Hegel And The Constitution
By Michael R. Bowen (04/01/03)
The last Hegel1 I read was in college, and I don't remember much of it. But what has always stayed with me was a point the instructor made: that Hegel liked to draw the distinction between categories and real individual objects. From the podium, the instructor pointed straight at me and said, "Mr. Bowen! Please show me a people." Of course I stood up and waved my arm over the assembled students. "Wrong. Those are some people. I want to see a people."
Because of course people is a category, a term to describe a characteristic held in common by a number of individuals (in this case, membership in the species Homo sapiens), but it does not describe anything about an individual human. And as P. J. O'Rourke likes to point out, human beings come only in individual units.
Collective concepts can be quite appropriate, of course. The concept of cars is perfectly adequate to describe the entire universe of automobiles as well as any single one, because the differences among individuals aren't really all that important. Whether it's a Maserati or a pickup, they are all four-wheeled internal combustion-driven conveyances in which we sit in order to go places or impress women. The term is all we need in order to know that interstates are not good places to pitch a tent, because cars come flying down them at great speed. Snake says pretty much all you need to know about a slithery reptile, at least along at first: some of them are venomous, even though most are not; practically speaking, the word means "creature you'd better know something about before handling". Lumping all slithery reptiles together under one term doesn't necessarily lead you to mistreat or misunderstand them.
Group terms can be a name and a judgment at the same time, as when certain animals of different species are lumped together as vermin, or when the English refer to fishermen who use bait for carp as coarse anglers. These appellations are more loaded, and imply something about the proper treatment, such as not letting guys with worms fish your trout stream.
Whether or not it's true of animals, I think we can all agree that each human being is a unique individual, however much his anatomy and eating habits may be like someone else's. That's why collective names lead usually to trouble when applied to humans. The obvious examples are racial epithets and class distinctions like redneck or hillbilly. But even terms which on their face imply no contempt can be destructive -- in fact this latter type of collective noun is often downright murderous.
All the greatest mass murders in history have been committed in the name of political beliefs which lumped people into large groups instead of viewing them as many individuals. Whether it's a German talking about the Volk, the Aryans, and the Untermenschen, or a Russian referring to the masses or the proletariat, that kind of talk always leads to concentration camps and war. But even if it stops short of mass murder, we should be wary when someone tells us how things ought to run by using group names.
My neighbor has certain rights which I must honor in my dealings with him, and they exist because he is a fellow human. I have no right to his wife or his car, no right to defraud him in a business deal, no right to silence him just because I think he's a pinko. The same rights prevail in my dealings with Mrs. Neighbor, but not because there is such a thing as "Women's Rights". If she's a black lesbian, it's still wrong to cheat her, but not because of "Gay Rights" or Affirmative Action. You cannot postulate rights specific to one particular group without elevating them above the others and diminishing the rights of all.
The group approach doesn't just fail in achieving fairness among different types of people; it also serves to suppress the rights of individuals who deviate from the supposed norm of the group. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a black man who condemned Larry Elder, Condoleeza Rice, and Clarence Thomas as "bootlickers for the Man".
Our Constitution is a monument to the rights of individual human beings. There are no clauses in there specifying race, religion, or sex. Nowhere in the Constitution do I see the words "man" or "male", nor a reference to races, except for the mention of Indians in section 2, article I. Aside from the traditional use of "he" as a genderless pronoun, the only term used for a person in the Constitution is just that, Person. There is no White, Black, Gay, or Transgendered Constitution.
That the rights it delineates have not always been allowed to everyone who deserves them says nothing about the Constitution but a lot about human frailty. Whenever there has been institutionalized unfairness in this country, it has always been in violation of the Constitution—and attempts have always been made to correct it, however debatable their success. Ours is a Constitution of Persons, specifying the rights of the individual, not of classes or races. That is why it has stood the test of time so well. And that is why we must turn the jaundiced eye on anyone who wants to lump us together into categories. When we're identified by our group, we cease to be individuals. And when we cease to be individuals, we cease to have rights.
1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), disciple of German philosopher Emmanuel Kant, of the "Idealist" school and proponent of the 'dialectic' method of philosophical discourse.
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