Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy

Beyond Kantian Constructivism

James Gledhill, Sebastian Stein, James Gledhill, Sebastian Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780815383734
• eBook ISBN: 9781351205535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While Kantian constructivism has become one of the most influential and systematic schools of thought in analytic moral and political philosophy, Hegelian approaches to practical normativity hold out the promise of building upon Kantian insights into individual self-determination while avoiding their dualistic tendencies. James Gledhill and Sebastian Stein unite distinguished scholars of German idealism and contemporary Anglophone practical philosophy with rising stars in the field, to explore whether Hegelian idealist philosophy can offer the categories that analytic practical philosophy requires to overcome the contradictions that have so far plagued Kantian constructivism.

The volume organizes the contributions into three parts. The first of these engages debates in metaethics regarding the relationship between realism and constructivism. The second part sees contributors draw on debates about the nature of political normativity, focusing primarily on the problems of historical contextualism, relativism, and critical reflection. The concluding part considers the application of the Hegelian framework to contemporary debates about specific ethical issues, including multiculturalism, democracy, and human rights.

Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy contributes to the on-going debate about the importance of systematic philosophy in the context of practical philosophy, engages with contemporary discussions about the shape of a rational social order, and gauges the timeliness of Hegelian philosophy. This book is a must read for scholars interested in Hegel and in the contemporary tradition of Kantian constructivism in moral and political philosophy.

Section 1

Hegelian Ethics Between Constructivism and Realism

1 Hegel’s “Actualist” Idealism and the Modality of Practical Reason

Paul Redding

In a review article on Hegel’s critique of Kant’s formalism of the categorical imperative, Sally Sedgwick has stressed the need to look beyond those few passages in which Hegel explicitly attacks Kant’s formulations of this moral law: such passages are simply “too vague and uninformative to support a reliable interpretation of [Hegel’s] empty formalism critique” (Sedgwick 2011: 265). To gain a more adequate understanding of Hegel’s position, she argues, we must look to his more general stance towards Kant’s larger philosophical commitments in both theoretical and practical domains. Hegel’s ultimate target, she notes, is Kant’s account of human reason and its laws. Given the systematicity of the thought of both these philosophers, Sedgwick is surely right, but the question of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s account of human reason inevitably raises the further contentious question of the nature of Hegel’s own metaphysics. Thus, it may be asked whether Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s account of reason amounted to a radicalization of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, or whether it was more a type of metaphysically driven rejoinder to it – a question that has divided Hegel scholars for decades.

In this chapter I want to explore the idea of Hegel’s so-called “empty formalism” critique as being a consequence of his idealism understood as a version of a distinctive metaphysical, or perhaps meta-metaphysical, position that has been dubbed “modal actualism” and that was first applied to the New Zealand logician and philosopher Arthur Prior (Fine 2005: 133). Prior was an early opponent of a theory about the nature of modality made famous by David Lewis who, as had Leibniz in the seventeenth century, had given an interpretation of modal concepts in terms of an ontology of possible worlds (Lewis 1973: 1986). Whereas Prior and subsequent modal actualists took aim at the logic and ontology of Lewis’s “possibilism,” Hegel’s analogous critique, I suggest, aimed at the possibilism of Leibniz and at Leibnizian elements in Kant. The basic ideas behind the view of Hegel as a modal actualist are not new and are implicit in the work of a now largely ignored Hegel interpreter from the 1950s, John N. Findlay. It was not a coincidence, I suggest, that Findlay had been a teacher of, and an important influence on, Arthur Prior, the first official modal actualist. Nor was it a coincidence that Findlay himself had devoted considerable efforts to giving expression to a broadly Hegelian “axiological” moral theory which he opposed to an “ethics of rule” of which Kant was, it would seem, the paradigm.

I take the possibilism opposed by Prior and Findlay to comprise both logical and ontological aspects, with Leibniz and Lewis having endorsed both. Thus both Leibniz and Lewis had wanted to be realists about possibility: judgments about non-actual possibilities must be meaningful, and both thought that the meaningfulness of such judgments could be explained by invoking an ontology of possible worlds. Thus a judgment in the actual world will be understood as necessarily true if it holds in all possible worlds, while one will be held as possibly true if it holds in some possible worlds. And both were happy to accept this in the face of the strongly counterintuitive idea that the actual world is all there is, although not surprisingly, few have been willing to follow them in this regard. For example, in a letter to Leibniz in 1686, Antoine Arnauld had written: “[W]e imagine that before [God] willed to create the world he envisaged an infinity of possible things from which he chose some and rejected others: several possible Adams, each one with a large success of people and events, with which he has an intrinsic relation.” But Arnauld objects that he is

strongly inclined to think that they are chimeras that we make up for ourselves… . For my part I am convinced that, although we speak so much of these purely possible substances, we nevertheless never conceive of any of them except through the idea of one of those which God has created.

(Leibniz 1998: 104)

To think of some merely possible thing only “through the idea of one of those which God has created” is to hold that thought about the possible must rely on resources found in the actual. This too was the alternative embraced by Hegel and expressed clearly in his discussion of possibility in the section “Wirklichkeit,” or “Actuality,” with which the “Objective Logic” of the Science of Logic concludes. Moreover, it is not only manifest in Hegel’s critical attitude to Leibniz, and especially his logic; it is manifest also, I will argue, in what Hegel sees as the consequences of that logic in the doctrines of Kant.

