Can Hegel provide us with the keys to happiness? Is his call for situating ourselves in a moral community (Sittlichkeit) a way of finding our place in society? Will it help us gain some sense of peace in a turbulent world? The answer is, maybe. Honestly, it will probably help me find peace and purpose. But for many people, Hegel suggests fitting into the moral community might mean a life of discomfort and strife--a prolonged period of struggle and a demand for dignity. In short, you should be skeptical about Arthur Brooks's reading of Hegel: it is a bit too positive for the philosopher of negativity. There is a good chance you can't be happy--and Hegel can clarify why.
Brooks on Hegel
Brooks's argument is straightforward: against philosophers of the individual, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Hegel was the philosopher of community. For Hegel, success in society can be measured by people having a place within it. Hegel praises social institutions--from marriage to religion, schools to museums, hospitals to hospices. The "good life" is one that belongs within the community, one where we know our place amongst the various institutions we belong to: being a good spouse, a good sibling, a good worker, a good citizen, and so on.
For this reason, Brooks argues, the true goal of Hegelian life is harmony. Brooks writes, "Happiness comes in the peaceful, unmemorable parts of life." For the individual, then, the goal is fitting in. Brooks writes:
For Hegel, the correct answer for peaceful happiness is Sittlichkeit, or “ethical order,” by which he means prosocial behavior grounded in tradition and custom learned from one’s community. As he explains in Philosophy of Right, this ethical order involves striving “to make oneself a member of … civil society by one’s own act, through one’s energy, industry, and skill,” thus “gaining recognition both in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others.” This is where true happiness occurs, Hegel believed, because we succeed in realizing ourselves both as individuals and as members of the community.
The dangers, for Brooks, are those found in individualism: amoral pursuit of pleasure, with no concern for others, or a self-indulgent, moral superiority--what Hegel called "the beautiful soul." The libertine has no place in society save as a parasite, one who takes advantage of the community's trust to satisfy themselves at other's expense. (Think the Andrew Tates of the world.) But the beautiful soul has no place because they refuse to--regarding themselves as too pure to contaminate themselves with the give-and-take of social and political life. (Think about the people not voting, or voting for Jill Stein, because they cannot "in good conscience" vote for "the lesser of two evils.")
For Hegel, these individualistic positions are not just wrong, they are miserable. That doesn't mean the individuals don't experience pleasure in what they're doing. But they still miss out on the best parts of social life: our ability to realize ourselves in social institutions. Some of the greatest pleasures of life are being good at what we do and being recognized as good at it--and these are only possible in institutions, which provide standards for what being good means. A good chess player can be good--and recognized as such--by their play against other chess players, just like a good professor can be measured against what other professors do.
These institutions give us possibilities of happiness unavailable to those outside them. Think about reading (which were a rare ability in Hegel's day!): with the ability, you can access millions of books, pour over tweets all day, or write articles. Someone who can't read would miss out on so much of contemporary life: it wouldn't limit what they can know and what they can do. The institution of education, then, makes possible new avenues of life. But so does the institution of marriage, or religious institutions, or political clubs, or friendship, or even work. But to fully appreciate these institutions, you have to join them and put the effort in.
Libertines and beautiful souls are neither; they simply do not recognize how much they are missing out on. In that regard, they are miserable because they are oblivious to how much they are missing out on. And, on this front, Brooks is exactly right: don't miss out on social life. He concludes, "The goal is not to be understood by the world but to understand the world as best we can and participate in our human community with a spirit of love." Hegel would surely agree.
Recognizing Antigone
But this reading misses the key challenge at the heart of Hegel's ethical picture. Fundamentally, the problem of Hegel's philosophy is recognition, and the long trajectory traced out in The Phenomenology of Spirit is the story of how hard it is for humans to obtain the recognition they deserve--and also to build a society capable of recognizing the dignity of other people.
For this reason, Hegel's discussion of ethical community focuses on how individuals might undermine the moral community through no fault of their own. Hegel introduces the problem of moral community through "the heavenly Antigone--the most magnificent figure ever to have appeared on earth."
Antigone has a place in the community, she desires to do her duties, and she wants to be a good citizen. The problem Antigone faces is that she cannot perform her duties and be a good citizen or have a place in society, because these come into conflict. As a sister, her duty demands she bury her brother who she loves. But, as a citizen, her duty demands she obey her King and withhold burial rites to her brother (who was a traitor). In short, Antigone cannot be recognized by her society, not because she is willful and arrogant, but because her commitments in one direction undermine her commitments in the other.
