The I and World history in Hegel

In this paper, I investigate the relations between the notion of the I and the conception of World history in Hegel’s philosophy. First, I address Hegel’s account of the I by reconstructing its phenomenological and logical development from consciousness to self-consciousness through recognition with the other and arguing that the project of the Philosophy of Right is normative, as it provides an account of the logical process of affirmation of the I as the normative source of the realm of objective spirit. I then argue for an account of World history as the self-conscious development and liberation of the I in time and objectivity, and I consider Hegel’s philosophy of history in light of the Philosophy of Right as the historical emergence of the I through the forms of objective spirit in history. Finally, I focus on two of the allegedly most problematic issues related to Hegel’s conception of World history: the nature and very possibility of an ‘intersubjective consciousness’ and the notion of ‘World spirit’. I conclude by outlining how the conception of World history, if reconstructed in light of Hegel’s conception of the I, can have previously unnoticed political implications.     

Leaping Ahead of Heidegger: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Being and Time

Abstract

This article challenges Honneth’s reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory (2001/2010). Focusing on Hegel’s method, I argue that this text hardly offers support for the theory of mutual recognition that Honneth purports to derive from it. After critically considering Honneth’s interpretation of Hegel’s account of the family and civil society, I argue that Hegel’s text does not warrant Honneth’s tacit identification of mutual recognition with symmetrical instances of mutual recognition, let alone his subsequent projection of symmetrical forms of mutual recognition onto the various spheres of the Philosophy of Right as a whole. I conclude by indicating an alternative way in which Hegel’s text might be used to understand contemporary society.     

Justice and care: The implications of the Kohlberg-Gilligan debate for medical ethics

Carol Gilligan has identified two orientations to moral understanding; the dominant ‘justice orientation’ and the under-valued ‘care orientation’. Based on her discernment of a ‘voice of care’, Gilligan challenges the adequacy of a deontological liberal framework for moral development and moral theory. This paper examines how the orientations of justice and care are played out in medical ethical theory. Specifically, I question whether the medical moral domain is adequately described by the norms of impartiality, universality, and equality that characterize the liberal ideal. My analysis of justice-oriented medical ethics, focuses on the libertarian theory of H.T. Engelhardt and the contractarian theory of R.M. Veatch. I suggest that in the work of E.D. Pellegrino and D.C. Thomasma we find not only a more authentic representation of medical morality but also a project that is compatible with the care orientation's emphasis on human need and responsiveness to particular others.     

Kant and Hegel on purposive action

This essay discusses Kant and Hegel’s philosophies of action and the place of action within the general structure of their practical philosophy. We begin by briefly noting a few things that both unite and distinguish the two philosophers. In the sections that follow, we consider these and their corollaries in more detail. In so doing, we map their differences against those suggested by more standard readings that treat their accounts of action as less central to their practical philosophy. Section 2 discusses some central Kantian concepts (Freedom, Willkür, Wille, and Moral Law). In Section 3, we take a closer look at the distinction between internal and external action, as found in Kant’s philosophy of morality and legality. In Section 4, we turn to Hegel and his distinctions between abstract right (legality), morality, and ethical life, as well as the location of his account of action within his overall theory of morality. We discuss the distinction between Handlung and Tat, and non-imputable consequences. The overall aims of our essay are to shed light on some puzzles in Kant and Hegel’s conceptions and to examine where their exact disputes lie without taking a stand on which philosophy is ultimately the most satisfactory.     

From hostility to hope: Beauvoir’s joyful turn to Hegel in The Ethics of Ambiguity

Abstract

Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit generated two ideas–otherness is something threatening that must be overcome and one’s relationships with others are inexorably violent–that fundamentally shaped the way many exponents of early French phenomenology regarded intersubjectivity. This essay shows how Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel in The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a perspective on inter-subjectivity that defies the other-conquering Cartesian hero implied by Kojève and celebrated in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Beau-voir appreciates the degree to which Hegel makes subjectivity indebted to otherness. Like Hegel, she defines oppression as the failure to recognise the otherness of the other. Beauvoir shares Hegel’s optimism that individuals can sublate their naïve solipsism. She associates reciprocal recognition between subjects with ethical freedom, which she distinguishes from Sartre’s concept of freedom. From the analysis of ethical freedom it is concluded that both conflict and friendship are side-effects of the essential bond between subjects and their mutual need for one another. The Hegel-inspired hopefulness at the core of The Ethics of Ambiguity is further demonstrated by Beau-voir’s rejection of the absurd in favour of ambiguity, her positive rendering of failure, her appeal to outrageousness, and focus on the joy of existence.     

