|
Published in Literary Review of Canada , June, 1994
Chapter Two
Hegel is often misrepresented as a lover of big government, a philosopher with "a tendency to fetashize the state," as Philip Resnick suggests in his otherwise valuable The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State (McGill-Queens, 1990:22). But recent research has established Hegel's deep commitment to individual rights. This scholarship has revived the concepts of British idealism, and especially those of the Canadian, John Watson, who loomed large in Anglo-American thought at the turn of the century. It was Watson who first claimed that Canada was Hegel's true home, since the Germans had long since abandoned his philosophy.
In Hegel's perspective, the locus of individual right is found in the right to property; a conjunction also insisted upon by C. B. Macpherson, who noted that the original meaning of property referred to "a property in one's person, one's life and liberty, as well as one's worldly goods" (1985:32-3).
Hegel's individual, unlike John Locke's, is profoundly social. Her destiny lies not just in the competitive marketplace, but also in the overarching reality of the state, on one hand, and the personal fulfilment of family life, on the other. As Leslie Armour affirms in The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (1981: 109), the foremost Canadian philosophers have similarly emphasized the notion of community whenever they spoke of individuals; and the concept of community itself is usually seen by them in pluralistic terms.
Hegel's conception of the individual provides plenty of room for collective goals, and thus validates Charles Taylor's model of a decentralized Canada (as well as Trudeau's bilingualism project). Yet, Taylor's understanding of recognition, the centrepoint of Hegelian individualism, is peculiarly lacking in the social element Hegel insisted upon. For Taylor-who seems unaware of a similar argument by Canadian expatriate sociologist, Erving Goffman recognition boils down to the simple human need each of us has to be acknowledged by another. Thus, you feel affronted if someone fails to return a greeting you offer on the street. On a larger scale, says Taylor, this explains Quebec's anger when the rest of Canada rejected the "distinct society" clause in the Meech Lake Accord, and, as a result, refused recognition to the Quebec nation.
In Reconciling the Two Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (McGill-Queens 1993: 192-3) Taylor submits that the need for recognition is misunderstood by feminists, black activists, and others, as the illegitimate exercise of power-as exploitation and coercion-on the part of those who withhold recognition. A simple need for tolerance of diversity is transformed, he says, into a struggle for justice. As I understand it, however, Hegel's point is that withdrawal of recognition amounts to precisely an act of violence, of exploitation. The master's failure to recognize the slave is not simply a denial of diversity, any more than our eating of an apple is grounded in some cosmic lack of shared values between human and fruit. The person who is unrecognized does not exist for the other as human, and this facilitates an entire social mechanism of exploitation and violence. For Hegel, the capitalist marketplace-in which the worker's right to a job, property, good health, and a decent future for her family are constantly in jeopardy-is primarily a mechanism of non-recognition, of exploitation.
Something like this was Trudeau's message in the famous Maison Egg Roll speech, "A Mess that Deserves a Big NO". The Charlottetown Consensus meant more than open acceptance of the French fact, Trudeau warned. It also proposed withdrawal of recognition, of democratic rights, from particular groups of individuals, and a hierarchy of rights for others. Dismantling federal power meant exposing each citizen to corporate tyranny. "When each citizen is not equal to all other citizens in a state, we are faced with a dictatorship, which arranges citizens in a hierarchy according to their beliefs. And when a person lives under the reign of unbridled capitalism, it is not sharing and justice that prevail, but rather the law of supply and demand. The implacable market decides how wealth is distributed."
A vital part of the connection between Hegel and Canadian scholarship may be our underdog status relative to the United States. In many ways, this was also the relation of Germany to England in the mid-nineteenth century. "Why," ask Armour and Trott (1981:11), "should we find our Kants and Hegels on the fringe of European civilization and not in Paris, Rome, or London?" As Charles Taylor observes, Canada's marginality brings with it a tendency to look for universal truth outside our borders. "We then think of ourselves as provincials chasing after magic recipes concocted in major centres." The situation was similar in Hegel's Germany.
The Germans envied and admired their English cousins. The stability of the British crown under monarchs of German descent, and the unrivalled prominence of the English aristocracy were objects of German wonder. Hegel's contemporaries were enthralled by the English free market system, and the lively democracy that accompanied it. Thus, it was impossible for Hegel to develop a theory of modern society that did not take into account the English experience. As a result, his political theory was elaborated at second hand; more than anything else, Hegel was a discerning observer of the English scene. Marx's own fascination with the English experience, as documented in Capital was precisely a product of Hegel's influence.
The significance for the Canadian connection is that Hegel was constructing a model for an ideal government against the backdrop of England's rampant civil society. In the same way, I think Canadian scholars are creating a vision of the ideal society that takes into account the experience of Canada's noisy southern neighbour. Since Hegel's time, world economic and cultural leadership has swung across the Atlantic from England to the United States. This has given Canada an excellent vantage point from which to view the activities of the latest world-historical nation. Granted, however, that the distancing effect of language and the English Channel for Hegel's Germany is not available to Anglo-Canadians, who have only a porous border-the longest in the world-and the highly dubious comfort of the North American Free Trade Agreement, to protect us from our American cousins.
Like Hegel 150 years ago, most Canadians see America still as "the land of the future." Yet we are more skeptical than Europeans about the American dream, a skepticism shared by the German philosopher. Protection of private property, relative immunity from public service, commercial profit and gain are the main themes of life in the U.S.A., Hegel wrote. On one hand, the Protestant religion provided the American people with general confidence and trust in others, and focused their efforts on the world of work. On the other, respect for law in this violent society was merely formal; and since Protestantism exalted mere feeling as the most important element of faith, the result was a multitude of sects. These factors, Hegel observed, have produced "unseemly varieties of caprice" in the national character.
Trudeau said that living next to the United States was like sleeping with an elephant. He might have added, with Hegel, that this was an elephant with a personality problem. "The . . . principle [of] America," Hegel mused, is "incompleteness or constant non-fulfilment." Sharing a bed with an unfulfilled elephant has its own terrors, as a series of Canadian prime ministers, from Diefenbaker to Mulroney, have learned to their cost. |
|