Hegel's Theory against Public and Private

Hegel’s idea of subjectivity and the other can be viewed in relation to public and private in two ways. One way is to view it on a small individual scale, and the other addresses the bigger picture. Each involves seeing the pre-self-conscious individual as an individual in private, and “the other” is found in public. On the smaller scale, there is a single individual who finds self-actualization through the public sphere; he uses the public to determine himself in private. On a larger scale, what determines the boundaries and extent of privacy and private life for any society must come from a relation or exchange with it’s “other,” which is the ultimate public: the government. His theory involves two “selves” that use each other to achieve self-consciousness, “the process is absolutely the double process of both self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same” (67). Also in both cases and following Hegel’s theory, the individual and its other become conscious of themselves.

If a person were to live their life utterly secluded and engulfed by privacy, according to Hegel, he would never find true self-consciousness. A person must enter into the public sphere, and therefore step outside their private realm in order to become self-conscious. Self-consciousness or self-actualization is contingent on there being another person or “other” for the first person to sublate. This “other” being can exist as other individuals or as public society as a whole. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, he extensively discusses how an individual can use a relationship with another individual for self-consciousness, but his theory also is true to the relationship between an individual and society. In most cases, public society is almost a being in itself, and a person can shape society while society shapes that person. The word shape and the term “self-actualization” can be used interchangeably when addressing public and private. By viewing society as a public entity and an individual as a private being, one can see how a person is self-actualized by that society while at the same time, society sublates the individual and comes out of this process with a part of him in its composition.

In the large scale sense, the public is government. The people may create the government to start, but their privacy is found through a self-actualization process in which the government is also further defined. This is Hegel’s life and death struggle, and it benefits both the people and the government to engage in it, “they must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth, and make this a fact both in the case of the other and in their own case as well” (68). Self-consciousness in terms of a government and the privacy of its people means discovering the boundaries of each. How much privacy the people are allowed depends on how the government views its people and how much control the government has. At the same time, the boundaries and control of the government depends on how its people view or wish to view it.