CHAPTER 9

 

HegelÕs Phenomenology of Spirit:  post- Kantianism in a new vein

 

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart and died in 1831 in Berlin. Entering the Protestant Seminary in Tubingen in 1788, he had befriended and roomed with Friedrich Holderlin, and later they shared a room and friendship with Friedrich Schelling (who was younger than them). After graduating from the Seminary, he took a long and awkward path to philosophy; he became a "house-tutor" for two different families and experienced a failed independent career as an author before becoming an unpaid lecturer in philosophy at Jena and a co-editor with Schelling of the Schellingian Critical Journal of Philosophy, which, when it ceased publication, turned Hegel simply into an unpaid lecturer at Jena. After that position also collapsed, he became first a newspaper editor and then a high-school teacher in Nuremberg (where he married a member of the Nuremberg patriciate), and finally in 1816, at the age of 46, he acquired his first salaried academic position in Heidelberg. In 1818 he accepted a position as professor at the Berlin university, where he quickly rose to fame as the European phenomenon known simply as "Hegel."  pp. 217-218

 

In one of his letters to Schelling, written shortly after his graduation from the Seminary in 1793, he re­marked that "from the Kantian philosophy and its highest completion I expect a revolution in Germany.  p. 218

 

Hegel served as a house-tutor in Frankfurt between 1797 and 1801, a position his old friend, Holderlin, had found for him, and while there he came under the influence of Holderlin's own revolutionary attempts at developing post-Kantian thought. For Hegel, Holderlin had shown how Fichte's development of post-Kantian thought failed to understand the way in which there had to be a deeper unity between subject and object, how the distinction between the subjective and the objective could not itself be a subjective or an objective distinction, and that our awareness of the distinction itself presupposes some background awareness of their deeper unity.  Underlying the rupture between our experience of the world and the world itself, however, was a deeper sense of a notion of truth - of "being," as Holderlin called it - that was always presupposed in all our otherwise fallible encounters with each other and the world.  Hegel took those views with him when he left Frankfurt for Jena in 1801.  p. 218

 

SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POINTS OF VIEW: Although technically Hegel first published a book in 1797 - an anony­mously published translation of and commentary on a French language radical critique of the German-speaking Bernese patriciate (done while serving as a house-tutor for one of the leading families of the same patri­ciate) - his first philosophical book (and certainly the first that carried his name on it as the author) was his 1801 essay, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy. In it, he offered an argument that Schelling's philosophy (which until that point had been generally taken by the German philosophical public as only a variant of Fichte's thought) actually constituted an advance on Fichte's philosophy. Schelling had ar­gued that Fichte's key claim - that the difference between the subjective and the objective points of view had to be itself a subjective distinc­tion, something that the "I" posits - was itself flawed, since the line between the "I" and the "Not-I" was not itself absolute; one can draw it one way or another, idealistically or dogmatically, depending on what one's character inclined one to do. Instead, there had to be an overar­ching point of view that was presupposed by both points of view, which Schelling called the "absolute" and which, as encompassing both the sub­jective and objective points of view, was itself only apprehendable by an "intellectual intuition." In his Difference book, Hegel endorsed that line of thought, giving it some added heft by arguing that, in doing so, Schelling had implicitly brought to light what was really the upshot of Kant's three Critiques, namely, that the sharp distinction that Kant seemed to be mak­ing between concept and intuition was itself only an abstraction from a more basic, unitary experience of ourselves as already being in the world.  pp. 218-219

 

 

HEGELÕS REJECTION OF KANTÕS DISTINCTION BETWEEN CONCEPTS AND INTUITIONS: On Hegel's recounting in the Difference book, Fichte, having in ef­fect dropped Kant's requirement of intuition altogether, was then forced into understanding the "Not-I" as only a "posit" that the "I" had to con­struct for itself, and by virtue of that move was driven to the one-sided conclusion that the difference between the subjective and the objective had to be itself a subjectively established difference. Hegel hinted that Schelling's conception of the "absolute" already indicated that Fichte's views concerning both the sharp differentiation between concept and intuition and the subsequent downplaying of the role of intuitions were themselves unnecessary, and, on the first page of the essay, Hegel noted that "[i]n the principle of the deduction of the categories Kant's philos­ophy is authentic idealism" - that is, that the part of the Critique where Kant wishes to show that there can be no awareness of unsynthesized intuitions was implicitly the part where Kant himself showed that the distinction between concepts and intuitions is itself relative to an over­ all background understanding of what normative role various elements of our cognitive practices must and do play.3 Classifying something as a "concept" or an "intuition," that is, is already putting it into the place it plays in the practice of giving and asking for reasons, in what Hegel (following Schelling's usage) took to calling the "Idea," which Hegel eventually more or less identified as the "space of reasons" (although this was not his term).4  pp. 219-220

 

DUALITIES: That such oppositions (such as those between nature and freedom, subject and object, concepts and intuitions) have come on the agenda of philosophers in 1800 only indicates, he argued, that something deeper was at stake.  p. 220

 

