The pandemic has accustomed us to using philosophical vocabulary in day-to-day politics.
Immanuel Kant's categorical became the virological imperative.
The new Federal Minister of Health has now dared the famous step from Kant to Hegel, i.e. completing the course of German idealism, by quoting the latter in the Bundestag debate on compulsory vaccination on January 24 with the sentence that freedom is an understanding of necessity.
But is this statement even verifiable? Jörg Phil Friedrich put forward the thesis in the daily newspaper "Die Welt" that the minister used "the wrong quotation from Hegel". This calls into question the accuracy in the application of scientific teachings to politics, for which Lauterbach stands as a health economist and epidemiologist like only Greta Thunberg and Christian Drosten.
In fact, the sentence, as Lauterbach has quoted it, is not to be found in Hegel but in Friedrich Engels.
In his “Anti-Duhring” he reflected on the relationship between man and nature: the world around us is ruled by causality, to which we as earthly beings should also submit.
For example, if we jump off the ground, we will land on it again after a short time - gravity cannot be overridden.
It is therefore necessary and limits our arbitrariness to that extent, unless we succeed in mobilizing other natural laws against it.
If, for example, we manage to use fluid mechanics to construct an aircraft that temporarily evades gravity through lift, we have broken the compulsion of nature by applying our knowledge.
This is how Engels arrived at his sentence.
He was concerned with the fact that mankind has freed itself from nature through nature over the course of history: “Freedom therefore consists in domination over ourselves and over external nature based on knowledge of the necessities of nature;
it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.” Without a doubt, this is a variation of Hegel's position, whose philosophy is teleological, i.e. deals with goal-oriented processes, which in history becomes an imperative of development: Man must, like Engels has described, to fight out of the constraints of nature, to develop into a spirit and ultimately to emancipate it as well.
Freedom is more than arbitrary freedom
So Engels may have gotten the wrong wording, he hit the spirit of Hegel's thoughts pretty much exactly, which is why it is not entirely correct when Friedrich now claims: "Hegel never said that and didn't mean it either." Even on the main work, the " Science of logic”, anyone who wanted to defend Engels' interpretation of Hegel could claim that where the category of necessity is developed, freedom is also explicitly mentioned.