The Revolution Completed? - Hegel
- Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: post-Kantian in a new vein
- Hegel’s Analysis of Mind and World: the Science of Logic
- Nature and Spirit: Hegel’s System
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: post-Kantian in a new vein
Hegel’s Journey
The guiding question behind Hegel’s work is: what would a modern religion look like, and was it possible to have a modern religion that would satisfy our needs in the way that classical religions seemed to have satisfied the needs of the ancients? The need to satisfy is the need to be free in a Kantian and post-Kantian sense, what would it take to be able to lead one’s own life, to have a life of one’s own, to be autonomous, self-legislating?
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel intended the book to satisfy the needs of contemporary humanity: to provide an education, a Bildung, a formation for its readership so that they could come to grasp who they had become, why they had become those people, and why that had been necessary. It showed why “leading one’s own life”, self-determination, had become necessary for “us moderns” and what such “self-legislation” meant.
Consciousness
Hegel explained that starting from the common sense presupposition of transcendental realism, that there is some object independent of our perception which makes our consciousness about the object true necessarily leads to Kant’s transcendental idealism, that it must be possible for an “I think” to accompany all our consciousness of things. The dialectic of “consciousness” requires us to focus on how we hold ourselves to norms, and how we cannot rely on something independently of our own activities to keep us on the straight and narrow path to truth.
Self-Consciousness
In showing the normative demands made by “consciousness”, we are driven to comprehend hat our mode of taking them to be such-and-such plays just as important a role in the cognitive enterprise as the object themselves, or our direct awareness of them. But how might we distinguish what only seems to be “the way we must take them” from the “way they really are?”
In a section called “Self-Consciousness” in Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel carried out his most radical reformulation of Kantian philosophy. Hegel tried to explore what we might be seeking to accomplish in tasking things one way as opposed to another.
Kant argued that we must practically take ourselves to be self-determining or free. But if will imposes such a law on itself, it must do so for a reason and it cannot itself be self-imposed. The “paradox” is that it seems to be both required not to have an antecedent reason or to have such a reason. Hegel viewed the “Kantian paradox” as the basic problem that all post-Kantian philosophies had to solve.
Hegel’s resolution of the Kantian paradox was to see it in social terms. Since the agent cannot secure any bindingness for the principle simply on his own, he requires the recognition from another agent of it as binding on both of them. When one agent is cared about the law so much that is prepared to stake his life on the outcome, when the other agent is not prepared to do so, one becomes the author of the law, the master and the other becomes the agent subject to the law, the slave.
What seemed to play the decisive normative role in underwriting judgments turned out to be what the proponents of that point of view had taken it to be, but to be something else. Normative authority turned out to rest in both master and vassal (“slave”), in being a social matter of each serving as master and vassal.
From Mastery and Servitude to Reason
Hegel believes the general problem of coming to grips with the “Kantian paradox” only has historical solution, the move from a lawless will to a certain kind of autonomy is to be taken as a historical, social achievement, it begins with the period when the ways of life first began to reflectively come to grips with the issue of what it means to be a free agent as a rational agent.
Stoicism attempts to make oneself a self-legislating “master” by creating a practice of remaining free in thought even if not in body, whereas skepticism is the attempt to secure the freedom of thought by turning it on itself through a practice of doubting all claims. However, neither of them was capable of sustaining itself.
The failure of the practices of the ancient world made European humanity ready for an account of those norms as coming to them (as contingent, “changeable” individuals) from outside themselves via a revelation from an “unchangeable” source of truth, which gradually came to be identical with reason itself as the moderns came to believe that they could comprehend the ways of God.
Galileo’s and Bacon’s new science reassured the early modern Europeans of he power of thought to grasp that truth.
The failures of post-medieval life to sustain itself by appeal to reason seems to demand an fixed “authentic” self which lie behind our various plans, projects, desires and did not change. However, when put to test, the fixed “authentic” self turned out to be open to as many different interpretations as the overt actions and works that were supposed to be the contingent. There is nothing fixed in the self that could play such a normative role. The truth of the matter behind the giving and asking for reasons was an ongoing series of social negotiations against a background of taken-for-granted meanings.
