Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics

Michael J. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367591120
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351974240
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The renaissance in Hegel scholarship over the past two decades has largely ignored or marginalized the metaphysical dimension of his thought, perhaps most vigorously when considering his social and political philosophy. Many scholars have consistently maintained that Hegel's political philosophy must be reconstructed without the metaphysical structure that Hegel saw as his crowning philosophical achievement. This book brings together twelve original essays that explore the relation between Hegel's metaphysics and his political, social, and practical philosophy. The essays seek to explore what normative insights and positions can be obtained from examining Hegel's distinctive view of the metaphysical dimensions of political philosophy. His ideas about the good, the universal, freedom, rationality, objectivity, self-determination, and self-development can be seen in a new context and with renewed understanding once their relation to his metaphysical project is considered. Hegel's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics will be of great interest to scholars of Hegelian philosophy, German Idealism, nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory.

Part I

The Relation of Hegel’s Metaphysics and Political Theory

1 The Course of God

Reading Hegel

Peter J. Steinberger

In The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Josiah Royce suggests that

[i]f Hegel taught anything, then what he taught can be conveyed in an utterly non-Hegelian vocabulary, or else Hegel is but a king of the rags and tatters of flimsy terminology, and no king of thought at all. It is therefore absolutely the duty of a man who nowadays supposes that he has any truth from Hegel to propound, to state it in an entirely fresh and individual form. Of Hegelian language repeated to us in place of Hegelian thought, we have had by this time a sickening surfeit.¹

Such an observation, which seems to me plainly true, is certainly as germane to the study of Hegel’s political thought as it is to any other region of his philosophy, and it poses a particular problem for scholars of the Philosophy of Right (henceforth PdR), namely, how to make manageable sense of the larger system out of which that work emerges. Of course, to engage this problem in a truly satisfactory way is nearly impossible; the system, by its very nature, is utterly ill suited to the kind of abbreviation and paraphrase that might make it genuinely tractable. But the task is also necessary, if, that is, one wants to understand what Hegel has to say about politics. For while we know that a generation of influential scholars, working in the second half of the last century, sought to describe a Hegelian political theory that is separate from and innocent of the basic claims of Hegelian metaphysics, it’s hard to see how such a project could be at all tenable.² In writing about right and the state, Hegel does not simply make a series of assertions but, rather, explicitly and pointedly embeds those assertions in an elaborate structure of argumentation designed in part to show why they are true, and it is equally clear that the structure itself is to be understood as composing, in the end, nothing less than the totality of what Hegel calls philosophical science. That, at any rate, is how he himself intended his political thought to be comprehended. But what this means is that to approach PdR without examining its metaphysical grounding is, in effect, to invent a new theory of politics that, however edifying and useful, has rather little to do with what Hegel actually said.³

The challenge becomes perhaps especially acute, though also perhaps especially revealing, when one encounters the most central of Hegelian claims concerning the very idea of political society. In the Zusatz to §258 of PdR,⁴ we encounter the famous—or infamous—notion that “the state is the course of God in the world [der Gang Gottes in der Welt].” This is, in effect, a gloss on the immediately preceding proposition, namely, that “the state is Geist that is present in the world,” which, in turn, is an elaboration of Hegel’s own Remark to §258 where he says that the principle of the state has “thought” (Gedanke) both as its form and as its content, hence is nothing other than “thinking (Denken) itself.” Clearly, we cannot begin to understand these important passages unless we try to make some sense, however preliminary, of what Hegel means by, above all, the notion of Geist. But again, fully to engage such a question would require an exploration of the Hegelian project more or less in its entirety, for the fact is that Hegel conceived of his philosophical system as a system in the strongest sense of the word. The various parts are connected to one another in deep and complicated ways, and the result is a kind of hermetic and seamless whole. Indeed, a penchant for wholeness—for organic synthesis—seems to be a basic and defining feature of Hegel’s cast of mind, and one consequence is that nothing in his system admits of simple definition. All things must eventually be understood in light of their connections with everything else, and the putative outcome—an apparently impenetrable structure of endless interpenetration—seems only to have encouraged political theorists to try to save Hegel’s political thought from the opacity and supposed obsolescence of his metaphysics.

