On the Highway of Despair: Hegel and Winnicott on Growing Up

Suffering is a feature of human existence. - Buddha’s first noble truth

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow. - Ecclesiastes

The True is the whole. -Hegel

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I feel nervous, the way I used to feel at the start of intro to philosophy courses. Many students were there for credit-hours, not because they were curious about philosophy. So to make it a good class, I needed to spark their curiosity. Finding ways to do that was part of the fun of teaching. What made me nervous was knowing that thinking (not to be confused with memorizing and regurgitating) is hard work. And reading great philosophers thoughtfully is some of the harder cognitive work out there. So I knew it was a tough sell. If all that weren’t hard enough, to “get” philosophy you need to have, or acquire, a taste for thinking for its own sake. Or, as my beloved and scientifically minded sister would say in mock exasperation, “Navel-gazing.”

This note offers one big idea-navel to gaze on: Growing up into our true selves is a developmental process driven by negativity. As Hegel famously said, ‘the road to wisdom is a highway of despair.’ Perhaps no one has done more to unfold the depth and significance of this force of negativity than Hegel. It was he who kept coming to mind as I was thinking about D.W. Winnicott for these last few notes. I’m nervous because Hegel’s a notoriously difficult thinker, but I’ll do my best to keep it simple.

As a lived experience, negativity involves suffering of some sort: pain, loss, rage, paranoia, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, loneliness, intrusive thoughts, disillusionment, psychosis—the list goes on. Within bounds, these negative experiences help us learn and grow into our best selves. However, should they become too intense and persistent, they arrest our development.

Enter Winnicott’s good-enough parent. A crucial part of their job is making sure that the negativity is kept within bounds. Winnicott writes that “The good-enough mother is one who makes active adaptation to the infant’s needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration.” That is, attuned parents supply their child with gradual (and therefore tolerable) exposure to limits, frustrations, failures, disappointments, loss, and the like.

Winnicott offers parents the chilly consolation of philosophy: the knowledge that negativity—including their child’s opposition, hatred, and disillusionment with them—is a natural and healthy part of development. As Winnicott says, a child “will pull out all the stops” when “he has confidence in his parents” and their ability to “hold" him in a way that gradually introduces him to the Buddha’s first noble truth. Children slowly learn they’re not omnipotent, that they can’t always have their way, and that their parents and everyone else (including, sadly, their future therapists) will fail them. Worst of all, they themselves will eventually fail those they love.

Hegel made this point on a much grander scale. What he called “the labor of the negative” drives not just human development but the dialectic through which nature, life, human history, and logical thought exist. Think of the negative as anything that complicates, contradicts, pushes back on, or otherwise resists our default way of being in the world. The labor of the negative involves grappling with the challenge posed by such resistance. It could beDarwinian selection pressures that challenge a species to adapt to changing conditions; it could be laboratory evidence that contradicts a scientist’s beloved hypothesis; it could be the challenge posed by a child’s temper tantrums; it could be facing the resistance from those we’re trying to teach or help. But wherever it comes from, the negativity issues a challenge. How we engage with such challenges shapes our lives.

In a note on how to think about mistakes I mentioned Hegel’s idea of the “beautiful soul.” Had Winnicott read Hegel, I like to think he’d have appreciated how this type fits in the case of what we now call snow-plow parents. They are trying to protect their children’s innocence from being besmirched by the dialectical rough and tumble of the actual world, with its bullies, hardships, disappointments, and compromises. Like curiosity, joy, paranoia, depression, etc, the beautiful soul is a familiar shape of consciousness. In other words, we’re all acquainted with our inner snow-plow, in the form of that temptation to avoid difficulties rather than work through them.

I’d like to wrap up this big idea with another of Hegel’s wonderful metaphors, the flower of wisdom. This is a happier one than the highway of despair because it reminds us of where that highway leads. True, our path is littered with our lost feeling of omnipotence, our abandoned beliefs and opinions, our disillusionment and despair, not to mention all those projections we’ve taken back and owned along the way of growing up. Our path is also, we hope, full of love and joys and triumphs, but their value for our lives is easy to appreciate!

Hegel’s metaphor shows that what I called “litter” are better thought of as recyclables. The way leads to autonomy and the wisdom of the true self (mashing up Hegel and Winnicott). But these fruits emerge through a labor of the negative in which what comes before and is refuted is not so much lost as it is taken up, learned from, and integrated into a more comprehensive view. The whole, wrote Hegel, is the flower of wisdom. It emerges as “the progressive unfolding of truth"….

The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted [negated] by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These different forms…supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.¹

1. This is from Hegel’s preface to his most famous work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Here’s a pro tip for interested readers: You can get a good sense of Hegel’s philosophy by reading the prefaces and introductions to his major works.