Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: Conceptions of Freedom
Hegel and Marx: Common Features
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) share some common features in their philosophies:
- Both reflect on historical change as driven by internal laws of history itself. In Hegel, this law is the conflict between ideas; in Marx, it is class struggle.
- For each historical moment, both ideas, such as morality, and social institutions are defined by that historical moment.
- History is a process with a beginning and a final outcome, which means it is progressive, so that each historical moment is higher than the previous one and inferior to the one that follows.
Freedom: From Political to Individual
The other major underlying theme is that of freedom. This issue became important from the French Revolution onward, understood then as political freedom, linked to the concept of citizenship: the free man is the citizen, that is, a person who is involved and in union with other people, participates in, and is responsible for the functioning of society.
A few years later, in the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant inaugurated another conception of freedom that would have an extraordinary influence. Freedom consists of independence; that is, in the absence of external limits or constraints. Thus, total or absolute freedom is infinite, and only God would be free. God appears as a goal that justifies the existence of freedom in man.
Hegel and Marx: Freedom as Self-Realization
Hegel and Marx start with another notion of freedom, which, parallel to the Kantian one, would have great influence in the two centuries that followed: freedom understood as being and acting as one truly is. The opposite of freedom is alienation, which literally means “being another.” For Hegel, freedom is not placed on the individual, but in something he calls “Spirit,” which in this context is something like the human essence. Hegel has a conception of totality. Marx, for his part, puts the individual, not as an individual in itself, but as belonging to a class. To be free, for Marx, would be to think, act, and be according to the traits of the social class to which one belongs.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Freedom and the Individual
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) raises another notion of freedom centered on the individual. He believes that social groups, communities, what he called “masses” (especially applying this concept to the socialist and nationalist movements), were an obstacle to the individual. The masses are moved by slogans, by what the leader says; they are the new sheep, cowards, and slaves. Only in the individual does freedom lie. But the path of freedom is difficult; it is to go in search of what one is, of what one holds within, of one’s truth. To accept what he called the “death of values” is to accept that there are none, that one is alone and responsible to oneself.
Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Construction of Desire
Finally, any interpretation mentioned above gives space to the theory inaugurated by Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis, the truth behind each individual is their desire, which can only be built through a firm commitment to the father after the death of this father, understood as a symbolic image, not as a subject or real person.
Hegel: Being Oneself and the Spirit
In Hegel’s case, being oneself is to incorporate the values, principles, and habits of society. The only thing that is real is the Spirit, which is the set of all those values, habits, principles, and ideas, embodied in institutions. The subject or individual is secondary, and their truth lies in the extent to which they join the Spirit. Alienation is to get out of the Spirit.