For our purposes, the implication is that a truly satisfying and comprehensive analysis of what Hegel means by Geist would seem to require nothing less than a full and detailed consideration of, presumably, his Enzyklopädie—something obviously light years beyond what could be accomplished in an essay (and light years, as well, beyond the ambitions of the present author). But what perhaps can be offered here is an attempt to describe in broad terms the general character of Hegelian speculation per se and to outline thereby the basic structure of argument—the distinctive manner of thinking—that underwrites his theory of the state. It is to such an effort that the present essay is devoted. I propose to consider, specifically, the kind of thing that Hegel is talking about when he talks about Geist, understood as somehow embodying or representing the universe of discourse out of which emerges the world of politics in general and the concept of right in particular.

Geist is usually rendered in English either as “spirit” or as “mind,” though any number of alternative translations might be plausible, for example, intellect, intelligence, wit. I believe these various renderings to be at once accurate and misleading. They are misleading in that their usual connotations in English fail to do justice to, perhaps even distort, the idea of Geist as it actually operates in Hegel’s thought. Thus, for example, the word spirit may conjure up a kind of arcane and elusive mysticism, thereby leading the casual reader to suppose that Hegelian philosophy involves arbitrary and unsupported assertions about irrational, otherworldly things. Similarly, the word mind might, in certain contexts, suggest the faculty of a discrete individual being, hence encourage the idea that Hegel is talking about some kind of strange, transcendent, supernatural person or deity whose thoughts are somehow omniscient and omnipotent. Since none of this has much connection with the perspective that Hegel actually adopts, it would be good to gain some independent purchase on the notion of Geist, if only for the purpose of being clear about what he is not saying. What kind of philosophical work is Geist supposed to do? How is that work done? In what ways is it similar to and different from the types of conceptual materials that we find elsewhere in the philosophical literature? Answering such questions in plain language—in, as Royce says, an “utterly non-Hegelian vocabulary”—can provide, I would propose, a useful pathway into the alleged mysteries of Hegel’s mind and, by necessary implication, into the underlying logic of his idea of the state.

1

I propose to look at Geist by means of an analogy, specifically an analogy with mathematics. Now mathematics is, of course, a term that we use quite freely in ordinary conversation, but its reference is not entirely straightforward. Our intuition is that it has to do with quantitative things, that it involves the rigorous analysis of those things, that individuals systematically engaged in that kind of analysis are mathematicians, that groups of mathematicians in a college or university often compose a department of mathematics and the like. If we unpack all of this, however, I think we can see that our concept of mathematics, in fact, contains a number of quite distinct, albeit interrelated, elements.

To begin with, mathematics is understood as an activity. It is something that people do, like tennis or cooking. As a rather widely recognized and frequently well-organized activity, we may say that mathematics has the features of what philosophers used to call a “practice.”⁵ This means, among other things, that it is an activity governed by more or less explicit rules. These rules are constitutive of the practice; they make mathematics what it is such that to violate the rules is no longer properly to be doing mathematics.

There is, of course, a certain inconvenience inherent in this or any other practice. Specifically, the rules may change, and it is, as a result, often difficult to know when the rules are being legitimately revised and when they are being violated. The ambiguity seems to me unavoidable; it is a characteristic of all practices. But while ambiguity may well be, from a philosophical point of view, the most interesting feature of a practice, from the perspective of the relevant practice itself it’s rather secondary. For the fact is that most of the rules of a practice are clear and uncontroversial most of the time. If this were not the case, if the rules were truly ineffable, undiscoverable or radically unstable, then the practice simply would not be a practice, that is, an established, ongoing social activity the principles of which can be observed and utilized with some reliability. In the instant case, mathematics would not be what it is, namely, an intellectual discipline wherein some procedures and answers are clearly, recognizably right, others clearly, recognizably wrong.