Plato solved the problem of Antigone by getting rid of the family and gender-specific duties (see book five of The Republic). Confucius, wrestling with similar issues from a different direction, took Antigone's side: our duties to family outweigh our duties to society (see Analects 13.18). But Hegel, the philosopher of negativity, argued against both solutions. For him, Antigone poses a challenge that cannot be "solved" by taking sides, but only through suffering--with "tarrying with the negative." The goal of history, for Hegel, is finding a place for Antigone: how do we, as a society, recognize the individual who might undermine or destroy our ethical community?
The Need for Recognition
The central chunk of Hegel's Phenomenology is the discussion of "Spirit," which is the struggles of moral community to make sense of Antigone. The problem cannot be solved as Brooks suggests, where Antigone just fits in, since doing so would require giving up her duty to her brother. But it is also not society just overlook her infraction, since that fails to recognize Antigone as she is. The difficulty is that society must change in order for Antigone to be recognized.
This is important to stress: Antigone is not a libertine--she laments at length how much she wants to be a wife and mother before she dies--nor a beautiful soul--she performs her actions and accepts her punishment. She is not indulging her individuality at the expense of others; she is just being herself and doing what she is supposed to. How can we build a society where people can be themselves and be recognized for it?
The rest of Spirit is that story (as told through European history, obviously): oppression of individuality in the Romans gives way to Luther's demand for recognition where, like Antigone, he cannot perform his duties to God and Church since they come into conflict. It shows up in the French Revolution, where citizens cannot perform their duties to reason--to think for themselves--and the Church and State.
For Hegel, Napoleon's conquest of old Europe brought with it the possibility of a new world, where citizens could be equals--where we could be recognized by the state as possessing a right to self-determination, not mere peasants or subjects, and be capable of choosing our religion, rather being bound to the Church. The Sittlichkeit Napoleon suggested (though, sadly, did not pull off) is one that makes room for multiple and potentially conflicting institutions--where Luther can simply accept or form a different religion without problem, where Antigone can bury her brother without punishment, and where citizens can abolish laws they disagree with.
The brilliance of Napoleon's promise, for Hegel, was the invention of civil society--a whole dimension of life where we can be ourselves and realize our lives, untouched by higher powers. If we need new institutions, we can build them and, in doing so, we can achieve the recognition we need. Put bluntly, we can form a punk band to yell, "down with Capitalism!," and have our political vision recognized without being shut down by "the powers that be." We can start a new religion, or bounce between them, or call them all foolish. We can get married--or get divorced--without being banished from society. And, in all these things, we can be seen--we can be ourselves and be recognized for who we are.
Happiness for Some, Not for All
Hegel is famed for declaring "the end of history." But he didn't really mean it. His advice to a student, John Roebling, made this clear: go to the America, where "the future would be built [and] a man might determine his own destiny.” History ends only temporarily, for brief periods of peace. But demands for recognition will return, where people will feel they cannot be themselves and achieve their duties in society as it currently exists.
And this is why not everyone can be happy. Bog-standard, mediocre white males like me have been able to achieve full recognition in society since Hegel's time: I can be myself in all the ways I desire and can be recognized and accepted in those capacities. It's pretty great, and I can see why Hegel regarded the French and American Revolutions as the end of history for people like me. I can vote, go to school, marry well, receive accolades, and all the rest.
But, for much of society, the demand for recognition has not been fulfilled. Successful Black men and women in government right now are losing their jobs and are branded as incompetent, undeserving "DEI" hires. Their brilliance, hard-work, and success are being stripped of them. They cannot perform their duties--to their country, to their family, and to themselves--because much of society refuses to recognize Black excellence.
The same problems go more broadly: teachers who cannot tell their students about their same-sex partner; women who can't play sports because they are intersex or transgender; scholars who cannot pursue their work because it is "woke"; immigrants who cannot support their family from fear of arrest; and so on. They all have the same duties as the people around them, but the outlet for them is foreclosed. Society refuses to recognize them, regardless of what they do.
For these people, and so many others, the lack of recognition makes happiness impossible. This is not to say the lives of those without recognition are all miserable. They can (and always do) form their own moral community and own institutions to achieve some recognition and acceptance. But many are stuck in the place of Antigone, incapable of living a socially sanctioned life, where their merits and successes can be recognized and accepted, where they cannot participate in the institutions available to others. And this is not because of individualism, as Brooks thinks, where they are driven to pursue selfish desires or self-righteous ones. Most of them just want to be allowed to do what all the bog-standard white guys like me get to do. And society won't let them.
In short, Hegel is not the philosopher of happiness by fitting in. He's instead the philosopher who would see the unmet demand for recognition in our society as a powder keg. And he'd probably say that MLK got the problem about right:
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. If [the] repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.
For Hegel, like MLK, there can be peace in the moral community only if the moral community genuinely recognizes its members. But in an unjust community, where people cannot be seen for who they are, the peace cannot be maintained for long. Hegel contends that the human Spirit is irrepressible; it will achieve freedom and recognition, even if it has to destroy our society to do it.
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