4.3 Slavery

The Best of All Possible Histories

in Lectures on World History seems confusing at first blush, but it is the implication that they do utilize their will that makes this feature important. The imagined lack of will is brought in even to physical wants, as “at Midnight a bell had to remind them even of their matrimonial duties.”45 This is a unique feature of Amerindians as Hegel directly contrasts them with Africans, saying “negroes [have] become competent clergymen. . . while only a single native was known whose intellect was sufficiently developed to enable him to study, but who died soon after the beginning through excessive brandy-drinking.”46 The implication being that no civilizing effort on the part of Europeans is able to make indigenous peoples’ will develop an objective reality. Due to the extreme brevity of his discussion of the Americas, it is slightly unclear whether Hegel believes indigenous people have even an abstract will though he justifies their genocide regardless of this detail. The lack of a finitely determined will is sufficient in Hegel’s eyes to reduce Native people to the level of animals and places no restrictions on their extermination.47

Hegel’s defense of Atlantic slavery is confounding for a few reasons. First is that Hegel is generally hostile to blatant disregard for a person’s freedom and natural rights. His discussion of Rome in particular hinges on his contempt for slavery and inequality, he says of Roman caste divisions and slavery “the consecrated inequality of will and private property. . . involves a duplicate power, the sternness and malevolent isolation whose components can only be mastered and bound together by a still greater sternness, into a unity maintained by force.”48 From this, one might expect Hegel to differentiate Atlantic and pre-modern slavery, as that would give him a basis to justify one rather than the other. Hegel, however, chooses the opposite course, likening slavery to other institutions he resented, such as serfdom, saying “slavery is in and for itself injustice,” while still stubbornly arguing that slavery “is the cause for the increase in human feelings among Negroes.”49

The key to unraveling Hegel’s seemingly contradictory conception of slavery lies in his Philosophy of Right, specifically his conception of wrong. Criminal wrong is the final stage of abstract right in the text and is the element that draws pure right

45. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 82. 46. Ibid. 47. Hoffheimer, "Hegel Race Genocide." 48. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 295 49. Ibid., 98-99.

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The Best of All Possible Histories

out of itself and brings about genuine morality.50 The term is roughly equivalent to its everyday definition, comprising any violation of the rights of another or the violation of contractual relations between people. Wrong elevates the individual’s understanding of their own will from mere personality to subjectivity, it is what negates personality, and when double negated, wrong brings about subjectivity.51

Hegel’s historical treatment of Africa frames the region as essentially egoistic, with both state and religion ultimately mutable by the will of the individual.52 This style of social organization is firmly planted in the realm of abstract right, as Hegel says of this stage, “uncivilized man, in general, holds fast to rights, while a more generous disposition is alert to see all sides of the question.”53 Therefore, we can see Hegel’s logical next step for Africa by merely moving one step further on the progression towards wrong. In the context of Africa, wrong is slavery, which “is itself a phase of advancement from the merely isolated state of sensual experience.”54 Slavery is thus justified paternalistically and progressively, it is for the moral good of African people, even if the means are a criminal wrong, “the gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal.”55

This restoration through double negation is typical of Hegel’s dialectical logic, but what is atypical is the way Hegel works backwards through the progression for moral justification. Slavery is not justified as a response to prior material conditions, but as a means to a hypothetical future end of realizing freedom.56 In most contexts, Hegel does not equate the dialectical necessity of an action with moral justification. The less concrete discussion of Wrong in the Philosophy of Right makes clear that Hegel does not endorse crime or violence solely on the basis that it negates right and thus creates progress. In fact, it is the inadequacy of right as a concept that necessitates criminality, as the individual’s insistence on their own right without self-legislation leads them to violate the right of others.57 Hegel’s application reverses the blame however, assuming it was Africans’ lack of civility that caused them to be enslaved, when in the context of the Philosophy of Right, wrong implies uncivility on the part of the perpetrator, not the victim.58

50. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §82. 51. Ibid., §104. 52. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 91 & 97. 53. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §37A. 54. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 98-99. 55. Ibid., 99. 56. Chu, "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa." 57. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §83. 58. Ibid., §90

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