This sketch suggests that the word mathematics, in fact, denotes two quite different things: first, the set of rules that constitute the practice and, second, the actual activity of following (to the degree possible) those rules. Stated otherwise, mathematics is both a social institution and a kind of human action. The former is roughly what a sociologist might call a “social fact” insofar as it is what it is apart from what any particular individual does. For example, if some number of individual mathematicians suddenly stopped doing mathematics, or stopped doing it properly, one could nevertheless claim that mathematics as a practice continues to exist (albeit rather more quietly than before). The latter—mathematics as a kind of human action—is an individual fact. It simply describes something that particular people do (though they often do it in concert with other people) and that derives its identity from the fact that doing mathematics is different in specifiable ways from what people do when they play tennis or cook or do all of the other things that people do. Mathematics, then, is both of these.

But it is something else besides. For we use the word mathematics to describe not simply the practice and the activity of following the practice but also the content to which the practice is directed and the actual fruits of the activity. Mathematics, in short, is the sum total of true mathematical axioms and theorems. Our own language amply reflects this. To pursue mathematics certainly is in part to pursue the rules of the practice, but surely it is also to examine the substance, to learn the truths that mathematics has to offer. One does mathematics, but one also studies mathematics as one studies a (very complex) thing. The thing itself, moreover, has two quite different aspects. For the substance of mathematics is, to begin with, composed of all currently known mathematical axioms and theorems. To have knowledge of mathematics is to know as many of those axioms and theorems as possible together with their respective rationales or proofs. But there are a great many people who investigate the substance of mathematics in order not simply to learn what is already known but to discover, in addition, what is not currently known. Thus, and in principle, mathematics contains not just all established mathematical truths but also all those that are as yet undiscovered. This may seem odd; one cannot specify the nature of those as yet undiscovered truths precisely because they are as yet undiscovered. Nonetheless, it appears that we cannot possibly deny that they exist—the desire to discover new mathematical truths is one of the main reasons for studying mathematics—and thus, we cannot but include them as an important part of mathematics.

There is yet a further complication here, for the relationship between the region of mathematics that is known and the region that is not yet known may be problematic in a very special way. Specifically, new discoveries in mathematics may lead us to the conclusion that certain old and established truths are, in fact, not true at all. We certainly do not count this as a bad thing; to demonstrate the falsity of what was previously thought true is, by some accounts, very nearly a definition of rational progress. But it does suggest that although we are interested in studying the substance of mathematics, we are or ought to be aware that that substance itself may have, strangely enough, a certain character of instability and unreliability. This might suggest, in turn, that the content of mathematics is unfixed, evasive, changeable. Yet such a suggestion would be, in the end, unacceptable or, at best, non-mathematical. For as mathematicians we are virtually forced to presuppose that, in fact, there is somewhere a fixed, permanent and absolutely certain truth to mathematics, if only we can discover it. This truth would be composed of, roughly, the complete and entire gamut of all possible correct mathematical principles and propositions. When we study the substance of mathematics, we are, in fact, studying established mathematical truths in the hope of going beyond those truths to discover something that is truer, which can then, in turn, clarify the degree to which the established truths are, in fact, true. If, as Gödel suggests, mathematical hope is ultimately forlorn, this provides no argument against the claim that the aim is, in no small part, constitutive of the activity.

One last feature of mathematics requires our attention. I refer to the long-standing controversy about the relationship between mathematical truth and the world “out there,” by which I mean the natural, observable, physical world in which we happen to fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I The Relation of Hegel’s Metaphysics and Political Theory
• Part II Ontology, Metaphysics and Practical Reason
• Part III Metaphysics, History and the Structures of Ethical Life
• List of Contributors
• Index