MODERNITY AND RELIGION: FREEDOM AND ABSOLUTION: The guiding question behind almost all of them was one that had been nagging at him since he was a student at the Protestant Seminary in Tubingen: 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 that modern religions were called upon to satisfy was, of course, the need to be free in a Kantian or post-Kantian sense, and the question that Hegel was implicitly asking was: what would it take to be able to lead one's own life, to have a life of one's own, to be, in the language that Kant had introduced, autonomous, self-legislating? pp. 220-221

 

As he was finally running out of money and all hope for any future employment as an academic, he set to work on his greatest piece, the epochal Phenomenology of Spirit, finished in 1806 and published around Easter, 1807.  p. 221

 

One of Hegel's students in Berlin, Karl Michelet, claimed that Hegel took to describing his 1807 Phenomenology if Spirit as his own "voyage of discovery.Ó  p. 221

 

He never lectured on the Jena Phenomenology while in Berlin, although he did lecture on some sections of it that he had reworked into his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and near the end of his life he even disavowed it as the proper "introduction" to his system of philosophy at all, claim­ing that his later Encyclopedia now formed the proper introduction. (The Encyclopedia was first published in 1817 and went through published revi­sions and expansions in 1827 and 1830.) However, he continued to give copies of the Phenomenology to friends and notable visitors, and in 1831 he signed a contract to publish a revised edition of it. (He died before he could do much work on it, and although the revisions were clearly intended only to be minor, we will, of course, never know what Hegel might have done once he began work on it.)  p. 222

 

Not surprisingly, interpreters have always had trouble making sense of the book; it has been held, variously, to be a "coming of age" novel (a Bildungsroman), a new version of the divine comedy, a tragedy, a tragi-comedy, a work in epistemology, a philosophy of history, a treatise in Christian theology, and an announcement of the death of God.         p. 222

 

Hegel intended the book to satisfy the needs of contemporary (Euro­pean) humanity: it was to provide an education, a Bildung, a formation for its readership so that they could come to grasp with who they had become (namely, a people individually and collectively "called" to be free), why they had become those people, and why that had been necessary. In that re­spect, the Phenomenology was a completely post-Kantian work: it intended to show its readership why "leading one's own life," self-determination, had become necessary for "us moderns" and what such "self-legislation" actually meant.  p. 222

 

TRUTH-MAKERS AND THEIR PROGRESSIVE IDENTIFICATION: Hegel called this a thesis about Òconsciousness.Ó  If we begin with our consciousness of singular objects present to our senses ("sense-certainty," an awareness of "things" that is supposedly prior to fully fledged judgments), and hold that what makes those awarenesses true are in fact the singular objects themselves, then we take those objects to be the "truth-makers" of our judgments about them; however, in taking these objects to be the "truth-makers" of our awareness of them, we find that our grasp on them dissolves (or, alternatively: that in their role as "truth-makers" they themselves dissolve). The impetus for such dissolution lies in the way our taking them to play the role of "truth-makers" in that way turns out to involve ineliminable tensions or contradictions in our very "takings" themselves, and the result, so Hegel argued, is that, in the process of working out those tensions, we discover that it could not be the singular objects of sense-certainty that had been playing the normative role of "making" those judgments of sense-certainty true, but the objects of more developed, more mediated perceptual experience had to have been playing that role. (The objects of "sense-certainty" turned out, that is, not to be playing the normative role that the proponents of "sense-certainty" had originally taken them to be playing; something else, namely, perceptual objects as complexes of individual things instantiating general properties, turned out to be playing that role.) Or, to put it more dialectically, the tensions and contradictions involved in taking singular objects to be making our judgments about them true require us to acknowledge that something else must be playing that role (and that, implicitly, we are already relying on that "something else" in making such judgments in the first place).

p. 223

 

HOLISM THESIS: The dialectic inherent in Jacobi's "sense-certainty" thus turns on our being required to see the "truth-maker" of even simple judgments about the existence of singular things of experience as consisting of more com­plex unities of individual-things-possessing-general-properties of which we are "perceptually," and not simply "directly" aware. That is, we can legitimate judgments about singular objects only by referring them to our awareness of them as singular objects possessing general properties, which, in turn, requires us to legitimate them in terms of our take on the world in which they appear as such perceptual objects.  p. 223

 

ACCOUNTING FOR OBJECTIVITY DEMANDS THE ÒNORMATIVE TURNÓ: What that requires us to see, so Hegel argues, is that the concep­tion that there is any object or set of objects (even conceived as the world itself) that on its own, independently of our own activities, makes our judgments about those things true - as it were, something on which we could rely to keep us on the right track independently of any of our own ways of taking it, of our "keeping ourselves" on the right track - is itself so deeply ridden with tensions and contradictions in its own terms that it is untenable. The whole outlook of seeking the "objects" of some kind of direct awareness that would make that awareness true independently of our "taking" it to be such-and-such is so riddled with tensions that it requires us to acknowledge that part of that awareness has to do with the ways we "take" those objects. We must acknowledge, as Kant put it, that it must be possible for an "I think" to accompany all our consciousness of things. The dialectic of "consciousness" therefore 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.  p. 224

