ in the Encyclopaedia, is the natural presupposition of mind and spirit, preceding both the simple ‘I’ and consciousness of the external world. Conversely, Hegel's Phenomenology begins with an exposition of immediate consciousness—the ‘standpoint of knowing objective things to be opposed to itself and knowing itself to be opposed to them’ (PhG: ¶26, 17). The Phenomenology thus presupposes the moments of subjective mind that precede consciousness and progressively develops this first moment of consciousness’ immediate and natural existence up to the complex and self-reflective social standpoint of spirit proper: the ‘I that is we and the we that is I’ (PhG: ¶177, 108).

The story Hegel tells of the development of consciousness is one of seemingly unrelenting alienation. Spirit's alienation in general can be broadly understood as a problem of self-understanding, whereby it fails to adequately grasp itself and its world. The result is a disjuncture between what is essential to spirit at any given moment and its experience of its world, such that the actually existing world fails to live up to the demands of spirit.Footnote ¹³ The experience of alienation begins from the outset at the level of sensuous-certainty, as consciousness fails to grasp the object in itself independent of the work of consciousness itself (PhG: ¶¶90–110, 60–68). Through its experience of alienation from its object (as sensuous-certainty, perception and the understanding), consciousness turns inward for certainty as self-consciousness.

It makes prima facie sense to begin our examination of spirit's pathology, as well as the ways it may resemble or differ from alienation, with self-consciousness. It is at this point that consciousness estranges itself from the external world, where otherness becomes an intrinsic problem or threat for consciousness. Whereas the true and essential was previously the external object, now ‘certainty is, to itself, its object, and consciousness is, to itself, the true’—i.e. what is essential is now self-certainty (PhG: ¶166, 102). Any difference or otherness must, then, be brought into itself; otherness is tolerable only in so far as it is negated and appropriated by self-consciousness. The dialectic of the master and servant emerges once the ‘other’ in question is likewise a self-consciousness (PhG: ¶186, 110). The necessity for self-consciousness to sublate all otherness and demonstrate its freedom translates into a life and death struggle, as each party ‘must elevate its self-certainty of existing for itself to truth’, demonstrating once and for all that it is not restrained by mere being and that ‘there is nothing present in it itself which could not be a vanishing moment for it, that self-consciousness is only pure being-for-itself’ (PhG: ¶187, 111). Death, however, destroys the essential moment for both parties: on the one hand, life is the natural precondition for one's own self-consciousness and on the other hand, self-consciousness needs to prove its being-for-itself through recognition from the other (PhG: ¶188, 112). To cling to his life, the former becomes the servant, whereas the latter agrees to become the master such that he might posit the essentiality of his consciousness over against the inessentiality of the servant's consciousness (PhG: ¶192, 114). But the essence of the master's self-understanding turns out to be the opposite of what the master intended: rather than being independent, it is wholly dependent upon the servile consciousness. Ironically, it is the slave who experiences the first moment of freedom by means of thought's capacity to transform the external world through labour (PhG: ¶¶195–96, 115–16).

What is revealed to be the truth of the slave's work—the power of thought—emerges as the essential truth of stoicism. For stoicism, consciousness ‘is the thinking essence [wherein] something only has essentiality for consciousness, or is true and good for it, in so far as consciousness conducts itself therein as a thinking being’ (PhG: ¶198, 118). It thereby consciously alienates itself from actuality while nevertheless finding itself implicated in it (e.g. it denounces the senses while nevertheless using them). The stoic, ‘whether on the throne or in fetters, and in maintaining the lifelessness which consistently withdraws from the movement of existence, withdraws from actual doing as well as from suffering, and withdraws into the simple essentiality of thought’ (PhG: ¶199, 118). Alexandre Kojève calls stoicism the first ideology: ‘The Slave tries to persuade himself that he is actually free simply by knowing that he is free—that is, by having the abstract idea of Freedom’ (Kojève Reference Kojève, Bloom and Nichols1969: 53). Upon having the first taste of freedom while nevertheless falling short of being able to fully actualize it, stoicism is a way for the slave to interpret and live the inadequacy of reality. In turn, stoicism finds its concept fully realized in scepticism, in which ‘thought becomes the thinking that annihilates the being of the manifoldly determinant world, and the negativity of free self-consciousness in the heart of these multifarious shapes of life becomes, to itself, real negativity’ (PhG: ¶202, 120). Scepticism ‘avows that it is an entirely contingent singularly individual consciousness’, but at the same time, it is the ‘universal self-equal self-consciousness, for it is the negativity of all singular individuality and all difference’ (PhG: ¶205, 122). As the sceptic becomes aware of this internal dividedness—i.e. being at once contingent subjectivity and universal self-consciousness—it becomes the unhappy consciousness.