Hegel's real habits

Hegel frequently identifies ethical life with a “second nature.” This strategy has puzzled those who assume that second nature represents a deficient appearance of ethical life, one that needs to be overcome, supplemented, or constantly challenged. I argue that Hegel identifies ethical life with a second nature because he thinks that a social order only becomes a candidate for ethical life, if it provides a context conducive to the development of what I call “real habits.” First, I show that a criterion for a real habit can be found in Hegel's Anthropology, namely, that of liberation. Next, I explain how the state, as Hegel analyzes it in the Philosophy of Right, provides such an environment by enabling trust toward and within it. I then consider two literary examples of contexts that fail to be similarly supportive—Coates' Between the World and Me and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale—concluding with reasons for thinking that real habits are an integral part of ethical life.     

Empathy for Non-Kin,the Faraway,the Unfamiliar,and the Abstract––An Interdisciplinary Study on Mencian Moral Cultivation and a Response to Prinz

This article challenges the pessimistic view that empathy and other fellow feelings are biased and erratic motivation for morality. By discussing Mencius’ account on how to develop empathy from its biased and erratic beginnings, I argue that empathy can be extended to less common objects, such as non-kin, the faraway, the unfamiliar, and the abstract. The extension facilitated by empathy in turn enhances one’s moral cognition toward the sufferings of less common objects; the extension also helps to include less common objects into one’s circle of care. I respond to critics of empathy such as Prinz by highlighting the dynamic cultivational process of empathy that they overlook, and further point out that empathy can be cultivated so as to provide a remedy for the biases that no emotion is immune to. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on moral cultivation in the Chinese philosophy community and the dispute over empathy’s role in morality in contemporary ethics.     

Irrationality and egoism in Hegel’s account of right

ABSTRACT

Many interpreters argue that irrational acts of exchange can count as rational and civic-minded for Hegel – even though, admittedly, the persons who are exchanging their property are usually unaware of this fact. While I do not want to deny that property exchange can count as rational in terms of ‘mutual recognition’ as interpreters claim, this proposition raises an important question: What about the irrationality and arbitrariness that individuals as property owners and persons consciously enjoy? Are they mere vestiges of nature in Hegel’s system, or do they constitute a simple yet valid form of freedom that is not only a part of Hegel’s rational system of right, but its necessary starting point? I will argue the latter: The arbitrary, purely egoist self-definition of property owners is the simplest possible type of freedom for Hegel, which he dissects in order to show how the very arbitrary self-definition implicitly relies on an identity between persons, and hence foreshadows the more social forms of freedom Hegel will discuss later in his book. I make this argument by highlighting Hegel’s references to his discussion of atoms and freedom in his Logic of Being.     

The Non-Conceptual Dimension of Social Mediation: Toward a Materialist Aufhebung of Hegel

ABSTRACT

Sellars’s relationship with Hegel is complex and itself ‘dialectical‘ in interesting ways. Sellars follows Hegel in recognizing that the normativity essential to intentionality and conceptuality is a social phenomenon. But Sellars criticizes Hegel for his inability to independently explain the emergence and function of this essential group phenomenon. I shall argue that Sellars’s critique of Hegel on this count is part of a larger, metaphysically ambitious and rigorously realistic position, which, though turning Hegel’s ontology on its head, shares with Hegel the methodological ambition of arriving at a position which is globally explanatorily closed. Further, it will be suggested that although Sellars would surely have been critical of the ontological reification of Hegel’s dialectical method, he nonetheless reserves an important role for conceptual dialectical development right at the heart of his system, namely in his understanding of the conceptual evolution that leads from the manifest to the scientific image. Finally, I shall argue that Sellars thereby aspires to provide nothing less than a materialist aufhebung of idealist Hegelian dialectics.     

Virtues and ethics within Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku

ABSTRACT

In the second volume of Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsurō focuses on developing his notion of betweenness (aidagara 間柄) through the ethical organisations (jinrinteki soshiki 人倫的組織) of family, local community, economics, cultural community, and the state. Although those who have commentated on the later volumes have focused on the controversy which surrounds Watsuji’s account of the state, very little attention has been paid to the role of virtues within his thought. It is precisely this academic lacuna which this enquiry is intended to address. In this paper, there are two particular aims which I hope to achieve: firstly, I will seek to explicate the role which virtues play within Watsuji’s ethical system, and secondly, I will attempt to evaluate how the virtues inform Watsuji’s normative approach.     

Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy.     

Ethical alterity and asymmetrical reciprocity: A Levinasian reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Works of Love</Emphasis>

Following and extending the recent tradition of Kierkegaard–Levinas comparativists, this essay offers a Levinasian commentary on salient aspects of Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious deliberations in Works of Love, a text that we are unsure whether or not Levinas actually read. Against some post/modern interpreters, I argue that one should adopt both a Jewish and a Christian perspective (rather than an oversimplified either/or point of view) in exploring the sometimes “seamless passages” between Kierkegaard and Levinas’s thought. The first argument of this essay is that interhuman ethical relationships, as seen by Kierkegaard and Levinas, are premised upon an original asymmetry or inequality. Ethical alterity requires more on the part of the responsible I for the destitute Other. However, this original ethical alterity is not at all the last word in loving and healthy human relationships. In the second section of this study, a dual asymmetry on the part of each participating human yields an “asymmetrical reciprocity,” or in Kierkegaard’s words, “infinity on both sides.” While they are of no concern␣to me, your ethical duties to me are revealed to you upon our face-to-face encounter. Here I offer a Kierkegaardian–Levinasian response to Hegel’s and Buber’s thoughts that humans essentially desire recognition, mutuality, and reciprocity from one another in intersubjective relationships. Hegel and Buber are more or less correct, but when seen from a Kierkegaardian and Levinasian perspective, we are offered resources for understanding more precisely how and why their accounts are accurate. Hegel and Buber offer us the second phase of the argument, whereas Kierkegaard and Levinas show us the first and primary phase of interhuman relationships – the revealed and infinite ethical responsibility to the Other person.     

Enlightenment and the Unconditional Good: From Fichte to the Frankfurt School

In a series of lectures from 1804–05, Johann Gottlieb Fichte sets out a conception of enlightenment whose basic structure is, I argue, to some extent reproduced in two more famous accounts of enlightenment found in post-Kantian German philosophy: Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment’s struggle with faith in his Phenomenology of Spirit and the conception of enlightenment rationality presented in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The narrative I offer serves to highlight, moreover, the critical role played by the notion of an unconditional good in Fichte’s and Hegel’s critiques of enlightenment. The lack of an explicit appeal to, and account of, this notion in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment will be shown to raise questions concerning how successful their critique of enlightenment can really be thought to be.     

Second Nature and Historical Change in Hegel’s Philosophy of History

Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally concerned with how shapes of life collapse and transition into new shapes of life. One of the distinguishing features of Hegel’s concern with how a shape of life falls apart and becomes inadequate is the role that habit plays in the transition. A shape of life is an embodied form of existence for Hegel. The animating concepts of a shape of life are affectively inscribed on subjects through complex cultural processes. This paper examines the argument Hegel puts forward in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History for why civilizations come to atrophy and examines the decisive role habit plays in this process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way in which the central role of second nature in historical transitions and norm formation conflicts with Brandom’s account of norm formation in Hegel’s thought.     

From Gegenstand to Gegenstehenlassen: On the Meanings of Objectivity in Heidegger and Hegel

ABSTRACT

One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of (the presence of) the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the being of beings in terms of the objectivity of the object. In this paper, I trace Heidegger’s analyses of objectivity, through which Heidegger consistently establishes objectivity as non-primordial and derivative. In order to do this, however, Heidegger had to identify a specific, narrow (spatio-temporalized) conception of objectivity (in terms of Gegenstehenlassen and Vorstellen) as the hallmark of modern philosophy. I show that it is unclear whether that conception is a justified result or rather an unjustified presupposition of his approach. I then suggest what meanings of objectivity might be lost after Heidegger, by pointing to several aspects of Hegel’s notion of objectivity that are incompatible with Heidegger’s account, to wit: the lack of ‘subject-object’-terminology in his definitions of objectivity; the special language of ‘forms of’ objectivity; Hegel’s critique of representation; his notion of Gegenstand as a content with a categorical form, and, finally, that Aristotle’s notion of hypokeimenon might provide a clue as to how Hegel’s notion of object can be understood.     

