Understanding Hegelianism

Robert Sinnerbrink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317493334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

"Understanding Hegelianism" explores the ways in which Hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents of thought have shaped some of the most significant movements in twentieth-century European philosophy, particularly the traditions of critical theory, existentialism, Marxism and poststructuralism. The first part of the book examines Kierkegaard's existentialism and Marx's materialism, which present two defining poles of subsequent Hegelian and anti-Hegelian movements. The second part looks at the contrasting critiques of Hegel by Lukacs and Heidegger, which set the stage for the appropriation of Hegelian themes in German critical theory and the anti-Hegelian turn in French poststructuralism. The role of Hegelian themes in the work of Adorno, Habermas and Honneth are explored. In the third part, the rich tradition of Hegelianism in modern French philosophy is considered - the work of Wahl, Kojeve, Hyppolite, Lefebvre, Sartre, de Beauvoir as well as the radical critique of Hegelianism articulated by Derrida and Deleuze. Although the focus is primarily on German and French appropriations of Hegelian thought, the author also explores some of the recent developments in Anglophone Hegelianism.

part I
The adventures of Hegelianism

one
Introducing Hegelian idealism

For all his formidable difficulty as a philosopher, Hegel was also a committed teacher concerned to introduce his students to philosophy no matter what their level of expertise. Hegel was for a time a teacher at Nürnberg Gymnasium, presenting high-school students with a simplified outline of his philosophical system (see his Philosophical Propaedeutic). In this chapter I attempt to do something similar, though less formidable, namely to present a very brief introduction to important themes in some of Hegel’s most famous works. I begin with an overview of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, focusing on his account of the “dialectical experience of consciousness”, and providing a brief explication of his famous master/slave dialectic. I then turn to a very schematic account of the basic idea of Hegelian logic: the analysis of the systems of basic categories of thought that structure our experience of the world. Some important aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history are then explored, including the influential idea of an “end of history”. I also present some key elements of Hegel’s political philosophy, his account of the conditions necessary for the exercise of modern freedom. In conclusion, I look briefly at so-called British idealism, an important turn-of-the-century movement that generated the strong anti-idealist turn – particularly with Moore and Russell – that paved the way for the emergence of analytic philosophy.

From consciousness to spirit: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Legend has it that Hegel was hastily completing the final pages of his manuscript just as the first cannon-shots rang out announcing the battle of Jena in 1806. Under such dramatic circumstances, even the title of his master work remained uncertain. Originally, Hegel had selected Science of the Experience of Consciousness before opting at the last moment for Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel thereby made the term “phenomenology” famous, not to mention Geist or spirit, Hegel’s transfigured conception of what Kant called Vernunft or “reason”. “Phenomenology” comes from the Greek term phainomena, meaning that which appears or shows itself, and logos, meaning reasoned account. It was a term first used by Kant’s friend Lambert in 1764, but Kant also used it in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 to refer to an account of perception and its limits (see Rockmore 1993: 86 ff.).

It was Hegel, however, who made phenomenology famous as a philosophical approach in its own right. The concept of phenomenology was to have a fascinating career in modern thought, being later transformed in quite different directions by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). But what did Hegel mean by this term? Hegelian phenomenology is a philosophical method that describes and interprets interconnected patterns of knowledge as an appearance (knowledge-claims that make an appearance in our historical world). Our objects of enquiry are not “truth” or “meaning” but rather configurations of consciousness. These are figures or patterns of knowledge, cognitive and practical attitudes, which emerge within a definite historical and cultural context in a variety of guises (for example, the figure of “sense-certainty”, which can be found in ancient scepticism, Humean impressions and Russellian sense-data).

Hegel’s Phenomenology depicts certain configurations of consciousness, describing how knowledge and experience conflict in the subject’s various attempts to know the world. It shows how consciousness resolves this conflict between its assumed form of knowledge and its experience, that is, the result of its attempt to know the world in such and such a way. Consciousness, in Hegel’s terms, thus undergoes a dialectical experience – the movement from a conflict between knowledge and truth to a more complex configuration of consciousness that presents a new relationship between subject and object – a process that “we”, the philosophical readers, can observe in its unfolding. Hegel’s Phenomenology will attempt to demonstrate how the various cognitive attitudes that have emerged in Western thought and culture are interconnected in a conceptually articulated sequence – a sequence culminating in Hegel’s own phenomenological enquiry. From this point of view, Hegel’s phenomenological exposition can be understood as “the path of natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge” (PhS: §77), namely, to the experiential knowledge of itself as spirit.