The alienation of self-consciousness appears in each case examined thus far as the failure of what self-consciousness takes to be essential and authoritative—i.e. the means by which it seeks to secure its self-certainty—to live up to its own standards. In this way, the self-understanding posited at each moment is unstable and ultimately self-undermining. In the case of the master and servant, the master's independence was revealed to be rooted in dependency whereas the dependency of the slave, mediated by the object of labour, was revealed to contain the first moment of freedom. The stoic could not successfully gain full independence in thought from the material world and the sceptic fails to reconcile the absolute subjectivity of their standpoint with the universality of their epistemic claims. In each of these cases, some claim to self-certainty and authority is confronted with and ultimately undermined by some aspect of self-consciousness’ reality—the antagonism is fundamentally between interiority and exteriority. The unhappy consciousness is the first time we witness the alienation become internal to consciousness; consciousness not only becomes alienated from itself, but it despairs over its self-alienation.

Having internalized the contradiction that emerged out of the experience of scepticism, the unhappy consciousness ‘is the consciousness of itself as a doubled, only contradictory creature’ (PhG: ¶206, 123). No longer is some external force opposed to self-consciousness but, rather, it ‘itself is the beholding of a self-consciousness in an other; it itself is both of them; and, to itself, the unity of both is also the essence. However, for itself it is, to itself, not yet this essence itself, nor is it yet the unity of both’ (PhG: ¶207, 123). The unhappy consciousness is the consciousness of itself as a doubled consciousness—i.e. there are two consciousnesses contained within a singular consciousness:

The unhappy consciousness, often regarded as a devoted religious figure, is a torn self. The unchangeable universal is understood broadly as an other-worldly beyond, whereas contingent particularity is its corporeal, determinate existence. Its ‘reality is, to itself, immediately a nullity’ compared to the eternal, pure, and essential other-worldly universal (PhG: ¶225, 131–32). For the unhappy consciousness, it is the other-worldly beyond that is essential and true, not this finite existence. Yet, it finds itself immanently tied to its physical singularity, and thus the contradiction is not simply between two mutually exclusive options but between two consciousnesses that are immanently detrimental to each other; they cannot both be true and yet, for the unhappy consciousness, they must be. It tries to make the ascent—either through the realm of pure thought, religious activity or the priestly mediator (PhG: ¶214, 126)—but inevitably fails each time. All that it can do, then, is despair and yearn for an existence it cannot have.

Jean Hyppolite describes this self-divided or doubled ‘element’ of self-consciousness as madness: ‘The essence of man is to be mad, that is, to be himself in the other, to be himself by this very otherness’ (Hyppolite Reference Hyppolite and Steinkraus1971: 64). In doing so, Hyppolite inadvertentlyFootnote ¹⁴ points to a key parallel between the madness Hegel describes in the feeling soul and the despair of self-consciousness: the unhappy consciousness resembles the third main form of insanity described by Hegel, in which ‘the maniac himself is aware of the disruption of his consciousness into two mutually contradictory modes, [and] has a vivid feeling of the contradiction between his merely subjective idea and the objective world’ (EG: §408Z, 135). Berthold-Bond contends that while there are indeed striking similarities in ‘the formal structures of withdrawal, the doubling of reality, and projection remain similar’, despair and madness remain distinct categories in so far as ‘they circumscribe opposed spheres of life, the life of reason and the life of feeling’ (Berthold-Bond Reference Berthold-Bond1995: 54). Similarly, Jon Mills describes the unhappy consciousness as ‘neurotic’ spirit, arguing that the ‘contradiction that ensues is devastating for psychic health: the self views itself as perfect (i.e. rational, eternal, etc.) and also as hopelessly imperfect, deficient, and finite—both saint and sinner’ (Mills Reference Mills2002: 155). Nonetheless, while Mills contends that the unhappy consciousness’ despair ‘informs the precondition for madness’ (2002: 156), it falls short of madness as it does not manifest within the domain of the unconscious.