 

INTUITION = THE GIVEN = THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN: BEYOND THE CONCEPT/INTUITION DUALISM: The opening chapters of the Phenomenology provided Hegel with a way of stating some Kantian points without, so he thought, having to commit himself to (what he regarded as) either the unfortunate and untenable Kantian dualism between concepts and intuitions or to the Kantian mechanism of the "imposition" of concepts on sensibility to which Kant had been driven by virtue of accepting that dualism (that is, to seeing intuition as providing neutral content on which an organizational, con­ceptual scheme was then imposed).  pp. 224-225

 

In showing that the normative demands made by "consciousness" (that is, the norms governing judgments about objects of which we are aware), we are driven to comprehend that our mode of taking them to be such-and-such plays just as important a role in the cognitive enterprise as do the objects themselves or our so-called direct awareness of them. That itself therefore raises the question: what are the conditions under which our "takings" of them might be successful? In particular, how might we distinguish what only seems to be "the way we must take them" from the "way they really are?"  p. 225

 

KANTIAN SPONTANEITY AND THE QUESTION OF HOW SUCH A RULE GAINS A ÒGRIP ON USÓ: In the next section of the Phenomenology, titled "Self-Consciousness," Hegel carried out his most radical reformulation of Kantian philoso­phy, drawing deeply on Fichte's, Holderlin's, and Schelling's influences, while giving them a thoroughly new twist. Kant had said that, in mak­ing judgments, we follow the "rule" spontaneously prescribed for us by the concepts produced by our own intellects (the "understanding"), and had argued that the necessary, pure "rules" or "concepts of the under­standing" were generated by the requirements of ascribing experiences to (in Kant's own terms) a "universal self-consciousness" - that is, what were the requirements for any agent's "I think" to be able to accompany all his representations. Hegel's way of putting that Kantian question had to do with what in general could ever possess the authority to determine what counted as the rules of such a shared, "universal self-consciousness." The outcome of the dialectic of "consciousness" had shown that it depended on how we were taking things, and that, in turn, raised the issue of what we might be seeking to accomplish in taking things one way as opposed to another. Thus, the issue turned on what purposes might be normatively in play (or what basic needs might have to be satisfied) in taking things one way as opposed to another.  p. 225

 

INCORPORATION THESIS & PRACTICAL RATIONALITY AS SELF-SATISFACTION: However, practical desires are themselves like sensations in cognition; they acquire a normative significance only to the extent that we confer such a significance on them (or, in Kant's language, only as we incorporate them into our maxims). That means that agents are never simply satisfying desires; they are satisfying a project that they have (at least implicitly) set for themselves in terms of which desires have a significance that may not correspond to their intensity.  The agent, that is, has a "negative" relation to those desires, and thus the agent never simply "is" what he naturally is but "is what he is" only in terms of this potentially negative self-relation to himself - his (perhaps implicit) project for his life, not "life" itself, determining the norms by which he ranks his desires.8 

pp. 225-226

 

It cannot be simply "reason" itself, since that would beg the question of what purposes the use of reason best serves (or whether those purposes are to take prece­dence over any others in any non-question-begging way, or what even counts as a reason to whom).

p. 226

 

KANTIAN PARADOX SOLVED: In putting the question in that way, Hegel raised the issue that Kant had himself brought out so prominently in his own practical philosophy, which we have called the "Kantian paradox." Kant had argued that we must practically take ourselves to be self-determining, that what we as agents were "ultimately about" was freedom in this radical sense (or, to put it in slightly non-Kantian terms, there would be no point to our lives if they did not somehow embody this kind of freedom). But if the will imposes such a "law" on itself, then it must do so for a reason (or else be lawless); a lawless will, however, cannot be regarded as a free will; hence, the will must impose this law on itself for a reason that then cannot itself be self-imposed (since it is required to impose any other reasons). The "paradox" is that we seem to be both required not to have an antecedent reason for the legislation of any basic maxim and to have such a reason. Kant's own way out was simply to invoke the "fact of reason," which from the standpoint of the post-Kantians amounted more to stating the "paradox" than actually dealing with it.  p. 226

 

Like many others, Hegel, too, was unsatisfied with that result. How­ever, unlike Schelling, Hegel did not think that any kind of metaphysics of Naturphilosophie would satisfactorily resolve the issue, since such a Naturphilosophie either ultimately rested on some form of "intellectual intuition" (which, as Hegel was later to remark in his lectures on the history of philosophy, basically would have the same value as consult­ing an oracle); or, in light of Kant's destruction of pre-critical meta­physics, it simply begged all the questions it was trying to answer. Instead, something basic about our conception of the nature of agency itself had to be invoked. It is probably not going too far to say that Hegel viewed the "Kantian paradox" as the basic problem that all post-Kantian philosophies had to solve; and the solution had to be to face up to the paradox and to see how we might make it less lethal to our conception of agency while still holding onto it, all in terms of integrating it into some overall conception of agency that showed how the paradox was in fact livable and conceivable.  pp. 226-227