The dissolution of the notion of a fixed “authentic” self behind the appearances of our actions was only resolved by Kant’s conception of the agent as giving the law to himself in the form of maxims. Theo only real truth to be found lay in agents not looking to their identities to fix their maxims, but instead looking to see which of those maxims could be mutually (and ultimately universally) legislated.
Kant’s own idea seemed to founder on the “Kantian paradox”, since it both required there to be reasons preceding an individual’s choice of reasons in order for the choice to be reasonable; and to require that reason by themselves be chosen.
Hegel thought that the way out of Kantian paradox required us to comprehend how we must at each point be both “master” and “slave” in relation to each other, and how some form of self-legislation could be compatible with such a conception.
The Historical Genesis of Modern Life
The chapter following “Reason” is a longer chapter on “Geist”, or spirit, which talks about what it means to be a free, rational agent. It started with Greek paradigm, which simply kept faith with their received values, knowing that, in doing so, their actions would spontaneously harmonize, with the resulting way of life therefore forming a beautiful whole. Hegel took Greek tragedy (Antigone)to show what it means for a way of life to be base not on fully “giving the law to oneself”, but on “keeping faith” with basic ethical laws.
For Roman, what is normative in play in Greek life is power.
The French Revolution brought this to a close and completed. Faced with the collapse of all other authorities, the “people” now describe the people to be the law and to be attaining unconditional freedom normatively unconstrained by the past or the contingent feature of human nature, but by what was necessarily involved in that freedom’s being sought for its own sake, in short, “absolute” freedom. The truth of the absolute freedom is the Terror: giving the law to oneself, freed from any constraint by a kind of rationality preceding such legislation. Hegel argued instead that Kantian kingdom of ends was the absolute freedom.
However, the Kantian and Fichtean revolutions were a part of a larger way of life, the “moral worldview”, emerged out of religion. Freedom is taken as a call on oneself as an individual, independently of all social conditions, to realize one’s radical freedom in both giving oneself the law and holding oneself to it. What mattered for the “moral worldview” is that one exercise a particular kind of power that is independent of nature, that one can act on the right motive.
However, the problem is what interest an individual might have in being moral. On Kant’s own terms, there can be no antecedent interest. We are under the duty to promote the “highest good,” the union of virtue and happiness, so that our desire for happiness would not be in conflict with our moral duty. To that Kant makes many “postulates” to practical philosophy, including the immortality of the soul and promise of external reward for virtue.
On the one hand the “moral worldview” claims that one should do one’s duty for duty’s sake; on the other hand, it claims hat w cannot practically divorce the claims of duty from the claims of nature, even if duty always takes normative priority. One must strive to shape one’s character so that it is the motive of duty that prompts one to act and not the prospect of enhancing ones own happiness; yet at the same time one has a duty to bring it about that one is happy in proportion to one’s virtue, the key element in the “highest good”.
Behind the “moral worldview” is the stress on the purity of motive, and it finds its expression in personal conscience. The pure individual appealing only to what his own conscience permits him is a “beautiful soul”. For the “beautiful soul”, one avoids “Kantian paradox” only by holding fast to one’s conscience, more or less “expressing” individually the moral law that one personally “is”.
Religion and Absolute Knowing
The concluding chapter on the history of Geist in the Phenomenology thus culminated not in a fixed conclusion, but arguing that the modern world necessarily had to make space for individuals and their inviolable consciences while not fail to acknowledge the deep sociality of human agency. This conclusion comes about relying on the background understanding of the Christian “way of life”. Hegel also raised the question, is Christianity itself a rational way of life, or just the way “we” (nineteenth-century Europeans) habitually do things?
The only acceptable answer for Hegel would be dialectical and historical. One must first accept that religion is itself something to which we must be committed, and show that Christianity is also necessary, then show that it necessity is rational in the sense that it has emerged as what was really normatively in play with other religions.
