Page 37 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

known. At this later date, Hegel retained the idea that a particular form
of Understanding is simply a stage in the fuller evolution of a social
Reason itself. Now, however, Hegel asserts that this form can only follow,
never anticipate the full emergence of reality. He wrote:

One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be.
Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As
the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut
and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching
of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only
when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real
and that the ideal apprehends the real world in its substance and builds it
up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints
its grey in grey, then has the shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey
in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. 11

Such a daunting stoicism introduced a mechanical element into the other-
wise more flexible and dialectical body of Hegelian thought. If one sticks
with the earlier Hegel, then the ability of consciousness to achieve fore-
sight is preserved, but this is not an easily won and spontaneous fore-
sight. It does not arise arbitrarily but out of the emerging situation itself.
It was this conception which gave rise to Marx’s well-known formulation
to the effect that society only sets itself problems which it can solve,
since the emergence of the problem is a sign that the solution is at hand –
problem and solution are organically connected and necessarily emerge
together as part of a single process. Yet this is not to be understood
mechanically and as a fixed relationship: solution may precede problem –
consciousness anticipating reality – or arise entangled with it in complex
and contradictory ways which pose intense ideological and political
challenges.
Hall comes close to this dialectical conception in his well-known
essay, ‘The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees’. The key
point made by Hall here is the Hegelian one, ‘materialized’ by Marx. This
is the idea that failures and limitations of popular and individual con-
sciousness do not arise from failures in logic and the process of reason-
ing. They spring from reality itself. Reality has its own logic and process
out of which a grasp of this reality itself emerges. Therefore, it is not
truth alone which springs from reality while false consciousness is an
intellectual error. On the contrary, both true and false consciousness are
organically rooted in the process of the emergence of reality. Therefore,
the specific form which both true and false consciousness takes depends

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