But to articulate madness or pathology as being exclusively relegated to the sphere of unconscious feeling, though faithful to Hegel's theory of the individual's madness, is to rule out the possibility for an authentically social understanding of pathology in Hegel's system. As we shall see, however, the nearly pathological unhappy consciousness—neither unconscious nor within the pre-rational domain of feeling—gives us the key for understanding Hegel's invocations of pathology in his accounts of spirit's more advanced development. Hyppolite argues that the unhappy consciousness becomes understood as the ‘fundamental theme of the Phenomenology’ and paradigmatic of spirit's alienation: ‘Consciousness, as such, is in principle always unhappy consciousness, for it has not yet reached the concrete identity of certainty and truth, and therefore aims at something beyond itself’ (Hyppolite Reference Hyppolite, Cherniak and Heckman1974: 190).Footnote ¹⁵ More specifically, we shall observe a similar structure of self-division, in which a social contradiction is not experienced along the lines of interiority and exteriority but as being internal to spirit itself. Beginning with an analysis of the unhappy consciousness, therefore, helps us to distinguish between what could be understood as mere alienation or despair and its radical counterpart which Hegel carefully employs the language of madness to describe.

In order to outline what this madness looks like in more precision I will examine two case studies: reason's law of the heart and conscience's beautiful soul. While the former is a moment of reason's development and therefore remains a ‘singular individual […] still distinguished from the substance’ (PhG: ¶437, 253), it nonetheless shares with spirit the basic structure of the certainty-of-being-all-of-reality and has its aspect of sociality in the various competing law of the hearts. Ironically, through its very attempt to establish an all-encompassing unity of itself and its world, the madness that afflicts the law of the heart demonstrates that for Hegel, pathology persists to emerge out of reason itself. The elucidation of the madness that confronts conscience—which, as we shall see, ontologically mirrors that of the law of the heart—serves then to demonstrate that the pathologies that afflict reason extend to the social world of spirit. In both cases, Hegel claims that spirit (broadly construed) suffers from a madness that results from its own internal movements, such that it is unable to resolve a contradiction between two essential and necessary aspects of its self-posited reality. Not only is spirit unable to successfully realize its own ends and live in accordance with its essence, but there are two aspects of its reality that it finds inexplicably irreconcilable. The result is a disorienting, alienating and violent madness, in which the essential becomes the inessential and the actual becomes the non-actual.

II. The insanity of self-conceit: reason's law of the heart

Whereas the stubborn inwardness of self-consciousness often sought to negate or render inessential the external world so as to preserve the purity of its self-certainty, in reason we observe the beginnings of a complex reconciliatory unity. Reason is ‘the certainty [that consciousness has] of being all reality’ (PhG: ¶235, 139). It is through reason that consciousness attempts to fully comprehend the world—albeit abstractly—with the awareness that consciousness itself plays a foundational role in such comprehension. Self-consciousness as reason has ‘found the thing as itself and itself as a thing’ in so far as ‘it is in itself objective actuality’ (PhG: ¶347, 203). However, reason must also be for itself; it must not only observe its reality and understand such reality as its own, but it must actualize itself as this reality so as to find reason concretely reflected in its reality.

The law of the heart is one such example of active reason. As a moment of reason, the law of the heart understands itself as being all of reality and, as such, understands itself in an immediate sense as universal being-for-itself, while nevertheless embodying a singular individuality (PhG: ¶367, 213). Burdened, albeit proudly, with this sense of universality, this form of consciousness posits the laws it finds within itself universally and demands that the ordering of its reality must align with its own admirable aspirations such that there is no opposition between what it deeply holds to be true and right, and what concretely is (PhG: ¶368, 213). Yet, the idealistic law of the heart finds itself immediately embroiled in contradiction when it is confronted with its actuality:

The law of the heart seeks to remedy its corrupt and oppressive world. It is ‘the seriousness of a high purpose that seeks its pleasure in the exhibition of its own admirably excellent essence and in authoring the welfare of mankind’ (PhG: ¶370, 214). The free-standing laws of the world, then, are opposed to the law of the heart, and the latter seeks to replace the former with the good laws that reside in its heart. However, in accomplishing this actualization of the law of the heart as a universal order, it ceases to be a law of and by the heart (PhG: ¶372, 215). The law established by the singular heart becomes alien to the heart in so far as the law is now external to its individual deeds and innermost essence. Furthermore, since the law of the heart's truth consists precisely in the law being found in one's own singular heart, it follows that there becomes not only a contradiction between internal and external, particular and universal, in itself and for itself, but within itself.

As the law of the heart experiences its external world as increasingly dissatisfying, unjust, and hostile, it finds itself sinking even deeper in contradiction. Its essence is its law, yet this law, actualized, becomes a universally valid order which is also its essence: actuality is all wrong, yet it is its own—its truth (PhG: ¶375, 216–17). The contradiction is internal to itself; its own essence and actuality become doubled and, moreover, doubly opposed. Madness emerges out of this dizzying and disorienting experience:

The law of the heart's passage to madness is essentially a reaction against what is perceived as an unbearable reality, which results in a radical rupture in its consciousness whereby actuality is alienated and perceived as a non-actuality. However, while the law of the heart certainly generates an opposition within itself to its objective reality, this opposition is of a different nature than that of the madness found in the Encyclopaedia. Hegel describes:

Whereas the individual's regression to the feeling soul is characterized by a conflation of actuality and subjectivity, often in ways that the individual is unable to entirely cognize, the law of the heart is confronted with a contradiction in its reality where both sides are upheld as true. This is precisely the nature of the law of the heart's maddening contradiction: the law of the heart is actuality, and yet it acknowledges that its actuality is wrong and not its own—as we saw, ‘both aspects immediately are valid to it as its essence’ (PhG: ¶376, 217). The law of the heart's complex contradiction(s) cannot therefore be understood as mere delusion, separation or withdrawal; it is a contradiction within reason and thus within the law of the heart's rational actuality itself. The law of the heart's madness—and as we shall see, the sociality of madness more broadly—is produced out of a novel and distinctive way of positing its world: ‘it is the heart, or the singularity of consciousness immediately willing to be universal, which drives one mad and which is inverted, and its doing is only the production of what makes this contradiction become its consciousness’ (PhG: ¶377, 217–18). We then see this madness immediately replicated in the following way of the world as it grapples with its simultaneous individuality and universality: ‘In the way that it is as the conscious relation of an absolutely contradictory actuality, it is madness, but in the way it exists as an objective actuality, it is utter invertedness itself’ (PhG: ¶382, 220–21).

For the subject occupying the standpoint of the law of the heart, the world is rendered, to a significant degree, incomprehensible. As we saw, Hegel articulates the law of the heart's madness as resulting from it positing two equally necessary albeit mutually exclusive aspects of its reality. To actualize one is to denigrate the other, and to actualize neither is nothing less than spiritual death. In madness, the very force which serves to provide a sense of coherence to the world becomes inverted and contradictory. The resulting alienation is therefore not merely one of a simple antagonism between subject and world provoked by a misconception of the latter by the former. The stoic's alienation was produced not by upholding two aspects of its reality as true (i.e. my consciousness and my world are both true and yet they cannot be) but rather by consciously positing that its world is untruth or inessential so as to preserve its certainty as self-consciousness. Similarly, the unhappy consciousness’ despair emanates from its one-sided contempt for its facticity and actual existence. Once this contradiction becomes integrated into reason's reality-producing force, however, the contradiction eludes comprehension.