 

SPALTUNG: What the "Kantian paradox" seemed to call for was for an agent to split himself in two - in effect, for "me" to issue a law to myself that "I" could then use as a reason to apply the law to myself (what Hegel in his post-Phenomenology writings liked to call becoming the "other of itself," "das Andere seiner selbst," a phrase he claimed to take from Plato). 9   Splitting the agent in two - seeing each as the "negative" of the other, in Hegel's terms - does nothing to solve the problem, since such a view cannot adjudicate which of the two sides of the same agent is to have priority over the other; it cannot, that is, show how splitting myself in two somehow "binds" one of my parts because of legislation enacted by the other, nor can it even show how it would be possible for me correctly to grasp the rule to which I am supposedly subjecting myself.  p. 227

 

 

MUTUAL RECOGNITION AS THE LOGIC OF COMMITMENTS AND ENTITLEMENTS: 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 of another agent of it as binding on both of them. Each demands recognition from the other that the "law" he enacts is authoritative (that is, right). In Hegel's terms, the other agent must become the "negative" of the first agent, and vice versa; Hegel in fact speaks of this rather colorfully as a "doubling" (Verdopplung) of self-consciousness. II Or, to put it another way, the first agent demands that the other agent recognize his entitlement to the commitment he has undertaken and vice versa. This set of demands leads to a struggle for recognition, since at the beginning of the struggle, each agent is in effect lawless, simply imposing a set of demands for reasons that, from the standpoint of the other agent, must seem to be without warrant.  Each agent just chooses his own maxims (perhaps as those that satisfy his desires, perhaps not) and demands of the other agent that he confer an entitlement on him.  pp. 227-228

 

One becomes, that is, the author of the law, the other becomes the agent subject to the law.  p. 228

 

The master remains caught in the "Kantian paradox" without any real way out; for his edicts to have the kind of normative authority he claims (even desperately desires) them to have, he must be able to make his will "stick," to be able to enforce his will on the vassal; he attempts to "prove" that his will is binding by having the vassal slavishly work for him, but that only makes him more dependent on the vassal.  p. 228

 

The vassal, on the other hand, by internalizing the master's sense of law as what is right, as the objective point of view itself, also thereby through his work for the master ceases to remain a lawless agent. Through his work, the vassal learns what it means to subject oneself to the law, and, as having been shaken to his foundations in the struggle for recognition (by the fear of death), the vassal has existentially learned that he could rely on nothing but his own self-imposed subjection to the law. The vassal, curiously enough, therefore learns through his own self-subjection to the law what it would mean to be a lawgiver, and he comes to see that the edicts of the master are only the injunctions of a contingently formed individual, not the voice of reason itself. As gradually coming to see that his own recognition of the master is as crucial to the normative authority of the master's edicts as those edicts are themselves, he also begins subtly to undermine the normative status of the relationship in which both have found themselves, even if he, as vassal, remains powerless to extricate himself from it. In doing so, though, he also thereby comes to see his fate as resting on interest and power, not on right, and, when that happens, the normatively "binding" quality of the relationship has dissolved, even if the relations of power have not.  pp.  228-229

 

Although neither the master nor the vassal can discern it, in effect the same thing has happened to them in the dialectic of self-consciousness that happened in consciousness: what had seemed to play the decisive normative role in underwriting judgments turned out not to be what the proponents of that point of view had taken it to be, but to be something else entirely. Neither the master's nor the vassal's will alone was normative for the judgments of either agent; normative authority turned out to rest in the will of both, in being a social matter of each serving as master and vassal, or, in Kantian terms, of simultaneously, first, each subjecting the other to the law he himself authors; second, of each being himself subject to the law authored by the other; and, third, of each subjecting himself to the law of which he is also the author. The "truth" of the matter, as Hegel points out, is an "I that is a We, and a We that is an I," that is, Geist, a matter of sociality, not of individual awareness, desire, nor even of mere coordination of competing perspectives.  p. 229

 

Hegel seems to be suggesting the general problem of coming to grips with the "Kantian paradox" only has a historical solution, namely, that the move from a lawless will to a certain kind of autonomy is to be taken as a historical, social achievement, not as the realization of a metaphysical power that was all along operative in us (as Hegel apparently thought Kant's doctrine of transcendental freedom amounted to). The dawn of truly philosophical history thus begins with the period when the claims of reason were first addressed philosophically themselves, when, that is, ways of life first began to reflectively come to grips with the issue of what it meant to be a free agent as a rational agent.  p. 230

 

The political and moral collapse of the slave-owning societies of an­tiquity left the people of the ancient world in the position of having to affirm their being laws unto themselves without having to rely on slaves to affirm it for them, since it had become clear that the slaves could not play that role. Both stoicism and skepticism (both as philosophies and as ways of life) arose out of what seemed to be required by that fail­ure: one could only really be a law unto oneself if, first, one engaged in practices of distancing oneself from "life" and only taking as true what one could vouch for in one's own free thought (as "stoicism"), or, second (carrying that line of thought further), by taking a fully negative stance to all those putative claims to truth (as skepticism) and thereby preserving even more fully one's sense of being a law to oneself. 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.  pp. 230-231