An Existential Foundation for an Ethics of Care in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Martin Heidegger’s existential account of care in Being and Time (2010) provides us with an opportunity to reimagine what the proper theoretical grounding of an ethic of care might be. Heidegger’s account of care serves to deconstruct the two primary foundations that an ethic of care is often based upon. Namely, that we are inevitably interdependent upon one another and/or possess an innate disposition to care for fellow humans in need. Heidegger’s account reveals that both positions are founded upon an ontic (meaning factual existence), as opposed to an ontological (which refers to the nature of being), understanding of care. The distinctions between an ontic and ontological understanding of care are significant. Yet, I maintain that they are not completely incompatible. Both Heidegger and care ethicists contend that our existence with others is understood through a relational ontology. Furthermore, there are certain ontological structures from Heidegger which resonate with an ethic of care. Two key existential structures are leaping-ahead and being-guilty. These existential structures are latent in care ethics, and by explicitly revealing them I reinforce the connection between Heidegger’s account and care theory. Lastly, I develop the theoretical foundations of care ethics by proposing an existential ethic of care.

     

Intergenerational transmission of violence: Is violence a pathology of intersubjective contact?

In this article, I look at violence as a pathology of the intersubjective contact. In particular, I claim that one possible explanation of violence is lack of recognition on a societal, intersubjective level. I propose an explanation based on Honneth’s concept of struggle for recognition and Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. The article takes the following course: I first give a short outline of the concept of intergenerational transmission of violence, as understood by psychology at the level of an individual, followed by a brief presentation a summary of sociological research on the concept. Then, I proceed with a discussion of Honneth’s three modes of recognition, viz. love, rights, and solidarity, as modes of intersubjective contact, leading to the development of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. I claim that the lack of these kinds of recognition leads to the decrease in confidence and trust and consequently to abusive behaviour, that it affects social integrity and brings about the destruction of social functions, and that it results in an individual and a society which have lost their “honour” and dignity. Finding his account of intersubjectivity lacking in its philosophical aspect, I complement Honneth’s account of intersubjectivity with that of Merleau-Ponty, based in his understanding of the intertwining of the subject and the world and the reversible contact between and among subjects within the world. Considering the negative effects of misrecognition as described by Honneth, in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intersubjective contacts among subjects, I conclude that a country where all three modes of recognition have been disturbed houses a society lacking self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, and consequently shows all the signs of Honneth’s forms of disrespect, i.e. abuse and rape, denial of rights and exclusion, as well as denigration and insult, all of which are forms of intergenerationally transmitted violence.     

Hegel after Nancy: Sensibility,Singularity, and the Problem of the … x

This article takes up two models of punishment in Hegel, one that is underdeveloped in the Phenomenology of Spirit and one more fully developed in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Both models focus on the notions of law and the legality of personhood. I argue that beyond this, they share a common concept of singularity as an excess over and above the ethical-political order. This concept opens up to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “event” of freedom in Hegel. This point about excess lets me deploy Lacan and then Nancy to underscore how, for Hegel, problems concerning the question “what is law?” might be a clue as to how the bad infinite is opposed to the good or “actual” infinite. I take this up in the context of Hegel’s theory of “value,” including the value of the “good.” Altogether this analysis reveals that Hegel’s method allows for a more complex humanism than is typically understood, since his points about law and punishment lead to a more radicalized notion of intentionality and forgiveness than usually derived from the logic of recognition.     

A Case for Moral History – Universality and Change in Ethics after Wittgenstein

In this paper, I raise the question of how the tradition of ethics after Wittgenstein tends to neglect the historicity of morality, in a way which is not representative of the complexity of Wittgenstein’s own thinking. I analyse a tendency towards one-sidedness in the preferred diet of philosophical examples, where focus lies on recognition of, and ethical attentiveness to, a fellow person or creature. Although these examples play an important role in their own right, the overuse of such examples, along with a certain notion of “philosophical grammar”, detracts from a historically sensitive investigation of our ethical forms of life.     

Ostrich Nominalism and Peacock Realism: A Hegelian Critique of Quine

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to offer a Hegelian critique of Quine’s predicate nominalism. I argue that at the core of Hegel’s idealism is not a supernaturalist spirit monism, but a realism about universals, and that while this may contrast to the nominalist naturalism of Quine, Hegel’s position can still be defended over that nominalism in naturalistic terms. I focus on the contrast between Hegel’s and Quine’s respective views on universals, which Quine takes to be definitive of philosophical naturalism. I argue that there is no good reason to think Quine is right to make this nominalism definitive of naturalism in this way – where in fact Hegel (along with Peirce) offers a reasonably compelling case that science itself requires some commitment to realism about universals, kinds, etc. Furthermore, even if Hegel is wrong about that, at least his case for realism is still a naturalistic one, as it is based on his views on concrete universality, which is an innovative form of in rebus realism about universals.