Religion had always been about what it means to be human; and so it has turned out, what it means to be human is to be a free agent, and what matters to us now in modern life is that we be free, that we are called to lead our own lifes. Protestant Christianity, as the religion of freedom, as a set of religious practices that both forms us to be free and demands that we assume our freedom, is the “truth” of religion itself.
What was normatively in play in Christian religion, Hegel said, had turned out to be theology, the articulation in rational form of what was only expressed in Christianity’s rites and rituals; and what was normatively in play in theology, in its appeal to reason, had turned out to be philosophy as “absolute knowing”.
Hegel’s Analysis of Mind and World: the Science of Logic
The link between the Phenomenology and Logic has to do with how each takes up Hegel’s generalization of “Kantian paradox” into a claim about normative authority in general. Whereas the Phenomenology treated that issue as historical and social, the Logic treated it more as a problem of “thought” itself, asking: is there a “logic”, a normative structure, to the way we must think about ourselves and the world in light of Hegel’s post-Kantian claim that our thought can be subject only to those norms of which it can regard itself as the author. How can “thought”, be the “other of itself,” both lawgiver and subordinate to the law?
Kant’s conception of the “figurative synthesis” transforms what was previously regarded as non-normatively significant sensations into normatively significant intuitions. That showed that we could not isolate concepts from intuitions except in terms of their normative role within some larger whole. The Logic was Hegel’s analysis of the normative “larger whole”.
Logic shows the various metaphysical positions assumed in the history of philosophy were not just random musing, but intend had a kind of internal drive. Logic can be divided into three parts, first two are “the objective logic” and the last one is the “subjective logic”. First two parts talks about pre-Kantian metaphysics which makes distinction between agency and the natural world, subject and object an objective distinction. Pot-Kantian moves this to a “subjective” logic. What had been normatively in play in our thought about mind an world turned out to involve Kant’s critical turn. “What is essential for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be purely immediate, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a cycle in which the first is also the last and the last is the first.”
Hegel’s Logic presupposes Phenomenology. The lesson of Phenomenology is that the structure of reason was social and was therefore a historical achievement, not a metaphysical structure of things that our minds learned to reflect; the Logic was to be the “reconstruction” of our grasp of mind and world that and showed that it had a developmental logic internal to itself such that the metaphysics of “substance” to Kantian “subjectivity” was a logical move, even if it’s not necessitated by any law of history.
The Doctrine of Being: Going Beyond Holderlin
The logic begins with “being” as expressing our sense of a kind of “orientation” in the world that precedes all other concept. The tension inherent in the conception of “pure, indeterminate being” is that this “pure thought” has nothing within itself by which it could be distinguished from “nothing,” and yet the sense of the thought is just that being is different from nothing. “Insofar as the sentence: being and nothing are the same, expresses the identity of these determinations, but in fact equally contains them both as distinguished, the proposition itself contradicts itself and dissolves itself.”
What we are doing in distinguishing being from nothing is not comparing two distinct “things” in terms of their properties; we are actually making a move in the normative space of reasons, specifically, working out the kinds of inferences that are permissible in terms of a conception of the world as a process of coming-t-be and passing-away, in which we recognize that what comes to be and what passes away is not nothing, but something. The distinction between “what is” and “what is not” is itself an “abstraction”, a “moment” of a more comprehensive whole, a world of determinate things coming into being and passing away.
Finite, Infinite and “Idealism”
Doctrine of Being brings out Hegel’s main point: what might look like a “reflective judgment,” in the sense of being a comparison between two items, turns out to be not a comparison of things at all but a normative ascription of entitlement, and it turns out something else must be brought normatively into play. The point of Logic is to say that we know something is not to compare two “things” at all (e.g. to match a photograph to what it is about); it is rather to make a normative ascription, to say that the person making the claim is entitled to the claim. Our ascriptions of knowledge are not comparisons of any kind of subjective state with something non-subjective but instead are moves within a social space structured by responsibilities, entitlements, attributions, and the undertakings of commitments.