 

Neither stoicism nor skepticism, however, was capable of sustaining itself - skepticism (as the truth of stoicism, as that to which one is driven when one attempts to cash out the Stoic attempts at a free life) ends up dissolving itself, since it ultimately has to submit its own freedom to doubt to the same kind of skeptical questioning to which it submits everything else, and, in doing so, exposes itself to itself as being only the result of the contingent thoughts of a particular individual.  p. 231

 

That despair over ever getting it right suffused the philosophies of the ancient world as the old gods and ways of life began dying out.  p. 231

 

The long-ruling medieval period of European history, interpreted by Hegel as a reign of universal servitude expressing itself as devotion to something "higher," turned out to have as its "truth" (as what it turned out to have required itself to formulate, given what it was trying to accomplish) a view of a completely "objec­tive" (God's eye) point of view, which gradually came to be identified with reason itself as the moderns came to believe that they could, in fact, comprehend the ways of God.  p. 231

 

In the long chapter of the Phenomenology titled "Reason," Hegel gave a sweeping (and idiosyncratic) account of the early modern European attempt to fashion a science of society, to translate the demand that one should be a law unto oneself into a workable way of life. As a way of life, the attempt to become a law unto oneself thus took increasingly individualistic forms; but as nei­ther the Faustian pursuit of knowledge in the service of satisfaction of desire, nor as the appeal to the "laws of the heart" (as laws to which individuals appealed to justify their stance to social projects), nor as a neo-stoic conception of virtue that identified true self-interest with the greatest altruism, could such attempts at being a law unto oneself sustain themselves.  pp. 231-232

 

It, too, unraveled under the pressure of practice and reflection upon its claims to authority. In other words, trying to hold onto the "authentic" self as the fixed point in our otherwise contingent dealings with each other turned out not to be possible, and it only served to show that there simply was nothing fixed in the self that could play such a normative role. The truth of the matter behind the giving and asking for reasons, therefore, was an ongoing series of social negotiations against a background of taken-for­granted meanings, with everything in the negotiations being up for grabs.  p. 232

 

The dissolution of the notion of there being a "fixed," authentic self behind the appearances of our actions was only resolved, so at least it at first seemed, by Kant's conception of the agent as giving the law to himself in the form of maxims. That is, in the ongoing, contingent set of social negotiations that seemed to be the "truth" of the modern world, the 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.  p. 232

 

KANTIAN PARADOX: Kant's own idea, though, seemed to founder on what we have called the "Kantian paradox": it both required there to be reasons preceding an individual's choice of reasons in order for the choice to be reasonable; and it seemed to require that those preceding reasons be themselves cho­sen. The Kantian solution, required by the failures of what had come before it, thus threatened to dissolve on its own part precisely because its appeal to "reason alone" seemed to rule itself out because of the "paradox." The key issue concerning which norms we elect and which we are simply called upon to "keep faith with" thus seemed to be at risk in the Kantian (and therefore the modern) solution itself.   Retreating to a mere formalistic interpretation of Kantian morality did not salvage the Kantian enterprise, since the principle of non-contradiction rules noth­ing substantive out; nor did interpreting Kant's categorical imperative as being only a procedural "test" of maxims taken from elsewhere not beg the questions of the rationality of the origins of those maxims. In that context, the modern crisis of reason and Jacobi's charges of impending "nihilism" seemed all the more crucial to consider.  p. 233

 

The way out of the Kantian paradox, so Hegel thought, 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. Answering that question in turn required a history of "social space," that is, an account of how the history of the demands we have put on each other required us to develop a determinate type of modern "social space," such that the modern, Kantian interpretation of the claims of reason on us would come to be seen not as merely contingent, and perhaps self-defeating, features of European history, but as something itself actually required by the history of that "social space," or Geist.  p. 233

 

 In that light, Hegel took Greek tragedy – in particular, SophocleÕs Antigone - to be especially revelatory of what it might mean for a way of life to be based not on fully "giving the law to oneself" but on "keeping faith" with basic ethical laws.  p. 234

 

Antigone is the true heroine of the play because she alone truly understands the conflict (unlike Creon, who for the greater part of the play seems to see no conflict at all, just insubordination on Antigone's part), and she thus understands that, although she must keep faith with the unconditional demand to give her brother the proper burial rites, she is also guilty of violating the unconditional demands of the civil law; and, even at the end of the play, she knows she is guilty while at the same time holding fast to her view that she did the right thing. 15   p. 234

 

 

 

15 SOCIAL ROLE MUST BE UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF NORMATIVITY, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND: In speaking of "keeping faith" with the laws, I am modifying somewhat the way I spoke of the "immediate" identity of Greek agents and their "social roles" in Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology.  The language of "social roles," as I have since found, obscures rather than reveals the crucial notions of giving oneself the law and keeping faith with the law, also making it sound as if, for Hegel, the Greek agent had never had to reflect on what she was required to do.  p. 234 footnote