What about “spirit”? The meaning of this famous Hegelian term only becomes clear during the course of Hegel’s exposition, but here we must say something by way of introduction. Spirit or Geist is Hegel’s term for self-conscious reason, for socially and culturally articulated relations of meaning, or shared forms of social and cultural intersubjectivity. Spirit refers to forms of collective “mindedness” encompassing not only individual self-consciousness but also forms of knowledge and shared meaning in a culture, from sensuous representations in art, symbolic representations in religion, to conceptual comprehension in philosophy. At the same time, spirit also designates social and political institutions as “objective” embodiments of the shared rational norms of knowledge and practice that define human communities. Taken together, these institutionally embodied forms of shared meaning and situated knowledge comprise the historical spirit and self-understanding of a rationally organized human community.

The phenomenological exposition begins, however, not with spirit, but with “consciousness”. For Hegel, “natural consciousness” describes a kind of common-sense realism that is the presupposed background of philosophical enquiry. What the phenomenological enquiry explores is the development of natural consciousness into philosophical knowledge. “Consciousness”, for Hegel, describes a bipolar cognitive structure relating a knower with something known: a knowledge-claim with what is taken as truth. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, each instance of knowledge involves a relation between a subject and an object (what Hegel calls the poles of “knowing” and “truth”) in which consciousness compares its claims to knowledge with its experience of whether these claims remain coherent. If a contradiction emerges between the experience of consciousness and its claim to knowledge, consciousness reconstructs the relationship between knowledge and object so as to correspond with its experience. Consciousness overcomes any disparity that emerges between knowing and truth by cancelling the inadequate aspects of their original configuration, and by incorporating the positive aspects into a more complex unity of consciousness and its object. What emerges is thus a new relation between knowledge and its object, a new configuration of knowing and truth. This is what Hegel called the “dialectical experience” of consciousness: the movement from an initial pattern of consciousness, its inversion into an opposing position, and the reconfiguration of both within a more complex unity.

Lordship and bondage: the struggle for recognition

The most famous passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology is undoubtedly the section describing the proto-social relationship between dependent and independent subjects – the celebrated “master/slave dialectic”. This passage is famous for many reasons. It is a dramatic phenomenological account of the origin of sociability, Hegel’s critical version of the “state of nature” fiction familiar from social contract theories in Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke. It provided an inspiration for the tradition of left-wing Hegelians, from the young Karl Marx (1818–83) to Alexandre Kojève (1902–68), who derived much of their social and political philosophy from Hegel’s account of the dialectical relationship between master and slave. Yet for Hegel it was only one brief episode in the transition from consciousness of the world to rational forms of theoretical and practical self-consciousness.

Given the enormous influence of this section of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it is worth elaborating a compressed version of this “struggle for recognition” (see PhS: 111–19). Hegel’s dialectic of independent and dependent consciousness, as it is called, is a description of various inadequate conceptions of freedom. It emerges out of the experience of desire, the fact that our first experience of self-consciousness, so to speak, is as living, desiring beings immersed in a natural environment. In satisfying our animal desires we gain a fleeting sense of self-identity, for once our desire (for food, drink, sex) is satisfied, it disappears, only to return and demand further satisfaction. By incorporating a desired object into myself, I gain a temporary and unstable sense of my self-identity, which is disrupted as soon as I am once again in the grip of the desire for another object. Although there are traditionally a number of moral and ethical responses to the problem of controlling desire (Epicureanism, Stoicism, and so on), Hegel will argue that it is only in desiring recognition or acknowledgement from another living, desiring subject that we can gain genuine satisfaction and a lasting sense of self-identity.

In Hegel’s “state of nature”, however, the first experience of desiring proto-subjects (“proto-subjects” because we are dealing with pre-rational, not-yet-autonomous beings) is one of conflict, even violence. Each desiring subject attempts to assert its independence and self-identity by negating the other desiring subject; the result is a “life-and-death struggle” in which each proto-subject seeks to destroy the other. But to achieve this aim (destroying the other subject) would be self-defeating, victory over a corpse rather than acknowledgement from a living being. So one of the protagonists in the struggle must capitulate, renouncing his independence and submitting to the will of the other; the other thereby succeeds in having his independence acknowledged, albeit under duress. The victorious protagonist, who risked his life in order to prove his independence, becomes the master, while the vanquished party, who remained “tethered” to mere life, becomes the slave, the dependent consciousness who recognizes only the master’s will.

Here is where Hegel’s famous “dialectical reversals” come into play. The master’s victory is hollow, for he is in fact dependent upon the slave, who works for the master in order that the master may satisfy his desires. The master has extorted acknowledgement of his independence from an utterly dependent being, reduced to the dehumanized status of a “living tool” (Aristotle). The slave, by contrast, will turn out to be the “master of the master”, so to speak, for the slave has experienced his own limits, his finitude (through encountering the threat of death), the power that negates all his attributes; he is thus negatively aware of his mortal limits and of his capacity for freedom. The slave thus chooses life, curbs his desire, learns self-discipline, develops his abilities and skills in labouring for the master, and slowly comes to recognize his power to transform the objective world through work or collective labour. In the long run, Hegel intimates, the slave will arrive at a truer conception of freedom, recognizing the interconnection between dependence and independence, and developing a sense of self-identity through work and contribution to the social community.