Rather than being taken as a single thing, the infinite should be taken as the expression of the world-process of things coming-to-be and passing-away taken as a whole. The world taken as a whole is truly infinite because there is nothing external to the world with which the world as a whole could be contrasted or explained.
The guiding idea in the “Doctrine of Being” has to do with the transformation of the “Kantian paradox” into a thesis about normative authority in general: we must conceive of our thought as being subject only to those “laws” of which it can regard itself as the author.
Modern Skepticism and the World of Essences
“Doctrine of Essence” is concerned with the normative structures of the judgments that have to do with distinguishing how the world appears to us and the way it really is. Such an activity suggests both the skepticism that we could not make judgments about the way the world is independent of our epistemic condition, and that without such a grasp of the conception of the whole of “the world in itself as appearing to us”, we could not even begin to make the kind of ordinary skeptical judgments that we do make.
Hegel’s diagnosis is that the contradiction comes from the skeptics way of taking the “whole” and treating its constituents only as parts, as independent, “finite” pieces of knowledge. It comes out of the comparison of two “things”, appearance and the thing in itself. This move is paradigmatic of the “reflective” viewpoint, we look at the pair of items that are distinguishable but nonetheless internally linked and make the mistake of treating the two items as if they were distinct “things” to be compared. They arise from the “reflected” sense of the whole, by taking the “finite”, “sideways on” point of view as “absolute”.
Ultimately, such “reflective” judgments push toward a conception of the world as one substance that necessarily manifests itself to judging agents as a set of causal relationships holding among the various “accidents” of the substance.
Concepts and Inferences
“Reflective judgments” can themselves be redeemed only by being understood as part of a more comprehensive practice of judging that is itself to be construed as a normative matter of judgment and inference, not as part of the naturalistically construed world.
“Doctrine of Concept” is the theory of normativity that would cash out Hegel’s overall claim that our ascriptions of knowledge a re not comparisons of any kind of subjective state with something non-subjective; they are moves within a social space structured by responsibilities, entitlements, attributions and the undertakings of commitments. Hegel’s point is that the naturalistic explanations are partial, “one-sided” and they are supplanted by the theory of normativity. Once we reject any identification of the “finite” point of view with the “absolute,” we can only draw the conclusion that “the opposition between idealist and realist philosophy is thus without significance”.
Objectivity as a pint of view on the world, as a way of taking a stance toward what will and will not redeem certain type of judgments, itself rests on a unity of concept and intuition that was always normatively in play in Kant’s theory. On Hegel’s view, intuitions and concepts are not to be conceived as separate existents, but are both normative statuses that acquire their status in the normative whole of the practice of giving and asking for reasons. The “truth” of representational thought is to be found in the “concept,” not that “representational thought” is an illusion; rather, its status as true or false depends on its being taken a certain way by the inferentially structured practice of giving an asking for reasons.
Subjects, Objects and Syllogisms
The “Idea” was Hegel’s term for that conception of our having the world in view through our conceptual and intuitive capacities, which themselves are possible only because of the normative, inferential “whole” of which they are the moments, the unity of concept and objectivity and also the unity of concept and reality.
The unity of the two points of view (subjective and objective) constitutes Hegel’s idealism. Logic is conceived to be about the norms of judgment and how those norms are themselves to be generated out of what is necessary for our own mentality to be possible, out of Idea itself.
The Absolute Idea
The Absolute Idea demand the practice of giving and asking for reasons be self-legitimating, and not rely on any givens outside of itself. The method by which the absolute idea comes to be known has to be the method by which that is necessarily undertake in order to shore up and sustain the other types of judgments that they must make.
Hegel thought that rationality is not “out there”, but is itself a historical achievement, since what it means for the “concept to give itself actuality” is to be embodied in the practices of judging and inferring.
Hegel ended his Logic with a controversial metaphor. He says that the “Idea is the creator of nature”. The interpretation of this determines what people take Hegel’s “system” to accomplish.