 

For the Greek spectator, however, who can understand that she in fact suffers from conflicting demands, Antigone still appears as an almost unintelligible figure: she is a woman (and the diminished role of women in Greek society is only too obvious), and she also seems to be making her own choice to be determinative of which law is to be obeyed, and thus in effect to be putting herself in the contested role of the ultimate "tester" of valid law. The chorus tells her that she has erred, saying, "Your self-sufficiency has brought you down" (or, alternatively, and more literally, "your self-recognized anger destroyed you"); Antigone's anger is that of someone who recognizes only herself as an authority on the issue at hand.16 Antigone thus displays in herself how the normative demands of individuality acting according to personal conscience are, as it were, struggling to emerge out of a situa­tion where there is no conception of conscience on which to base those actions; Antigone's plight is that of somebody experiencing an imme­diate identification with her social role (as sister, as keeping faith with the divine law), while at the same time coming to experience that kind of immediate identification as both impossible (and thus having already had that identification wither within her own experience of herself) and inescapable, as something simply required of her. We moderns can see her conscience at work; she can only experience the conflict and guilt.  p. 235

 

The self-destruction of the ethical harmony of the ancient Greeks, and both the necessity for and the impossibility of the emergence of individuality within that way of life, prepared the ground for the Roman Empire to understand its own fragmented, "prosaic" way of life as the Successor to the Greeks.  p. 235

 

The French Revolution brought this to a close and completed, at least in principle, that line of development. Faced with the collapse of all other forms of authority, the "people," now describing themselves and not the monarch as the "nation of France," declared themselves "as the people" to be the "law" and to be engaged therefore in attaining an uncondi­tional freedom normatively unconstrained by the past or the contingent features of human nature, but instead to be constrained only by what was necessarily involved in that freedom's being sought for its own sake, keeping faith with nothing outside of its own dictates – in short, claiming to be "absolute" freedom. However, without anything more definite to determine what counted as such self-determination, any government of the "nation" could only be a faction, a particular group with its own agenda, renaming its own interests as those of "the people" and characterizing those other factions opposed to it as a danger to the nation. The truth of "absolute freedom" was the Terror: giving the law to oneself freed from any constraint by a kind of rationality pre­ceding such legislation, found its "truth" in the constant movement of the guillotine's blade.  

pp. 236-237

 

To see it only in those terms, however, was one-sided and therefore misleading. The real truth of the French Revolution, so Hegel argued, were the Kantian and Fichtean revolutions in philosophy, for only they brought out what was really normatively in play in the demand for "absolute freedom" - not the Terror, but the Kantian kingdom of ends was the "truth" of the demands of the Revolution. The Terror was, as it were, the false conclusion that would be necessarily drawn from such a demand without the mediating effects of social institutions that themselves embodied and realized the kingdom of ends (which Hegel, ever a child of his own times and upbringing, thought was some form of Protestant Christianity, the religion of both himself and Kant).  p. 237

 

The Kantian and Fichtean revolutions were themselves, however, also part of a larger way of life, the very modern "moral worldview," as Hegel called it. While the Terror emerged in France because of the way its institutional past as an absolute, centralized monarchy made the claim of "the people" seem like the rational embodiment of the demand of ab­solute freedom, in fragmented Germany, the "moral worldview" at first emerged out of developments in religion, not politics. For the "moral worldview," as with the French Revolution, the primary object of con­cern was freedom, but this was not taken in institutional terms (as a call to establish a government of "absolute freedom") but instead 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. If the threat to freedom for the proponents of the Revolution was governmental or aristocratic despotism, the threat to freedom for the "moral worldview" was nature (and especially one's own "human" nature of desires and inclinations). To be free was to be able to give oneself the law independently of any constraint by nature (or social cus­tom, although this was less important for the "moral worldview"), and this could be actualized for an individual only by holding fast to his self-legislated (although universal) duties. What ultimately mattered for the "moral worldview" were that one exercise a particular kind of power (such as transcendental freedom) that is independent of nature, that one formulate one's maxims so as to meet the demands of universalizability, and that one act on the right motive (do duty for duty's sake). This is a problem for individuals, not for governments; no institution can make one transcendentally free, nor can it prevent it; nor can an insti­tution determine one's motive, for only the individual himself can do that.  pp. 237-238

 

The basic problem for the "moral worldview" had to do with recon­ciling its claim to (individual, moral) freedom with the competing claims made on an individual by his own sensuous nature. In particular, it has to ask what interest the embodied individual might have in being moral. On Kant's own terms, of course, there could be no antecedent interest in being moral, but even Kant himself recognized that, whereas we could always demand of everyone that they do their duty, we could not ratio­nally expect everyone to be moral drudges, to live lives of unremitting pain or stupefying dullness if morality required it.17 We are thus also under the duty to promote the "highest good," the union of virtue and happiness, so that our desire for our own happiness will not be at such odds with our clearly recognized moral duty. To that end, Kant (and so many post-Kantians after him) attached great interest to producing various "postulates" of practical philosophy as necessary conditions of attaining the highest good as the union of virtue and happiness (one example being Kant's arguing for the practical necessity to postulate immortality and the promise of eternal reward for our virtue). 18   p. 238

