Man is a social animal, directed by others, but his sociability does not lead him into a peaceful civil society, because at the root of sociability is conflict.
In trying to unmask the root of conflict and desire, I have drawn from the ideas of Rene Girard, Hegel, and Fukuyama. See “Mimetic Theory: The Origin of Conflict” and “The First Man.”
Hegel’s idea about the primordial battle is not so much about conflict, but about freedom.
Imagine a time when there were no institutions, no politics, no belief systems of any kind, but only primordial man, with his instinct to survive. Under such circumstances, imagine a violent struggle to the death between two enemies.
This bloody battle can lead to one of three results.
- It can lead to the death of both combatants.
- It can lead to the death of one of the men, in which case the survivor is unsatisfied because there is no longer another human consciousness to recognize him.
- The battle can terminate in the relationship of lordship and bondage, in which one man decides to submit to a life of slavery rather than face the risk of violent death.
The master is happy because he has risked his life and received recognition for doing so from another human being. This initial encounter between “first men” is just as violent as Hobbes’s state of nature or Locke’s state of war. But this does not result in a social contract or other form of peaceful civil society, but in an unequal relationship of lordship and bondage.
Girard too dismisses the idea of a social contract as being an unlikely development in a world where violence between all men was constant. But he sees the scapegoat mechanism as the source of peace rather than a new relationship between master and slave.
For Hegel just as for Marx, primitive society was divided into social classes, but unlike Marx, he did not think that important class differences were based on economic functions (landlord or peasant) but on one’s attitude towards violent death. Simply, society was divided between masters who were willing to risk their lives and slaves who were not.
According to Fukuyama, Hegel’s account is historically more accurate than that of Marx.
Many traditional aristocratic societies initially sprang from the “warrior ethos” of nomadic tribes who conquered more sedentary people through ruthless cruelty and bravery.
After the initial conquest, the masters in subsequent generations settled down on estates and then assumed an economic relationship as landlords who were paid taxes by the slaves they ruled. But the warrior ethos – the sense of innate superiority based on the willingness to risk death remained the core characteristic of the culture of aristocratic societies, long after years of peace and leisure allowed these same aristocrats to degenerate into pampered and effeminate courtiers.
Modern people will find Hegel’s account strange, especially the willingness to die for prestige as a basic human trait, since such a trait seems primitive, along with dueling and revenge murders. But there still exist people who risk their lives over a name, flag, or piece of cloth, but they belong to gangs (Bloods or the Crips) or live in countries like Afghanistan. Is such a man more deeply human (or free) than someone who backs down from a challenge and submits to peaceful arbitration or to the courts?
To be willing to risk one’s life in a battle for pure prestige can be understood only if we consider Hegel’s view of the meaning of freedom. The normal definition of freedom is that it is the absence of restraint. Hobbes defined it as the absence of opposition-by opposition, and this can be applied to irrational and inanimate creatures as well. A rock rolling down a hill and a hungry bear in the woods facing no constraint would both be “free.”
But the tumbling of the rock is determined by gravity and the slope of the hill, and the bear’s behavior is determined by natural desires – only in a formal sense is the bear free. A bear has no choice but to respond to hunger and instinct, it cannot choose to go on hunger strikes on behalf of higher causes. The bear and the rock can only behave according to the laws of the natural environment, there is an absence of volition, and therefore, an absence of true freedom.
Hobbes thinks of man, no differently than he does a bear or a rock. The human being is a complicated machine that behaves according to a more complicated set of rules. If he faces no physical constraint in his search for food, this only creates the appearance, but not the reality, of freedom. Ultimately, man has basic passions like joy, pain, fear, hope, indignation, and ambition, and in different combinations they are sufficient to explain all human behavior.
In the end, Hobbes does not believe that man is free in the sense of having moral choice.
But Hegel starts with a different understanding of man. Not only is man undetermined by his physical nature, but his very humanity consists in his ability to overcome his animal nature.