III. The sociality of madness: conscience and the beautiful soul

The second case study I shall examine appears at the standpoint of moral spirit. Spirit, in Hegel's terms, is reason elevated to the truth of being ‘conscious of itself as its world and of the world as itself’ (PhG: ¶437, 253). Spirit is therefore historical, and manifests itself as the development of shapes of the social world, each with their own system of meaning and collective self-understanding. For spirit to be mad, it must therefore manifest not only amongst a multitude of individuals but at the level of the entire spiritual world. In other words, the sociality of madness must be contained within the very rationality of a community, such that we are not discussing the madness of a community of individuals qua individuals but rather a community of individuals who collectively embody a particular shape of spirit. The stages of morality, which collectively conclude the chapter titled ‘Spirit’ in the Phenomenology, are Hegel's critical accounts of the German philosophical outlooks of his contemporaries, which begins with a critique of Kantian moral philosophy and ends in conscience, a critique of Fichte and romanticism. What unites the various stages of morality is that it is spirit ‘absolutely free in knowing its freedom, and it is this very knowing of its freedom which is its substance, its purpose, and its sole content’ (PhG: ¶598, 348). This freedom takes on the form of moral duty, which moral spirit understands as its content and absolute essence.

Conscience is the final attempt to preserve the autonomous freedom of the moral worldview. Whereas previous moments of morality attempted (and failed) to determine the nature of its duty, conscience ‘has within its certainty of itself the content for the formerly empty duty as well as for the empty law and the empty universal will’ (PhG: ¶633, 367). The Kantian emphasis on a universally derived standard by which duty can be evaluated or determined is replaced (or, perhaps more accurately, completed) with a concrete, self-legitimating individuality, wherein one's duty is to follow one's innermost truth unbridled by either society or universal reason's demands. In sum, conscience understands its essence as its duty; its duty is found in itself; it knows that its essence is real when it acts on this duty; it is certain of the legitimacy of this duty in so far as it is immediately certain of itself; and the knowing of this certainty consists in its conviction.

At first, conscience is able to achieve what the law of the heart could not in so far as its duty is legitimized by and through its own self-determined action: it simply ‘knows and does what is concretely right’ (PhG: ¶635, 368). However, much like the law of the heart, conscience's self-certainty will begin to wane. The certainty conscience has of itself cannot be found anywhere but in itself. While conscience does concretely act in the world by actualizing its duty through the deed, the determinate action and its consequences are wholly contingent. The deed's actuality is ‘an absolute plurality of circumstances which infinitely divides itself and spreads backwards into its conditions, sideways into its juxtapositions, and forwards into its consequences’ (PhG: ¶642, 371). To avoid this ‘flaw of determination’, conscience can only be given lasting validation through the conviction underlying the dutiful deed (PhG: ¶653, 377). In this way, conscience can be viewed—somewhat paradoxically given how advanced this stage of spirit is—as being governed by the arbitrary givenness of whatever one subjectively determines to be essential and true. The price for preserving an internally consistent subjective freedom is that conscience is essentially an arbitrary emotivism: as ‘determination and content, this certainty is natural consciousness, i.e. the impulses and inclinations’ (PhG: ¶643, 372). Nevertheless, the blatant contingency underlying conviction renders it no less authoritative in the romantic community of conscience. Indeed, at least at first, conviction is truth and it ought to thereby be universal (PhG: ¶654, 378).

In this manner, conscience, despite its God-like self-certainty as the ‘moral genius’, does not cease to be a being-for-others in its spiritual world. Particular consciences, all equally certain in their convictions, do not agree on their subjectively posited duties and therefore do not grant each other the recognition necessary for the vindication of conscience's spiritual essence. Conscience struggles, then, to reconcile its certainty of itself and its actuality, and in order to preserve the last scraps of its purity it flees from contact with actuality, such that ‘life and all spiritual essentiality have receded into this self and have lost their diversity from the I-self’ (PhG: ¶658, 380). Conscience becomes the anxious and self-defeating beautiful soul that is too afraid to act:

The very self of conscience—which it previously had been so certain of—is called into question, and lacking the ability to reconcile itself and its greater community, it anxiously self-deteriorates. The shared self-understanding of the community of conscience ironically precludes sharing and thus destroys the idea of the community itself. The individual conscience's actuality, in so far as it was intertwined and one with its essence, becomes disorienting, uncertain, and hostile. If the individual conscience does decide to act, it is immediately met with the judging consciousness who, proclaiming to defend the universal duty, meticulously picks apart the action, revealing the supposedly self-serving intentions and motives underlying the act. Seeing as the deed follows directly from the innermost conviction, the judging consciousness seeks to reveal this supposed truth of each individual conscience: always already hypocritical, self-interested, guilty, and evil. Confronted by the other, every individual deed finds its endless particularity at odds with the universality of duty (PhG: ¶665, 384). Conscience, already anxious and in despair, is finally pushed to the brink of madness:

Mirroring the law of the heart, conscience's dilemma is characterized by an incompatibility between two aspects of its reality and self-understanding that are, for it, equally true and essential: its pure self (i.e. its conviction) and actual duty (i.e. the duty to actualize its conviction in a spiritual community that is structurally inhospitable to the former). This defect refers not merely to the specific way that self-consciousness is deficient but rather a real contradiction within the objective structure of spirit which bears consequences for the former. Conversely to the individual consciousness who embodies the law of the heart, conscience represents a self-contained spiritual community, whose madness manifests itself within the rational actuality of an entire social world. Spirit is a self that is a world (PhG: ¶438, 253–54).

The opposition between subject and substance dissolves into a complex dialectical unity, giving spirit its unique standpoint as ‘being all of reality’. While this relational unity of self and world is generally understood to grant spirit its reason such that there is an identity between how it understands the world and how the world really is, it also ironically produces the possibility for a genuinely collective pathology in the form of spirit's structural homelessness. While the inability for spirit to bring together its subjective and objective parts to form a satisfying unity of self and world may indeed characterize all of spirit's alienations, what we observe here is a dual impossibility: the subject is unable (and, perhaps, unwilling) to live up to the demands of the world and, at the very same time, the world is completely inhospitable to the subject. Moreover, we observe this dual impossibility for a satisfying unity of self and world within, ironically, the very unity of spirit itself in its pathological moment. The tragedy of spirit's madness is that each aspect of its reality that it posits as its own inevitably eludes its grasp due to its own self-understanding. In other words, the conclusion (i.e. madness) follows necessarily from the premise (i.e. what is considered rational and authoritative for spirit at a given point). Hegel therefore seems to be offering an account of social pathology, in which spirit paradoxically produces onto-political tensions that lead to incomprehensible self-understandings that political communities invariably lack the resources to resolve. In other words, what began for Hegel as both the ground and object of reason—i.e. the collective self-understanding and rational way of knowing that is spirit—becomes a site for pathology and irrationality. The result is that what ought to be a home (the world that spirit self-posits) cannot be a home and is instead a site for madness.

Another connection worth noting here which gives credence to the notion that Hegel views the beautiful soul in an authentically pathological light is that Hegel frequently associates romanticism with madness. Recall that Hegel's exposition of conscience and its subsequent madness is a critical account of the romantic—namely, Fichte's—reformulation or continuation of Kantian moral philosophy. Moreover, it is well-known that Hegel's dear friend in his youth, the romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, suffered from severe, delusional and debilitating mental illness, and while Hegel remained unusually quiet about this, it has been argued that Hegel makes various implicit references to him in his Encyclopaedia account of madness.Footnote ¹⁶ In his Aesthetics, Hegel also refers to Shakespeare's Hamlet—undoubtedly a paradigmatic portrayal of madness in the Western canon—as a ‘beautiful soul’ (A1: 584). Similarly, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, in describing the German romantic poet and philosopher Novalis’ contributions to Fichtean subjectivity, Hegel claims that ‘the extravagances of subjectivity constantly pass into madness’ (HP: 510).

III. Conclusion: the sanity of ethicality

It is clear that what Hegel means by ‘madness’ at the level of objective spirit cannot be reduced to the pathologies of individuals. The sociality of madness is not determined by the number of individuals suffering from madness within a given social context nor whether these individual pathologies are caused or triggered by variables of a social origin. This is what fundamentally distinguishes the Hegelian approach from a social determinants of health or biopsychosocial approach (Bolton and Gillett Reference Bolton and Gillett2019). It is also what distinguishes Hegel's sociality of madness, as presented here, from many other theories of social pathology—particularly of a psychoanalytic bent.Footnote ¹⁷ As we have seen, the ‘illness’ Hegel identifies is embedded within the very fabric of a social world, such that Hegel is describing the structure of a political community as being either healthy or unhealthy. Hegel locates the birthplace of this ill-health or pathology within the necessary self-dividedness spawned by self-consciousness, which is later reproduced and radicalized at the level of reason and objective spirit. The result, I have argued, is that what spirit takes to be authoritative and essential becomes contradictory to the point of maddening incomprehensibility. Due to spirit's reality-producing force—as H.S. Harris (Reference Harris1995) puts it, spirit ‘is the unity of our world as we are conscious of it’ (Reference Harris1995: 61)—this aspect of incomprehensibility becomes inseparable from the means by which we become conscious of our world and ourselves. In this way, this social pathology implicates individuals, undoubtedly affecting their mental well-being, without locating the source or structure of pathology in the individual's psyche.