 

One must strive to complete morality (bring about the highest good), and one must also act without any interest in its being actualized (since one's happiness is impermissible as a moral motive).  p. 239

 

The "moral worldview," so Hegel argues, thereby commits itself to constant dissembling, a pretense that the only thing that matters is act­ing on the motive of duty for duty's sake, while at the same time claiming that, without attending to one's happiness, one is engaged in a practically hopeless enterprise.  p. 239

 

Behind the "moral worldview" is a stress therefore on purity of motive and purity of self, of cleansing the agent of all contaminants to his ability to be a law unto himself, and it is that commitment to purity that plays the determinative normative role in the "moral worldview." Such a commit­ment ultimately requires that the agent's uncontaminated commitment to duty be kept pure, and, within the Christian European way of life, that commitment to purity found its expression as the appeal to personal conscience. Although Hegel held it was a great achievement of modern life to have carved out a space for the claims of conscience within itself, he also thought that the way that space had to be carved out necessarily involved some false turns. At first, the appeal to conscience seemed to be consistent only if it were taken in either of two ways: either the commit­ment to duty must be kept pure, which rules out any action that might somehow soil that purity; or keeping one's purity intact required one to act simply out of the depths of one's conviction, committed to the belief that, whatever the outcome, the act was pure and therefore good if it was done out of genuine, deep conviction. (Fichte held a version of this latter view, as did]. F. Fries, who, of course, otherwise despised Fichte; in making his criticisms, Hegel probably had Fries in mind, whom he detested as much as Fries detested him.) The "pure" individual appeal­ing only to what his own conscience permits him is a "beautiful soul" (a term much in vogue in Hegel's day and explicitly invoked in the moral context by Fries). For the "beautiful soul," one avoids the "Kantian para­dox" only by holding fast to one's conscience, more or less "expressing" individually the moral law that one personally "is." Hegel, of course, could barely conceal his contempt for this line of post- Kantian individ­ualist self-absorption, but he also saw it as one of the ways in which the "Kantian paradox" was working itself out as it tried to realize the ideal of the morally pure will. '9   pp. 239-240

 

In their pursuit of purity in the face of the fragmented, modern world, such beautiful souls fragment themselves into those who act out of con­viction, knowing that they cannot know all the possible morally salient features of a situation but remain convinced that the purity of their con­viction carries over into their acts; and those who cannot tolerate being contaminated by any compromises with the real world and thus refuse to play along, preserving their inner purity by inaction and condemning all those who act as complicit with the evil of the world.  p. 240

 

In the eyes of the other, the judgmental purist, who refuses to soil his hands with action that might compromise what his "pure" conscience requires, is a hypocrite, pretending to be good but actually concerned only with himself; in the eyes of the judgmental purist, the agent who acts according to what the purity of his conscience tells him is also a hypocrite, for the same reason.  p. 240

 

In fact, each form of the beautiful soul expresses something Kant already anticipated: the moral ideal cannot mean that the demands of duty are supposed to be the normal case in everyday life, as if every waking moment in daily life should be taken up with the thought of duty for duty's sake. Instead, it must mean that we are to strive to bring about a world in which we quasi-naturally do the right thing without having to constantly factor in our duty.20   p. 241

 

20 Seeing Kant in this way rejects the overly "rigorist" interpretation of his views that only acts done from duty have any moral worth - an interpretation that leads to Schiller's famous jibe to the effect that we should set things up so that I dislike my friends so that my good acts toward them will therefore shine all the brighter. Two recent works go a long way toward dispelling such a view, substituting instead a view that Kant was a "value" theorist, for whom "respect for persons" is the ultimate value to be realized, and that all other duties and moral considerations are to follow from that. See Allen Wood, Kant's Ethical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Nancy Sherman, Making a Virtue of Necessity)': Kant and Aristotle on Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The difficulties (both philosophical and textual) of making Kant into such a "value theorist" are brought out by Robert Pippin, "Kant's Theory of Value: On Allen Wood's Kant's Ethical Thought," Inquiry, 43 (summer, 2000); and "Rigorism and 'the New Kant'," forthcoming in Proceedings of the IXth International Kant Congress.  p. 241 footnote

 