He is free not just in Hobbes’s formal sense of being physically unconstrained, but free in the metaphysical sense of being radically un-determined by nature. This includes his own nature, the natural environment around him, and nature’s laws. He is, in short, capable of true moral choice, that is, choice between two courses of action not simply on the basis of the greater utility of one over another, not simply as the result of the victory of one set of passions and instincts over another, but because of an inherent freedom to make and adhere to his own rules.
The End of History and The Last Man, Fukuyama
Man’s dignity is not based on his superior calculating ability that makes him a clever machine than animals but his capacity for free moral choice. But how do we know that man is free in this profound sense?
Hegel does not deny that many of man’s behaviors are determined by natural instinct, but not all of them are. He can also act in ways that contravene his natural instincts and not to satisfy a more powerful instinct but just for contravention’s sake. That is why man’s willingness to risk his life in a battle for pure prestige is an important part of Hegel’s historical account. By risking his life, man proves that he can act in contrary to his most basic and powerful instinct, self-preservation.
As Kojeve puts it, man’s desire must win against his animal desire for self-preservation.
And that is why it is important that the primeval battle at the beginning of history be over prestige alone, or an apparent trifle like a medal or a flag that signifies recognition. The reason that I fight is to get another human being to recognize the fact that I am willing to risk my life, and that I am therefore free and authentically human.
If the fight was for another purpose, a more rational one, then it would be fought for the satisfaction of an animal need, no different from fights between lower animals.
Only man is capable of engaging in a bloody battle for the sole purpose of demonstrating that he has contempt for his own life, that he is something more than a complicated machine or a “slave to his passions.”
You can argue that the willingness to risk your life in a battle for prestige is only apparently “counterinstinctual” but in fact, is another behavior determined by a deeper instinct, which Hegel was not aware of. Modern biology suggests that both animals and men engage in prestige battles, but no one speculates that the latter are moral agents. If we take modern biology seriously, any human behavior is reducible to biological and chemical mechanisms that have nothing to do with free will.
Hegel and Kant knew that the materialistic foundations of modern natural science posed a threat to human free choice. Kant’s great Critique of Pure Reason was written for a purpose: to “fence off an “island” in the midst of the sea of mechanical natural causation that would, in a philosophically rigorous way, permit truly free, human moral choice to coexist with modern physics. Hegel accepted the existence of this “island,” indeed, an island much larger and capacious than Kant envisioned. Both philosophers believed that in certain respects human beings were quite literally not subject to the laws of physics.“
This does not mean that humans have ultimate freedom, that they could move faster than the speed of light, but that moral phenomena cannot be reduced to the mechanics of matter-in-motion. The validity of this island is up for debate, but it is worth thinking about the risk of death as a psychological phenomenon. The risk of death points to something very real. Whether free will exists or not, all humans act as if it does and evaluate each other on that basis. Men do not only seek material comfort, but respect or recognition, and they believe that they deserve respect because they possess a certain value or dignity. Any psychological or political theory that does not take into consideration man’s desire for recognition, and his rare but important willingness to act against his primal instinct, would misunderstand human behavior.
Hegel did not see freedom as just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was uniquely human. Freedom and nature, in this sense, are diametrically opposed. Freedom begins where nature ends. Only when man transcends his natural, animal existence, to create a new self does human freedom emerge.
The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.
This point is like Becker’s argument in The Denial of Death. The denial of death is the same as the denial of mortality or the denial of nature. What Hegel saw as a landmark of human freedom, the choice to go beyond the parameters set forth by nature, to die or devote one’s life for a symbol, for an idea, a flag, was precisely what Becker saw as self-denial, or the denial of one’s true reality. Yet the latter seems to ignore the fact that by choosing self-denial, the human being, far from committing an error, proves that he is free. It is our very unnaturalness that gives us our identity. It is precisely because we cannot be content with the mere satisfaction of natural desires that we can be considered human.
In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley extends this point further. It is this human instinct to go beyond the basic urges for survival that leads not only to self-sacrifice for a flag or an ideal, but eventually, to the creation of enormous wealth and life-changing technology. If man was content simply to subsist on bread alone, then we would have no computers, no surgeons, no jets or rocket ships, and ultimately, no civilization.