I noted above that, arguably much like any other form of madness or pathology, the preeminent wrong of the sociality of madness can be understood in terms of its freedom-disabling function. Indeed, the sociality of madness might be best understood not merely as a hindrance to freedom, but as the structural impossibility of freedom within a given social world. Following Hegel in understanding social pathology as being both freedom-disabling and a problem of spirit leads us in our pursuit for a solution to the domain of politics rather than individual therapeutics.Footnote ¹⁸ More specifically, we ought to inquire as to whether Hegel's articulation of the modern ethical life (Sittlichkeit)—i.e. Hegel's account of Idea of freedom come to its full objective fruition (PR: §142, 189)—might serve as a political therapeutic for the sociality of madness. The use of ‘therapeutic’ here has two closely related meanings: on the one hand, it refers to the therapeutic process of spirit superseding its maddening contradictions. We can understand this as the aspect of ethical life's therapy that negates the sociality of madness. On the other hand, it refers to the therapeutic function it serves for its members in so far as it structurally fosters and preserves the institutional preconditions for freedom.

Hegel describes the ethical life as the ‘living good’ (PR: §142, 189, emphasis added). While Hegel was far from alone in employing the concept of life to describe social totalities,Footnote ¹⁹ this usage does imply a concern for the general ‘health’ of a society wherein the solution to social pathology—a sickness which inflicts the entire life of a people—would take form as a particular shape of the political community which would structurally preclude or mitigate such pathologies. It should come as no surprise, then, that it has not been entirely uncommon to ascribe a therapeutic function—and therefore a degree of health or well-being—to the account of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) presented in the Philosophy of Right.Footnote ²⁰ In particular, Axel Honneth (Reference Honneth and Löb2010) argues that, for Hegel, social pathology can be understood as a ‘suffering from indeterminacy’ that occurs when a subordinate shape of freedom—the legalistic abstract right or the inwardly self-reflective morality—overtakes properly ethical freedom (Reference Honneth and Löb2010: 30–31). When moral freedom ‘is systematically detached from the social context which gives it meaning and treated as a fully independent and originary source of authoritative guidance’, a romantic individualism characterized by ‘inner emptiness and inactivity’ predominates (Reference Honneth and Löb2010: 41–42). The ethical life, as interpreted by Honneth, is the network of recognitive institutions which facilitate a determinate mode of self-realization—the ‘process of realizing, without coercion, one's self-chosen life-goals’ (Reference Honneth and Anderson1995: 174).Footnote ²¹

The ‘self-realization’ interpretation of freedom in the Philosophy of Right only partially addresses the ethical concerns posed by the sociality of madness. It is indeed the case that social pathology, as we have understood it here, might give the moral agent's actions a sense of indeterminateness in so far as the agent either ceases to be recognized or is rendered unrecognizable. It is certainly Hegel's hope to give subjectivity an objective (and hence re-cognizable) significance: subjectivity residing in its one-sided negative moment as ‘pure indeterminacy or of the “I”'s pure reflection into itself’ (PR: §5, 37), is unwilling to pass over into ‘differentiation, determination and the positing of a determinacy as a content and object’ (PR: §6, 39). Ethical life provides an antidote to this problem of indeterminacy through what Hegel calls habit or second nature:

It is the three ethical institutions—the family, civil society and the state—that help to cultivate the dispositions, attitudes or modes of conduct that the individual must assume for ethical selfhood. In this manner, the habitual fostering and maintenance of an ethical second nature counteracts indeterminacy by pulling the individual outside of themselves and immersing them in the multifarious particularities, determinacies and duties that comprise the actual participation in one or more of the ethical spheres (whether it be the demands of family life, ‘becoming someone’ in civil society, or attending to the affairs of the political community).Footnote ²² The content of one's freedom, in this case, is no longer arbitrary or subjectively posited, and the ethical ‘self’ that is cultivated in this second nature satisfies the fundamental human need for recognition. For Honneth, it is dysfunction within these networks of recognitive relations that is the source not only of social conflict but many pathologies and ‘relational disorders’ (Reference Honneth and Anderson1995: 106).

