Extract from
Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz ) (Translation by the author)
"We no longer need to pray in the morning because we have the daily newspaper."
Hegel, around 1795
"Come into the open, friend", hardly anyone has expressed the philosophy of freedom more beautifully than Friedrich Hölderlin (Hölderlin 1801). Fritz Hölderlin's two close and mutually influential friends were Hegel, who was called Wilhelm (nicknamed "old man") and Schelling, who was called Friedrich. The three friends shared a room in the Tübingen Stift (faculty of protestant theology at University of Tübingen) for three years from 1790, all three not yet twenty years old. At the same time, the French Revolution was taking place a hundred kilometres to the west. Their other circle of friends on campus also included the "Mömpelgarder" (students from Mömpelgard, then a Württemberg exclave in revolutionary France, today the French Montbéliard region), who also did not adapt to the monastery-like everyday life in the Stift (with the trinity of Bible, Pietist confessional writings and strong faculty rules) and together developed a counter-world in which they polemicized against the Tübingen orthodoxy of the "formal authority of the Bible" (according to their professor at the time, Gottlob Christian Storr) and in which they began to think about a new world view.
In their conversations, freedom becomes their major theme, thinking about a new social and political order. During these years, Hölderlin dreamed of his Arcadia. His poetry focuses on the freedoms of man, who goes into the open, fed by the sources of ancient Greek philosophy and the real possibilities of new beginnings in France. The young thinkers Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling were torn between euphoria and despair, vision and disappointment, hope and conflict. Their early texts and correspondence manifest a way of thinking that would later be described as the nucleus of German idealism. They devoured the writings of Rousseau, Schiller and Kant and read French newspapers. They argued about the despotic dangers of revolutionary logic, and Hegel in particular explored the possibilities of a new Realpolitik with a constitution and constitutional state.
Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, who came from a family of pastors (like Hölderlin and Schelling), attracted the attention of his teachers at an early age. As a nine-year-old, he received from his class teacher an 18-volume edition of Shakespeare, which, like Schiller, had a strong influence on him (cf. Vieweg 2019). Even before enrolling, Hegel promised in a letter to the Duke that he would "study with all seriousness and diligence" and "choose no other profession" than that of theologian, but soon afterwards he enthused among his friends about the new language that revolutionary thought was producing. He was inspired by Rousseau's words from the Contrat Social: "Man is born free and everywhere he lies in chains. Some believe themselves to be masters of others and are greater slaves than they" (Rousseau 2012). Hegel and his sister Christiane exchange exuberant comments on Schiller's tone in Ode to Freedom. The young thinkers informed themselves about developments in France and maintained contact with the revolutionary networks. In 1791, Hegel, Schelling and their conspiratorial circle erected a tree of liberty outside the city and inscribed revolutionary slogans such as "vive la liberté" in a charity paper. A pharmacist from Tübingen, who is a member of the network, spills the beans. The Duke appears in person at the Tübingen Stift to investigate the activities of the scholars. The ringleader just manages to escape into exile in Strasbourg. The Duke rebukes the "spirit of rebelliousness". Hegel and a few others get off lightly. Promises of freedom and despotism - the Tübingen Three also had to tread a fine line. Critics in the Duchy of Württemberg experienced this first-hand. Scholar Rümelin is dismissed "for bad behaviour". Hölderlin was also reprimanded, and Hegel ended up in a detention cell for several hours for minor offenses. Political opponents were even threatened with imprisonment, banishment, disbarment, flight, exile and extradition.
The philosophy of freedom that Hegel drafted following the Tübingen years can be summarized in the words of Klaus Vieweg, in the form of an incipient "age” in which man par excellence, every man, according to Hegel, is regarded as a "new, supreme and ultimate saint". (Vieweg 2023)
In the context of Hegel's philosophy, man does not stand opposite a world, but is part of the world. For Hegel, man cannot have an overview of the whole, he is always in the middle of it. The term "freedom", as Hegel understands it, is more than bourgeois freedom with property rights, voting rights, freedom of opinion, right of residence or freedom of movement. "Freedom", writes Hegel in his "Encyclopaedia", is "precisely this, to be with oneself in oneself, to depend on oneself, to be the determining factor of oneself". (Hegel 1817)
For the further development of management, we thus find an interesting task description in Hegel in the context of organizing, here in companies. Managing does not mean continuing the arbitrariness and drill in the tradition of the despotic foremen in the early phase of industrialization (not even partially) and interpreting power in such a way that as a manager you can do what you want. The process of organizing and leading must be designed in such a way that you are temporarily (as long as you are a manager) given the freedom to vary your actions. However, this freedom remains restricted if it exceeds the limits through inhumanity, crime or ruthlessness. The constitutional state guarantees the freedom of human action and restricts civil rights only where individual or organizational action restricts and endangers higher rights to life and health of all. Hegel uses the terms "exceptional situation" or "state of emergency" for situations in which the common good is endangered. As a society, this means that in crises such as war or pandemics, intervention can be "proportionate" and civil rights can be temporarily curtailed. In organizations, too, management can temporarily suspend structures of self-organization in times of crisis.
Hegel's sentence, "what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable", has often been read as an excuse of some despotic decisions. Klaus Vieweg refers here to another of Hegel's sentences: "What is real is reasonable. But not everything that exists is real." What happens in state bodies (in Hegel's time in the Württemberg or Prussian state) can therefore also be unreasonable. In liberal democracies, the corrective here is free elections and in the economy, competition for economic advantages and, at the same time, legitimacy in matters of the common good.
For Klaus Vieweg, Hegel's philosophy of freedom can be clarified with his concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), which he locates under the two levels of ethical life in a family and in a bourgeois society. The third level is achieved through ethical life or morality on a state level. At this level, the state embodies moral development and becomes the highest destination of free will, of law and its realization. If Louis XIV could still say "I am the state", the free citizens of a modern state can say "I am the state". The state becomes for the people, for the "general life of its citizens, their public cause, res publica". (Vieweg 2019, p. 519)
"The state must establish itself as a formation that has gone through education. State action must be guided by conscious purposes, known principles and well thought-out laws, in full knowledge of the circumstances and contexts; only in this way does the state satisfy the demand for freedom. Education must therefore be considered a public good without restriction. This is where the epistocratic aspect of Hegel's philosophy of the state comes into play. Voting, political decision-making and participation, especially universal suffrage, should be based on knowledge, on the political education of voters." (ibid. p. 525)
Vieweg understands Hegel's philosophy and his main work Phenomenology of Spirit as an exercise in accomplishing scepticism. The integrated scepticism remains the negative-reasoning or dialectical moment of the logical, as the principle of all movement, of all life. (see Kozatsas et al. 2017)
In Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom, the first positions of liberal modernity are presented in a remarkable way. All are equal before the law, a plea for the welfare state and the provision of basic necessities, against colonialism, the rejection of racism and all forms of slavery, for the separation of church and state and for a regulated market. Hegel's philosophy forms one of the groundbreaking foundations that help people to learn to live freely and to shape the process of organizing and leading in such a way that, in leadership positions temporarily have the freedom to vary their actions.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Gang aufs Land. An Landauer, 1801
Klaus Vieweg, Hegel, München, 2019
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ich sah eine andere Welt. Philosophische Briefe, München, 2012
Klaus Vieweg, Herausgeber, Das Beste von Hegel. The Best of Hegel, Berlin, 2023, S. 7
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Heidelberg, 1817
Jannis Kozatsas , Georges Faraklas , Stella Synegianni und Klaus Vieweg, Hegel and Scepticism, Berlin, 2017
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