Nature and Spirit: Hegel’s System
Nature
Naturphilosophie studies the “Idea” of nature, the overall conception of nature must be in play in order for the space of reason to realize itself in practice and which is nonetheless also consistent with the findings of the natural sciences. The goal is to show that nature ultimately fails to give an account for itself, the possibility of a completely naturalistic account of the practices of natural science requires that a non-naturalistic conception of Geist be brought into play. Geist is trying to achieve something, even though we are not aware what it is that we were trying to achieve.
Hegel’s own dialectical proposal is to avoid speaking of how the different levels of nature generate themselves out of each other by virtue of any kind of metaphysical force. Instead the proper understanding of nature consists in grasping how the basic classifications of natural types are normatively in play in our grasp of nature as a whole and to show that the links must be “logical”, not a metaphysical or natural sense.
The Concept of Geist
The real teleology at work in Hegel’s system is that we, as minded agents, are trying to accomplish something, and scientific practice must be understood in the context of whatever those aims are and whatever role it plays in them. Hegel’s word for this aim is: freedom. What we need to understand is that the distinction between “nature” and “spirit” is posited by “spirit”, it is essentially a normative and not a metaphysical distinction, a social achievement about what is appropriate or not appropriate to do with “purely” natural creatures and “minded” creatures we are. Naturphilosophie and Gistesphilosophie are both linked to Hegel’s rejection of Kantian various dualisms - between concept and intuition, phenomenal nature and transcendental freedom, inclination and duty. Geist is subject only to those reasons of which it can regard itself as the author, with its dynamic of recognition and the working through of dialectics of mastery and servitude, Geist must be taken as the “other of itself”. In situations of mutual recognition, each of us would be both master and servant to the other. The opposition between nature and spirit is normative, of the norms that must be brought into play in order to reconcile what would otherwise be untenable oppositions. The distinction of “nature” and “spirit” is itself a “spiritual”, normative distinction posited by spirit itself. Hegel thought that only a “speculative philosophy” that “grasps the unity of that which is differentiated” is capable of making that complex thought intelligible to us.
Freedom
For Hegel, Geist, our mindfulness is to be understood not reductively, dualistically, or emergently, but normatively and as a kind of practical achievement of some sort. It is something that involves our being the kind of animals we are in our learning by virtue of our socialization to be both responsive to reasons and to hold ourselves and others to such reasons. Animals might have “souls” or even subjectivity, but mindfulness is what distinguishes a person from an animal. Both human and animals seek their own good as organisms, but it changes as human become the self-interpreting animals that can be described not only as organisms but also agents. Therefore, Hegel said a child only becomes “minded” after being initiated into the space of reasons and learning to practice giving and asking for reasons.
For “Kantian paradox”, the relationship between nature and freedom, Hegel describes the distinction to be normative, and not metaphysical, the distinction was between what was responsive to reasons and what was not and the key to that was a normative distinction about what it meant to hold any entity responsible to a set of reasons. To be free should be seen as the ability not to pull some kind of metaphysical level that somehow escapes natural causality, but to assume a certain stance toward oneself, toward others and toward the world. The key element in becoming an agent is to be able to appropriately respond to reasons normatively, to assume a stance and understands itself as stance.
Being an agent is more like having a normative status, not a matter of having a metaphysical power. Hegel argues for a “compatibilist” conception of freedom. To be free is involved with having a status ascribed to oneself as responsible, and that ascription is inherently social, not something that the individual can do as a single agent. In Phenomenology, Hegel said: “To be free is to stand in the relation of being both master and slave to another agent, for each to be both author of the law and subject to the law.” An agent is fundamentally an organism standing in a social space; to be an agent is to be a locus of a set of responsibilities (epistemic, moral, social, aesthetic, even religious).
