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Hegel and the Negativity of the Modern Spirit

April 4, 2011 by Tom McDonald 5 Comments

[Editor's Note: Tom McDonald, guest podcaster on our Hegel episodes, has eagerly agreed to join us on the blog to share more of what he's picked up about Hegel. You can read more by Tom at zuhanden.com -ML]

It's hard to overestimate how important for Hegel is Kant's critical philosophy following the Enlightenment. Kant's elaboration of 'the critical turn' in modern philosophy establishes how the faculty of reason needs to become self-critical in order to justify itself. We could reasonably call this the project to establish a self-legitimizing, self-justifying philosophy for modern life, i.e., a philosophy which can ground all authority in itself.

Kant's goal was to establish the autonomy of reason in a liberal (i.e. individualistic) spirit, but the modern liberal principle of individual autonomy comes with hidden costs (in the fine print): One becomes an island of consciousness responding only to appearances or representations of the world and others but not to the world or others themselves. In order to affirm that I am autonomous, I must negate all otherness, radically put it in question, see it as merely my own representation.

Hegel recognizes subjectivism in modern philosophy since Descartes, developed in British empiricism and continental rationalism, and given its consummate formalization by Kant, as a great achievement in conceiving and realizing greater freedom in the world (in contrast to ancient and medieval philosophy). However, Hegel is equally concerned about the deeply skeptical attitude and therefore destructive potential of modern subjectivism toward 'things in themselves' and 'the external world'. It seems that modern freedom entails the radical doubt and negation (creative destruction) of these externals in order to realize itself.

Does this not provide a brilliant explanation for why our contemporary skepticism toward so many things is ironically both a source of frustration and pride for us?

The task Hegel sets himself then is to try to preserve the freedom (i.e. negativity) achieved in modern individualistic thinking while somehow also teaching modernity not to deny the ancient (and, one could argue, commonsense) understanding that it is the world itself -- not merely our subjective projections -- which prompts us to conceive what we take to be beautiful (in nature or in art), good (in personal conduct), or true (in knowledge or in science).

Thus we can fairly say that the Phenomenology of Spirit begins literally in the modern world (when Hegel self-consciously writes it) with the modern ideals of freedom and self-realization as the telos, the end, of the history of reason in the world. But the purpose of the book is to reconstruct this history-in-thought so as to teach us that in all the various configurations and stages, there is a dialectical or creatively destructive relationship between one desire to know the world as it really is in itself and a problematically opposing desire to realize the freedom in thinking itself. Typically, when you're attracted to (modern) politics or art and you're worried about freedom or expression you emphasize the latter; when you're attracted to science and you're worried about representation in knowledge you emphasize the former.

The Phenomenology then studies various configurations of thought (Sense-Certainty, Perception, Observing Reason, Acting Reason, etc.) and their dialectical outcomes which force the development of more adequate concepts of the world and itself. Keep in mind that for each configuration there are three aspects involved:

  1. experience(s); the empirical aspect;
  2. the notion/theory/ideas/norms/principles/concepts/criteria by which experience and the world are judged at any particular moment (e.g., in Sense-Certainty the criterion of knowledge is "is it sense-data?"); the rational aspect;
  3. the world itself/the absolute/reality.

The claim of this third aspect remains controversial. But it must be said that Hegel is not simply an "idealist" who exclusively recognizes a human-constructed reality of humanly instituted norms of thought (although he certainly does affirm modern ideals and norms). His philosophy also allows that independent features of nature play a role in (stated negatively) constraining or (stated positively) giving normative shape to self-grasping thought in human reception. Although controversial this view is more or less defended by important contemporary Hegel scholars and philosophers such as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and Kenneth Westphal.

I hope that this brief introduction is helpful, especially for understanding Hegel's distinction between nature and spirit. This distinction-in-continuity helps to resolve what is still an ongoing debate between Cartesian dualism and naturalistic monism about the world and the mind. Hegel sometimes calls spirit "identity-in-difference", meaning that reason establishes knowledge and freedom by way of a negative or transformative relation to others, to the world, to nature, i.e., by not being identical with them. But this non-identical independence isn't possible without others, the world, and nature being the (ultimately) real prompts to everything we can actually accomplish in action and in thought.

Richard Rorty was one of the great pragmatist, if not quite realist, interpreters of Hegel. In a 2005 review of Robert Pippin's The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath,
Rorty describes the importance of Hegel's philosophical innovation:

Kant tried to make it impossible to think of knowledge as a matter of getting little replicas of the extra-mental into our minds [as a matter of mind mirroring the world]. That was the first step in breaking down the subject-object problematic which Kant had inherited from Descartes. On Pippin's account, Hegel took the next step by replacing the Cartesian distinction between thinking substance and extended substance with that between Spirit and Nature -- between behavior controlled by social norms and other behavior. Once that change was made, we were able to stop thinking of human freedom as a matter of making the atoms swerve. We could switch to thinking of it as a matter of making social norms explicit, thus putting ourselves in a position to resist [negate] them or change [transform] them. Hegel showed us how to think of increased self-consciousness as increased freedom.

You can read the rest of Rorty's excellent article at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

-Tom McDonald

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Filed Under: Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus

Comments

  1. Russ says

    April 4, 2011 at 9:11 pm

    Tom, it was great to have your comments on the podcast as well as this little writeup providing additional insight. I suspect I’m speaking for a few others when I say I’m in over my head in trying to come to grips with Herr Hegel. I listened to the Hegel podcast and am currently reading PofS. It’s pretty tough going, but I’m determined to stick with it. Maybe, between you and the PEL triade, a few of us uninitiated might just be able to peel back a few layers of the Hegelian onion!

    Reply
  2. Tom says

    April 4, 2011 at 11:00 pm

    Hey Russ,

    Much appreciated.

    My advice on the reading: Don’t hesitate to make your own interpretations, no matter how unusual, of any passage in the text. The important thing is that it’s yours. Then you will probably circle back and revise what you thought earlier in light of a later sentence. It’s written that way. The later constantly puts the earlier in a new enriched light. Main thing is don’t be afraid to make your own interpretaion no matter how crazy, and try to carry it forward as far as it can go!

    And feel free to email me any questions if you’d like. Any at all.

    Cheers,
    Tom

    Reply
  3. Burl says

    April 7, 2011 at 11:29 am

    Tom

    From your March 28 blog, I have two questions:

    1) Is this self-consciouisness what sociology labels the looking glass self> (I am not who I think I am, nor who tou think I am, but who I think you think I a,.) and,

    2) “It’s not until you meet another bro with a flashlight that you becomes illuminated. Self-consciousness absolutely must meet another self-consciousness, or else it can’t exist – it’s just plain consciousness, a bro with a flashlight and no sense of self.” Can this suggest that dogs are self-conscious, as they are clearly affected by our attention?

    On the Zen desire-satisfaction-desire… stream of unreflective consciousness, I would point out that it becomes a highly consciously aware thing when what one (including a sog) cannot satisfy a desire. This is what the Buddha calls suffering – desire for something we cannot get. The dialectic, the contrast, this sets up gives rise to intense conscious awareness.

    Reply
  4. Burl says

    April 7, 2011 at 11:32 am

    Damn typos.

    Reply
  5. Douglas Lain says

    February 26, 2012 at 9:51 pm

    I’m just stopping by to share this link to an essay/lecture I wrote on Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit with PEL. I figured this blog entry might be a good place to drop this link:

    http://symptomaticredness.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/philosophy-workshop-lecture-hegels-introduction-to-the-phenomenology-of-spirit-bishop-berkeley-and-philip-k-dicks-electric-ant/

    Reply

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