Nonetheless, both master and slave remain locked in an unhappy relation of domination: the master cannot gain recognition of his independence, for the slave remains a dependent being. The slave, meanwhile, remains enslaved to the master, and denied proper recognition of his humanity and freedom. Indeed, the experience of mastery and slavery teaches consciousness that not only life but freedom is essential to it. The question now is how this freedom is to be understood and realized, a question addressed in the next configuration of self-consciousness, which Hegel calls the “unhappy consciousness”. This is the experience of the alienated subject, and its various attempts to deal with the consequences of an inadequate conception of freedom.

Following the master/slave dialectic, the first strategy is to find freedom in pure thought, a strategy evident in Stoicism: I may be enslaved in reality, yet my rational mind remains free and universal, even though my empirical ego (and perhaps also my body) is alienated and dominated. This is a rather stylized presentation of Stoicism, which, to speak generally, advocated detachment from excessive forms of passion through the exercise of reason and rational self-control. Nonetheless, Hegel emphasizes the centrality of free rational thought in his account, and even argues that Stoicism, in the end, can only offer truisms and platitudes that ultimately result in boredom! Hence the next strategy is to radicalize this freedom of thought, turning it against all claims to knowledge. This is scepticism as the freedom of pure thought, which denies all claims to knowledge in the name of the radical freedom of the rational thinking subject. Yet this thinking subject remains an embodied, living, desiring being, existing in a social world with others. One can really be a sceptic only in theory, for acting in the world requires that we assume the truth of those very concepts that are rejected in the name of sceptical doubt.

Once the subject becomes aware of its separation into a radically free thinking self and unfree empirical self, it becomes an “unhappy consciousness”. This is the alienated, religious subject, who struggles against his own internal self-contradictoriness (as both divine and profane), and strives in vain to unite these universal and particular dimensions of selfhood. The universal aspect is projected outwards into an eternal unchanging essence (God), while the particular aspect remains bound to the degraded body, senses and ego of the individual. The unhappy consciousness thus embarks on ever more radical attempts to unite the unchanging and particular aspects of its alienated subjectivity, first through religious devotion, then in the performance of good works, and finally via utter self-abnegation. But the unhappy consciousness can only overcome its worsening alienation once it realizes that it cannot forcibly unify the universal aspect of its selfhood with its particular bodily experience. Rather, the universal and the particular are contrasting dimensions of self-consciousness, which will eventually be united in the embodied rational individual. My rational subjectivity is always mediated by my relations with others, by my being recognized within an intersubjective context of rational interactions. This is the moment when self-consciousness begins to transform itself into reason, the rational unity of universal and particular, the subject that is conscious of itself in being conscious of its universality. What lies ahead for self-conscious reason are the conflicting experiences of theoretical and practical reason, a dichotomy that is overcome only in the more complex unity-in-difference of “spirit”: “the We that is I and the I that is We” (PhS: §177), the intersubjective unity that is the true nature of realized freedom.

From spirit to idea: Hegel's Logic

Hegel’s Phenomenology is a “science” of the experience of consciousness that is also a reconstruction of our historical–philosophical experience as members of a modern rational community. The phenomenological experience of consciousness passes through self-consciousness, theoretical and practical reason, and different historical versions of spirit, from Greek antiquity, medieval Christianity, to Enlightenment culture and modern bourgeois society. The phenomenological journey culminates with what Hegel calls “absolute knowing” – a knowing encompassing this whole (circular) movement from consciousness and self-consciousness to reason and self-knowing spirit. We attain absolute knowing when we recognize that immediate intuition – the “sense-certainty” with which we began – presupposes the whole complex phenomenological history of spirit coming to know itself. It is in this sense that the Phenomenology of Spirit was intended as an introduction to Hegel’s speculative system. Once we have traversed this phenomenological path, we attain a level that enables us to embark upon speculative philosophy proper. Phenomenology thus enables us to move to the level of pure conceptual thinking: speculative logic that articulates the basic categories of thought.

Hegel’s logic is forbiddingly difficult. Nonetheless, Hegel intended it to be intelligible in principle to all rational individuals who desire philosophical comprehension of the categorical structure of self-conscious subjectivity (“subjective spirit”), of the different kinds of modern social and political institutions (“objective spirit”), and of the three cultural forms of “absolute spirit” providing our cognitive self-reflection (art, religion, philosophy). While debate still rages over the true meaning of Hegel’s logic, the simplest way to describe it is as an analysis of interconnected systems of basic categories of thought (see Kolb 1986; Pinkard 1988). Unlike formal logic, which considers the logical relations between propositions and the formal rules of valid argumentation, Hegelian logic analyses the system of basic categories of thought as ways of conceptualizing reality as a coherent and intelligible whole.

In this sense, Hegel radicalizes Kant’s “transcendental logic”, which aimed to describe the logical relations between ca...