BY Stuart Jeffries
Nicolas Sarkozy’s outburst on burqas calls up visions of the Terror. He really should read Hegel.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s problem is that he hasn’t read enough Hegel. Let me rephrase that: one of his problems is that he hasn’t read enough Hegel. When the French President told a special session of parliament earlier this week, “we cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity,” he would have done better instead to reflect on that passage in the Philosophy of Right in which Hegel distinguishes between abstract and concrete freedom.
The former means the freedom to do whatever you want, which is why you can choose between 32 different kinds of four-inch wedges the glossies tell you look sexy but in none of which you can walk. Such is the freedom of late capitalism, which seems to systematically strive to deprive us of an identity that we might construct ourselves.
For Hegel this isn’t real freedom, because our wants and desires are determined by society. By those lights, a western fashion victim is as much a sartorial prisoner as a woman in a burqa. By real freedom, Hegel meant not doing whatever one wants but having the freedom from societal conditioning by using reason. If you come across someone who manages to be really free in this sense then send me their names so we can celebrate their escape.
http://newageislam.com/sarkozy-and-the-burqas--/islam-and-the-west/d/1501
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