Hegel's concern for social pathology, I contend, runs far deeper than failures to be adequately recognized within determinate socio-recognitive relations (whether it be of one's humanity, personality, social identity or otherwise). One benefit of establishing objective spirit as the proper site for social pathology is an understanding of the ways in which our determinate social world radically conditions the shapes of selfhood at our disposal. In other words, we receive, at least in part, the content of the self (along with the various duties and responsibilities which flow from it) from the norms, values and substance of the world. What this means is that if the shapes of selfhood at our disposal are produced and embedded within a spiritual world suffering from madness, it is not merely that one's subjective capacity for meaningful self-realization is hindered (though, of course, it is) but that this very ethical selfhood being cultivated is rendered incomprehensible and contradictory—whether there is a meaningful attempt at mutual recognition or not. Indeed, the entire social world from which one's selfhood must be derived is rendered absolutely unintelligible and irredeemably self-divided. This reading of the nature of social pathology cannot therefore be reduced to purely individual, psychological or (re)cognitive factors.Footnote ²³ In this respect, the more traditional readings of Hegel's Philosophy of Right as a reconciliatory hermeneutic,Footnote ²⁴ whereby reconciliation is achieved through the rational comprehension of what is actual (PR: Preface, 20), come closer to grasping what is at stake in terms of discerning the ‘health’ of the political community.

The political ambition of the philosophical exposition of the ethical life, Hegel states, is that the ‘subject bears spiritual witness to them as its own essence, in which it has its self-awareness [Selbstgefühl] and lives as in its element which is not distinct from itself—a relationship which is immediate and closer to identity than even [a relationship of] faith or trust’ (PR: §147, 191). However, for such a subjective state of non-alienation to be possible, the subject must not only rise to the standpoint of understanding that the social world is worthy of reconciling with but the social world itself must in fact be worthy of reconciliation.Footnote ²⁵ While this articulation of freedom as non-alienation might be widely viewed as attractive, Hegel's claim that the major institutions that still largely govern and structure our political communities—the bourgeois nuclear family, civil society (i.e. the market economy), and the bureaucratic state—are essentially conducive to the realization of this freedom is generally met with far more scepticism.Footnote ²⁶

While there may be good reasons to be sceptical of Hegel's political-philosophical thesis—and, by extension, for the actually existing modern political community to serve as the kind of therapeutic outlined above—social pathology as a madness of spirit arguably poses unique threats relative to other threats to freedom (e.g. injustice). First, if we take seriously the idea that an internalized contradiction (i.e. self-division) elevated to the level of reason and spirit renders the contradiction, to a large degree, incomprehensible to the participants in a spiritual world, then social pathology will likely pose epistemic obstacles in addition to ethical ones. In other words, the difficulty in addressing or resolving social madness is not only a matter of overcoming a structural injustice but of adequately identifying the issue in the first place. It is worth recalling the profound inescapability of immanence for Hegel; no individual or philosophy can ‘leap over Rhodes’ (PR: Preface, 22). Any attempt to look beyond the madness will invariably be fraught with difficulties. Moreover, the contradiction Hegel labels as spirit's ‘madness’ cannot be reduced to the inadequacy of self-consciousness. Rather, as we have seen, it is a real contradiction within a social world that radically forecloses possibilities for self-conscious freedom.Footnote ²⁷ These madness-type contradictions can be contrasted with the typical Hegelian dialectical contradictions which find their resolution at the higher standpoint of recognizing in hindsight that the aforementioned contradiction was mistaken or one-sided (albeit logically necessary).Footnote ²⁸ The culmination of these two problems manifests in a determinate political community lacking the conceptual tools and resources for resolving its social pathology—perhaps including Sittlichkeit.Footnote ²⁹