The solution to this, so Hegel argues, arises out of the same prac­tice that produces the appeal to conscience in the first place, namely, Christian culture. In particular, it is the practice of forgiveness, the Christian recognition that we are all "sinners" in the eyes of God, trans­muted into a secular practice of forgiveness and reconciliation that brings out what is really normatively in play in the appeal to conscience: an appeal not to "beautiful souls," but to the recognition that, in Hegel's terms, our sociality fundamentally commits us to being the "masters" and "slaves" to each other - we are authors of the law to ourselves only as others co-author the law for US.22 The "ethical world" - the "I that is We, and the We that is I" - exists only in terms of each holding Our­selves to the law by holding others to the law, while at the same time they hold us to the law and hold themselves to the law; In all such cases, claims made on oneself by another agent (or, in more Hegelian terms, by "the other") radically alter one's self-relation. The freedom sought by "beautiful souls" is thus to be found not in a striving for independence (the problem with all attempts at being a "master" who is the author of the law but never subject to a law authored by anybody else), but in a recognition of our crucial mutual dependencies on each other.23 The "Kantian paradox" is not overcome, only sublated, aufgehoben, into a his­torical and social conception of agency, where the appeal to reason turns out to involve, first, our participating in a historical, social practice of giving and asking for reasons, not in an appeal to something outside of us that sorts the world out for us prior to our deliberations, nor to any purely methodological procedure of testing for universalizability; and, second, our understanding of freedom as itself involving a certain type of self-relation that includes relations to others as being in a common sphere, not the exercise of some transcendental, causal power.  pp. 241-242

 

23 This notion of "structured dependencies" is most explicitly worked out by (and in fact the term comes from) Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 

p. 242 footnote

 

The concluding chapter on the history of Geist in the Phenomenology thus culminated not so much in a fixed conclusion, as in the sketch of a pro­gram for Hegel's thought, arguing in effect that the modern world neces­sarily had to make space for individuals and their inviolable consciences while at the same time not becoming so individualistic that it failed to ac­knowledge the deep sociality of human agency. (That is, "individualism" in Hegel became a "right of subjectivity," a normative demand on how peo­ple should be regarded, not a metaphysically prior fact about them that somehow was supposed to generate such a demand.) This conclusion, though, comes about by relying on a background understanding of a Christian "way of life," which serves as a basis for articulating the com­mitments which such "beautiful souls" actually have undertaken (or what in Hegelian terms is their "truth"), and which is not itself to be found exclusively in those commitments but must be generated out of them as what is really normatively in play in the kind of giving and asking for reasons in modern social practice. Hegel's invocation of a "Christian" way of life in that regard was done quite purposely, since it raised for him the obvious question: is Christianity itself a rational way of life, or just the way "we" (early nineteenth-century Europeans) habitually do things?  pp. 242-243

 

Given the rest of the argument in the Phenomenology, it is clear that, for Hegel, the only acceptable answer would have to be dialectical and historical. One would first have to show that religion is itself something to which we must be committed; and, second, show that Christianity, itself taken as a historical practice, is also necessary, not just an accident of history; and, third, show that its necessity is itself rational in the sense that it has emerged as what was really normatively in play in other religions. 

p. 243

 

It is clear that Hegel thought religion, at least in the sense of being a communal practice involving a collective reflection on our (humanity's) highest interests - on what ultimately matters to us - shares its concerns with art and philosophy.  In Hegel's reconstruction, religious practice emerges in its earliest forms as "nature religion" in which the di­vine is interpreted as an abstract natural "whole" that does not necessar­ily concern itself with humanity in particular; such "nature religions" in turn culminate in Egyptian religious practices, in which, having reached the end of their development, they set the stage for their own overcom­ing in Greek religion, in which the gods present us with an imaginative, aesthetic presentation of what it would be like to be free, to be completely "laws unto ourselves." The replacement of harmonious Greek ethical life by Roman imperial life in turn motivated a new focus on subjective interiority that had itself emerged in an unsustainable form in the Greek experience of becoming "philosophical." That development found its truth in the idea that God appeared as man (Jesus) and died. (Hegel liked to cite an old Lutheran hymn to the effect that "God has died."24)  p. 243

 

The resurrection, Hegel seemed to say, occurs in each Christian wor­ship service in which God is present as rational self-conscious Geist itself (However, Hegel did not think, as some of his left-Hegelian followers later did, that, in religion, we worship only ourselves; he thought that we ac­knowledged the "divine principle" in ourselves.) Christianity, as a religion of humanity in general and not of a particular nation, and as a religion of interiority and freedom, not of authoritarian obedience, was the ground in which modern life took root and flourished and could become recon­ciled with itself Religion, that is, 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 - "infinitely," ultimately - is that we be free, that we are called to lead our own lives.  p. 244

 

However, even modern reformed Protestantism is not capable of for­mulating that truth about itself.  It could at best express it through its practices of devotion, its rites, and its symbols.  p. 244

 

What was normatively in play in Christian reli­gion, Hegel was saying, had turned out to be theology, the articulation in rational form of what was only expressed in Christianity's rites and ritu­als; but what was normatively in play in theology, in its appeal to reason, had turned out to be philosophy as "absolute knowing."  p. 244

 

The Kantian "critique of reason" (spread out over three Critiques and many other works), which asserted the sovereignty of reason and its re­fusal to recognize anything "not in its own plan" had culminated, so Hegel argued, in the historical triumph of philosophy, as non-religious, non-aesthetic reflection on what mattered most to us, which was the his­toricized use of reason itself to liberate ourselves from the dependencies on givens that had shackled us in the past.  pp. 244-245