Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Political Theory

Eric Lee Goodfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317665229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For over one hundred and fifty years G.W.F. Hegel's ghost has haunted theoretical understanding and practice. His opponents first, and later his defenders, have equally defined their programs against and with his. In this way Hegel's political thought has both situated and displaced modern political theorizing.

This book takes the reception of Hegel's political thought as a lens through which contemporary methodological andideological prerogatives are exposed. It traces the nineteenth century origins of the positivist revolt against Hegel's legacy forward to political science's turn away from philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. The book critically reviews the subsequent revisionist trend that has eliminated his metaphysics from contemporary considerations of his political thought. It then moves to re-evaluate their relation and defend their inseparability in his major work on politics: the Philosophy of Right. Against this background, the book concludes with an argument for the inherent metaphysical dimension of political theorizing itself. Goodfield takes Hegel's reception, representation, as well as rejection in Anglo-American scholarship as a mirror in which its metaphysical presuppositions of the political are exceptionally well reflected. It is through such reflection, he argues, that we may begin to come to terms with them.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and readers of political theory and philosophy, Hegel, metaphysics and the philosophy of the social sciences.

I Background, history and critique

1 From Feuerbach to Moore Hegelian metaphysics and the origins of positivist revolt

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768038-2

The word become flesh: Feuerbach, Marx and the German origins of the revolt against Hegelianism

Introduction: withdrawal from the citadel of idealist dialectic

Ludwig Feuerbach’s intolerance of Hegel’s metaphysics of the absolute, as presented primarily in his two volumes on logic, is intensive and thoroughgoing.¹ From his critical vantage point, Hegel’s idea of history and its unfolding of a master narrative takes up and subsumes all human thought, feeling and purpose. In so doing, Feuerbach held that Hegel derided the very essence of what it is to be human, taking what is most substantial out of the developmental history of the subjectivity he wishes to defend. It is in recognition of these ends that Feuerbach cites the violence done to real difference and particularity in both Hegel’s logical and historical dialectics. The theoretical role of the Aufhebung (sublation, dialectical “synthesis”) may seem neutral, indifferent and even tolerant, but in it Feuerbach witnessed the harshest tool of conflation and reduction. Dismantling differences and justifying coherences and compatibilities by reference to the higher order logic of the dialectic of the Idea dismisses the concrete differences which the categorical entities undergoing transformation themselves attest to in their essences. It is this insistence upon the immediate primacy of the real which sits at the root of Feuerbach’s problem with Hegel’s metaphysical systematization of history, and the way human experience is situated within it. Herein Feuerbach took forward the central plank of Schelling’s assault upon Hegelianism: that in his concentration on the “ontological absolute, [he] had ignored the anthropological and practical problems that are of central importance to human beings and, therefore, to philosophy.”²

This critical emphasis upon the alienation of the actual and the concrete—of positivity—in favor of abstract categorical and ideal comprehensiveness would remain a cornerstone of anti-Hegelian, and anti-idealistic, schools of thought from Schelling, through the young Hegelian revolt to James’s radical empiricism, reaching its zenith with the origins of the analytic program initiated in Moore’s highly influential “Refutation of Idealism.” Insofar as a program of skeptical Hegel commentary is initiated with Feuerbach, it is important that we understand and examine his arguments as a watershed and crucible of the movement which ultimately up-ended Hegel’s relevance for a century.³ This is especially so given that Feuerbach’s appeal is neither scientific nor empirical in any sharp sense, but rather emerges from an immanent and exegetical critique of his teacher’s idealistic alienation which would only find completion, theoretical as well as practical, in and through Marx.

Though a progression of argumentation is suggested, this chapter does not consolidate a single historical thread of anti-idealist thinking or tradition. Rather, it renders a synoptic narrative of the influential anti-idealist critiques of disparate thinkers who, though they often markedly diverged on the actual status of the empirical, contributed to the eventual eclipse of idealism’s wide-ranging influence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴

Feuerbach on Hegel's universalism and the curse of metaphysical ascription

Feuerbach’s first systematic and influential critique of Hegel’s system was set out in his 1839 essay entitled “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” and published in Arnold Ruge’s Jahrbücher. Its complaint regarding the subordination of lived experience to intellectualism was based upon Feuerbach’s assessment of Hegel’s logic and extrapolated as a grievance against the claims of Hegel’s system as a whole. By implication, where and when Hegel claimed to crystallize the content of the absolute idea all further thought is null and void such that philosophy “warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original, and material thought. It kills the spirit of invention.”⁵ Hegel’s system, which claims not only to represent truth but also to be the demonstrative representation of this truth in philosophical form, is to take all readers and listeners captive. Feuerbach’s countering notion of philosophy strips Hegelian thought of its self-suspending character in formalism and replants it in the soil of discourse as a relational continuity between thinkers and thoughts. This conception of philosophy condemns Hegel’s collective subject—spirit as the ultimate defeat of philosophical participation and agency. Here, none are truly permitted access to Hegel’s holy of holies, his disembodied metaphysical system speaking into history as an extra-historical actor. As a result, the dialectic itself becomes a “speculative Dalai lama”⁶ disclosing its esoteric truths into time from a beyond accessible only to initiates. The formalism of Hegel’s method thus presents us with a scripture of philosophy whose very presentation and outline is our own conclusion and present thought in the elaboration of a reality which is conducted for all witnessing disciples. This pedantry “proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect, and that … does not appeal to the intellect within us.”⁷ Hegel’s intellectual solipsism becomes the annihilation of the student and reader, and with them the defeat of the essence of philosophical intent. It is a relationship for Feuerbach where all further critical consideration is abandoned to the cultic liturgy of the dialectic in the presence of the holy spirit of truth.

