Hegel- Public and Private

In the manner that Hegel presents his philosophical reasoning in these sections, he opens few possibilities for places to distinguish or draw the line between public and private. The clearest way of attaching those words to Hegel’s ideas seems to be to see his contrast of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as synonymous to private and public.  Examining the relationship between public and private through the lens of these definitions restricts many common associations that go with the private realm down to one person and expands the public associations into a space that includes everything but the unbroken sphere of one individual.  While our private realm does play a role in our identity, even in the universal conception of self as the antithesis to God, it is irrelevant to the process of self-actualization and is only significant when brought into the public realm to be shared and enhanced. The ability to be private in this sense is therefore unattainable to us upon our entrance into the determinate world,

Freedom conventionally resides in the private realm, and so when Hegel’s conception of the self is brought into the public, or into the realm of ‘others’, we lose a certain ultimate, albeit irrelevant or insignificant, private freedom of the self. As soon as we burst our self-contained bubble in our natural desire to know ourselves and become conscious of our own consciousness, we sacrifice that brand of limitless freedom for something restrained and determinate, yet ultimately greater. Our private self, despite being infinitely free, is meaningless until it is recognized - at which point it becomes nonexistent.

There is the classic old saying that considers whether or not a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it actually makes a sound; with a Hegelian perspective here, one could argue that the empty forest contains an infinite amount of possibility, yet, devoid of witness, it is essentially nothing. Granted, it is indeterminate, ‘free’ even; but in a sense, it isn’t real. Unlike the forest, our ability to be self-conscious of our own self-consciousness means that we can be our own witness. This ability, however, can only be derived through interaction, or sublation, with other people, and so to be our own witness we must enter into the public realm and sacrifice our realm of absolute freedom and privacy.

 In the master/slave dialectic, the master is able to regain more of his freedom by defying that very process: he sees his selfish freedom to do what he wants as more desirable than attempting to find a sense of self and to realize his consciousness. By objectifying other autonomous beings, he is rejecting his own opportunity for self-actualization by his inability to see them as the same as him. The imbalanced condition is the result of the master’s attempt to retreat into disillusion (of seeing others as a means for his ends, their objectification), therefore retreating into the insignificance of the private realm as well.