Then the question for Hegel becomes: under what kinds of developmental and social conditions we can be said to be the authors of the law to which we are subject. Hegel said: “The person ought to bring himself forth, but he can make himself into nothing other, can have no other purpose than what he, in himself, originally is. That which he is in himself is what we call pre-disposition. The nature of spirit is to produce what it is. So it is destined to make itself into that which it is in itself.” We must be able to grasp which desires are our own and which coming at us because of some unintelligible natural capacity.
Institutions and Actualization: Objective Spirit
The aim for the book Philosophy of Right is to show how “the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of mind produced from within itself as a second nature.” Agents, as normative creatures, are never simply this or that; hey are always self-interpreting, and the conditions of their self-interpretation are always social and thus always escape the control of individuals. For agents to be free, they must be able to practically reason about their activities and that requires that they have some conception of some “good” that they are seeking to actualize. Hegel also proposes three “spheres of right” to resolve the Kantian paradox: “abstract right”, “morality” and “ethical life”.
What it means to be Human: Absolute Spirit
The practices of absolute spirit expressed our collective efforts to determine what counted as our “highest needs”, it consists in the set of practices through which we reflected on what it means to be human.
Human beings are self-interpreting animals; they are never simply what they “are”, but are as they take themselves to be, which is developmental in both the social and historical senses. The tree modes by which such self-interpreting animals think about what it means to be that type of creature are the practices of art, religion and philosophy.
Art came to realize that it could not overcome the problem of representing divinity purely by artistic means, and that the aim of grasping divinity was not itself therefore a purely aesthetic matter. The triumph of a claim to revealed religion in the form of a real person (Jesus) supplanted the domain of art. From that point on, art was subordinate to religion as the purveyor of the truth about ourselves. Then in religion, the need to understand God, which became clear by Augustinian times had pushed us to realize that what is normatively in play was theology, and ultimately, to the realization that what was normatively in play in theology was philosophy, whose practice is to appeal to reason only and admit no other authority.
Art matters to us because it attempts to display to us what genuinely matters to us; and, as self-interpreting animals, that is our “highest interest,” namely, in getting right about which of our self-interpretations of the ways we have taken ourselves to be is true. The goal of art is to represent “ideal”, an embodied norm. Hegel demonstrated that what matters most to us is our own self-determination, our freedom, the goal of art is show us freedom in the form of beautiful works. Hegel’s main point is that art cannot achieve that goal. And this deficiency has been recognized by artists themselves as they bumped against the limitations of trying to give a purely aesthetic presentation of what it means to be “minded”. Unlike Kant, Hegel focuses on the meaning of artworks and the role of art in the formation of mankind’s consciousness of itself and what maters most to it. Hegel’s point is not that art is over, but that it cannot matter to us as it once did. For Hegel, the idea that art intimates, hints at, or discloses a deeper, unconceptualizable, non-thinkable “unity” of ourselves and nature is not an idea that we can any longer seriously entertain, it cannot present us with anything “mysterious”, beyond conceptual, that it alone can portray.
Hegel’s philosophy of religion followed the same path as philosophy of art and remained one of the most hotly disputed elements of his legacy. Religion, like art, seeks to display what matters most to us, our status as minded creatures, as self-interpreting beings. Religion is the relation of “subjective consciousness” to God, which, philosophically expressed, is only “spirit’s” consciousness of what it itself is ultimately about. In religion, what matters is not some portrayal of Go but the experience of being at one with God, of being “elevated”, as Hegel says over and over again, to the status of the divine. Religion develops through various stages, from something mysterious, beyond experience to the stages in which it becomes more comprehensible to humans. Religion pushes itself to the realization that “spirit is only spirit insofar as it is for spirit, and in the absolute religion it is absolute spirit, which is no longer an abstract moment of itself but rather manifests itself. The principle, through which substance is spirit, as the infinite form existing for itself, that which is self-determining, is purely and simply manifestation”. Because of Christianity, we have been put in the position of legitimately claiming to be able to know God fully and completely, which leads to a transformation to philosophical reflection. The divine is free, self-determining Geist. Religion is not the most adequate mode for presenting or grasping what is divine: philosophy is.