The doctrine of being and the illusion of origination

It is with the outset of Hegel’s system of logic that Feuerbach identified the primary fallacy of Hegel’s system. Being is placed as the preliminary step on the way to its realization in the Idea, but this being itself is made dependent upon its fulfillment in the Idea. Here Feuerbach identifies a tautology. Hegel makes the idea dependent upon being as its telos but nonetheless wants to claim the Idea as the primary, the truth of the process. Yet in order to claim this truth as the result, the process as a whole is denied. In order for us to accept the Idea as the final realization of truth we must also accept being as its presupposition which contains the conclusion in its own definition: “The starting point could just as well be the Absolute Idea because it was already a certainty, an immediate truth for Hegel before he wrote the Logic.”⁸ Thus the question of the difference and antithesis of being and idea is glossed over in the dialectic’s apparent dual devotion to circular as well as linear progression.

Where being already presupposes the idea as its inner and necessary result, the idea is already present and so explodes the claims of being as an unmediated unity of origination. Where being is dismissed as the starting point of Hegel’s logical system, the system itself is undermined as system. It rather becomes a recursive play of the Idea in its isolation, where all categories are anticipated in the conceptual antecedence of the divine Idea as absolute identity. None of the transient categories participate with the actual autonomy which Hegel ascribes to them in the dialectic and, as such, the whole affair is reduced to a tragic monism of the first order. The monistic limits and pitfalls of Parmenides’ Eleaticism are not far off in Feuerbach’s meaning here and he resounds with Schelling’s earlier admonitions which ran that Hegel “hypostatized the concept with the intent of providing the logical movement—which, however independent one takes it to be of everything subjective, can nonetheless always exist only in thought.”⁹ The fervor and devotion to the absolute are made into Hegel’s own unhappy consciousness.

Critical approaches on the problem of universals

For Feuerbach, the primary problem with being as a starting point and its logical subordination to the Idea is evident in its incapacity to fully ground the concrete. Where Hegel abstracts from determinate being to its fulfillment in unmediated being, Feuerbach—borrowing once again from Schelling—invokes the problem of universals as a response: “Your indeterminate and pure being is just an abstraction to which nothing real corresponds, for real is only real being? Or else prove if you can the reality of general notions!”¹⁰ For Feuerbach, Hegel’s commitment to ideas requires that they exist independently of those things which they are taken to instantiate. The very notion of unmediated and pure being as a starting point is thus, as Hegel admitted, a vacuous idea, but it is problematically operative in the life of the idea in its primordial moment. While infinitely empty and devoid of content, it nonetheless plays the objective role of idealistic generation in Hegel’s system. Feuerbach herein charges Hegel with positing a dialectic reconciliation of idea and thing, and of overcoming substance dualism, but only through abstractions which displace the intransigent opposition of the dualism itself:

Do we not thus come to those general questions that touch upon the truth and reality not only of Hegel’s Logic but also of philosophy altogether? Is the Logic above the dispute between the Nominalists and Realists (to use old names for what are natural contraries)? Does it not contradict in its first notions sense perception and its advocate, the intellect? Have they no right to oppose the Logic?¹¹

Here experience and perception mount the first criticisms of the all-encompassing synopsis of thought and being in the Idea. From this point of view, Hegel’s abstract and idealized notion of being alienates the concrete and the empirical. The notion of being as a posit of experience forms an inferior level of being which must betray itself in resignation to the primacy of the Idea and its concept. But Feuerbach protests this transference: if we exclude from a being that which makes it a being, we can conclude that it never was a being as such. A human being whose specific being is denied in the concept of the human is a contradiction in terms. Feuerbach’s variation of the “third man” argument arrests Hegel’s notion of being as a definition which denies its own necessary content and, in so doing, loses all meaning and referential substantiality: “It is impossible to think of being in separation from specific determinations.”¹² Thus, while the particular may be more elusive than the general, and though language may be bound by its dependence upon generalization, there is no less reality in the singular than there is in the species, the many than the one. Do we necessarily lose our mothers in their uniqueness because they are generically named “Mary”? Are they any less real to us—by this or any other name—because of the lack of specificity of the name itself? Here Feuerbach restates Schelling’s argument that the Hegelian science of reason is culpable of

the illusion that [it has] not just grasped what is real, but [has] also grasped reality, or that [it has] grasped how what is real arises in this way, so that this merely logical process is also the process of real becoming. In this alone nothing else occurs save thinking.¹³

As Feuerbach’s critique of dialectical idealism intended to assert, thought understood only in its autonomy is alienated from man and takes over the latter’s sense of purpose and story. Hegel’s narrative of historical progression within thought in association with all particular and individual action thus amounts to the surrender of real and actual being for an over-beyond of the absolute, divested of human content and access. For Feuerbach, it is through humanist materialism rather than idealism that thought ma...