In relation to Lewis, reactions have varied. Some have used this link to simply dismiss such modal talk as meaningless, while others have accepted the meaningfulness of modal talk but dismissed the appeal to possible worlds – that is, to the approach of “possible-world semantics” – as a way of accounting for such meaningfulness. Another stance has been that of Robert Stalnaker who, accepting the meaningfulness of modal talk and treating possible-world semantics as the best theory to account for it, has attempted to free that approach from Lewis’s metaphysics (Stalnaker 2012), providing another variety of “modal actualism.” While Stalnaker affirms that the actual world, the world – within which we exist and to which we have cognitive access in empirical experience – is reality, he insists that the actual must be understood as somehow containing a plurality of alternative unrealized but possible states. This is broadly similar to the account of the relation of possibility to actuality given by Hegel in his discussion of Wirklichkeit, but the critiques of possibilism by actualists like Prior and Stalnaker are not restricted to its ontological dimension: they are also directed against its underlying logical features as well. So too, as I have argued elsewhere (Redding 2019a), Hegel’s ontological considerations were matched by similarly logical ones in his account of the logic of modal judgments in the subjective logic.

In this chapter I want to fill out parts of this picture in relation to the project that Sedgwick described earlier, and present Hegel’s critique of Kant’s “empty formalism” as a consequence of his broader metaphysical stance. First, in section 1, I locate Findlay’s approach to Hegel with respect to more recent debates, and in section 2, explore the features behind his reading of Hegel. In section 3 I examine Kant’s approach to the modalities of possibility and necessity and introduce Hegel’s critique, while in 4 and 5 I show the grounds of this critique in his criticism of the ultimacy of the laws of identity and contradiction – laws, I suggest, that are at the heart of the possibilist’s conception of logic.

1. Hegel and the Issue of Metaphysics

A focus of recent debates over the nature of Hegel’s stance towards metaphysics has been the metaphysically deflationary interpretations offered since the late 1980s by Robert B. Pippin and Terry Pinkard (e.g., Pippin 1989; Pinkard 1994). While traditionally Hegel had been regarded as having regressed to pre-Kantian metaphysical commitments of an extravagant theo-centric type, Pippin and Pinkard portrayed him as on the side of what Pippin (1997) described as “philosophical modernism.” By this was broadly meant a type of secularized enlightenment culture of the type to which C.S. Peirce had appealed when describing a community in which opinions are settled or beliefs fixed by propositions found “agreeable to reason” rather than by habit or compulsion (Peirce 1992). This is not to say that such revisionist readings were new. From the beginning of the twentieth century can be found various attempts, like those of Dilthey and Lukács, to rehabilitate Hegel within a broadly modern context, and commonly these focused on the thought of the “young Hegel” of the Jena period which culminated in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the early decades of the second half of the century, when the ideas of the later Wittgenstein had become influential within analytic circles, some interpreters saw parallels between Hegel’s more historicist approach to “ethical substance” [Sittlichkeit] in the Phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s doctrines of “language games” embedded in “forms of life” (see, for example, Lamb 1979). Again, usually such interpreters distinguished Hegel’s early approach to these issues from that of his “mature,” systematizing work, which seems to be the antithesis of the approach of the later Wittgenstein, while Pippin and Pinkard have been willing to embrace the whole of Hegel, systematic Logic and Realphilosophie included (e.g., Pinkard 2017; Pippin 2018).

Within the earlier Wittgenstein-influenced approaches, however, Findlay’s seems an exception in not being restricted to parts of Hegel’s oeuvre, and in the present circumstances there are distinct advantages, I believe, in re-examining his approach. One of these is that it provides a response to the critics of “deflationist” readings of Hegel’s metaphysics by showing Hegel as a “robustly” realist philosopher, as long as reality is equated with actuality. Findlay had been explicit concerning the way in which Hegel was not the extravagant metaphysician of tradition: “[T]here never has been a philosopher by whom the Jenseitige, the merely transcendent, has been more thoroughly ‘done away with’, more thoroughly shown to exist only as revealed in human experience” (Findlay 1958: 19). It was a similar resistance to the idea of a transcendent beyond, a Jenseitige, that made Prior so resistant to Lewis’s metaphysics. But, of course, denying the reality of other worlds in no sense impugns the reality of this world, the actual world, providing that one does not lose sight of the need to accommodate a place for possibility within the actual world. These issues had, I believe, been central to Findlay’s philosophy during a period in which such modal issues had been largely ignored.

Another advantage of Findlay’s work is that it provides at least hints about the deeper reasons behind Hegel’s critique of Kant’s empty formalism. In his own philosophy, Findlay labored on a “teleological” approach to value, inspired, he claimed, by the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and which he opposed to the then dominant “metaethics” approaches of analytic philosophy. The result of this effort was his Values and Intentions (Findlay 1961). Specifically, he there opposed “the long predominance in philosophy of an ethics of rule, which sought to prescribe what it is proper for the individual to do, or bring about by his doing, rather than with what it is proper and desirable for him to aim at, or wish for, or prefer” (Findlay 1961: 20). Thus, to this ethics of rule he opposed an “axiological” or value-theoretic approach, the Hegelian dimensions of which are clear. The source of our value-pronouncements is to be sought for and tested “in the general ‘spirit’ or attitude of mind lying behind our varying value-determinations.” Moreover:

This “spirit” may, further, have a natural developmental history, through the customary, the legalistic, the impulsively libertarian, the personally conscientious, to a stage which brings out its implications adequately, and which is best accommodated to it… . Of all thinkers on ethical questions the idealists alone have shown explanatory mastery over the detail of our value-pronouncements: others may have developed this detail more brilliantly, but they alone have rendered it intelligible. And it would seem that their success was due to subjective foundations of their explanations, though this lay rather in a universal rather than an empirical subjectivity.

(Findlay 1961: 24–25)

While it is clear here that a Kantian ethics of rule is being criticized, Hegel’s position is nevertheless clearly reg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Section 1 Hegelian Ethics Between Constructivism and Realism
• Section 2 Hegelian Political Normativity Between Reason and History
• Section 3 Hegelian Perspectives on Contemporary Politics
• Index