Tag: Hegel

27. What we Think About When we Think About Hegel

Hegel’s philosophical embrace of temporality took him to some fascinating places. Here is one.

On a Hegelian (and, later, a ”continental”) approach, nothing whatsoever can be understood without knowing something about where it came from; for if everything we deal with is in time, it is there replacing something else that didn’t work out. So to understand a current situation requires understanding the problems with the previous situation which it remedies.

Applying this principle to, for example, Kant’s distinctive account of moral agency as the capacity to act from a single universal principle, the “categorical imperative,” requires asking how such moral agency has come to be. This kind of  question usually has more than one answer. In the current case, one answer is that Kantian moral agency came to be from Kant: “moral agency” captures his understanding of a similarity holding for certain actions—those which we consider good, which all come into being in accordance with the categorical imperative. Kant has thus seized upon a similarity (or what he thinks is a similarity) among a number of events and has given it a name, making it publicly accessible (#3).

Thus, it is only fitting that Hegel’s account of Kantian moral agency finds a place in his broader discussion of Kant’s philosophy. But then Hegel asks a question which goes beyond Kant: how does one become a moral agent? Kant never answers this question: though his entire philosophy, at least as I understand it, is devoted to strengthening our capacity to act according to a universal principle, he never tells us how we acquire that capacity in the first place. Indeed, he explicitly refuses to do so:

But how this peculiar property of our Sensibility itself is possible, or that of our Understanding and of the apperception which is necessarily its basis and that of all thinking, cannot be further analyzed or answered, because it is of them that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects .

Kant, Prolegomena Akademie-Ausagabe IV 318f

As I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter One) this conflates an explanation of fact with one of validity. We cannot think without the Understanding, but we cannot think without our brains either: is Kant saying that brain research is impossible?

Hegel, however, does tackle the question, in the course of his Philosophy of Right. He begins with the notion of a human being who is not a moral agent—one who, then, is guided entirely by desires. Such guidance does not work out because desires are inconstant and inconsistent: desires for various things (or people) follow one another at random, all of them are never fulfilled, and someone who has no other spiritual resources is pushed around by the lack of fulfillment.

So much is standard philosophical fare from Plato on; but Hegel goes into much more detail than is usual about how a person moves from that pre-moral state to the universal concern for humanity implied in Kant’s categorical imperative to treat everyone as “ends in themselves.” His treatment has, I think, two distinctive features. One is an insistence that moral agency has an affective dimension—in order to treat all people as ends in themselves, you have to care about them. The other is the claim that we are brought to such universal care by the institutions of modern society.

Thus, marriage—which is grounded mainly in the urgent contingency of sexual desire—shapes that desire into a stable relationship of two hearts. In the family, the purely physical side of this eventually dies away, “extinguished in its own satisfaction.” But this also doesn’t work out, because families require sustenance. To get that, one must enter into civil society, the market-driven realm in which a person succeeds by providing others with goods and services that they require. This means taking into account, not merely the needs of one’s spouse, but those of a wider circle—one’s clients or customers, for one must figure out what they need in order to provide them with it. The market economy, in turn, requires state regulation. Eventually, erotic love turns into patriotism, and one’s physical desires are educated into a panoply of cultural and spiritual concerns. But states, too, are mortal, as we see at the end of the book. To be truly enduring, then, the emotion of patriotism must turn into concern for humanity at large.

Life in the modern state thus constructs the individuals who inhabit it:

The principle of modern states has this monstrous strength and profundity, to allow the principle of subjectivity to perfect itself into the self-sufficient extreme of personal diversity (Besonderheit) and simultaneously to lead it back to the substantial unity [of the state], and so to maintain that unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.

Hegel, Philosophy of Right §260

The modern state thus allows individuals to take shape in the most diverse ways—religiously, ethnically, professionally, and in whatever other “extreme” way is called for, while still providing channels for them to care, and care actively, about their fellows. This is the earliest explicit defense of human diversity I have found in Western philosophy, and still one of the most powerful for it claims that my being who I have to be enriches everyone. It is no accident that American thinkers as profound as W. E. B. Dubois and Martin Luther King were students of Hegel.

But all this, from Kant’s point of view,—and not only Kant’s—is misguided. For moral agency, on Hegel’s account, is historically conditioned, and so not, in Kant’s sense, “universal” at all. Before Kant, one could noconceive of such moral agency; and without the modern state, one cannot live it. On a Kantian approach—indeed, on the approach of all traditional philosophy, from Parmenides on—the capacity to act from a universal principle can only be either a state of affairs which obtains for reasons we cannot and need not fathom—or a mere ideal which cannot actually exist anywhere in our experience.

26 What We Think About Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is, as far as I know, the first book in western philosophy to abjure appeals to the atemporality of anything—for Hegel’s immediate predecessor in this regard was Heracleitus, who didn’t write books; he didn’t even know what they are.

This is hardly the standard account of Hegel, which is still a quasi-theological one. Nor is it the usual revisionary one, which is quasi-Kantian. But it is the only view of Hegel I know of that actually makes his philosophy work, for the others require gigantic and indefensible presuppositions (e.g. “not only does God exist, but here is what He thinks;” or “these, not Kant’s, are the necessary categories of human thought”). And, as I have argued in two books, it has textual support: look Hegel’s his use of “truth,” in the Phenomenology, to designate the outcome of a certain sort of process rather than the traditional notion that truth consists in the “correspondence” of something verbal or mental (a sentence, belief, etc.) to some fact or state of affairs.

Hegel’s usage here reminds us that truth as correspondence is an atemporal notion. For the two poles of a correspondence-relation, a sentence or belief on one side and a fact or state of affairs on the other, must exist simultaneously for the relation between them to hold: if I say the cat is on the mat,” then the cat either is, or is not, on the mat when I say it. If I say “the cat was on the mat last Tuesday,” then I am inferring to something I cannot now experience; what exists right now is whatever evidence I have that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Is it that of which the sentence is true?

Saying that a sentence “corresponds” to the evidence for it would evacuate correspondence of all meaning, so philosophers invented something called “facts,” to which sentences (etc.) correspond but which are atemporal: it is a fact right now that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Such a fact can serve as the complement for true statements about the past and future. But why postulate wholly atemporal  beings for this job, when you can follow Aristotle and say that our minds form images, φαντάσματα, of things, and locate some of those things in a similarly imagined past? “The cat was on the mat last Tuesday” is then true of my image of the cat on the mat, together with the temporal index “last Tuesday.” Philosophers don’t like mental images as a rule, and I sympathize—but how imaginary are facts? Have you ever seen one?

If I am right about Hegel, he thinks something like the Aristotelian account is the way our minds ordinarily work (he usually opts for Aristotle in such cases); but there is also the alternative of saying that “the cat is on the mat is true” has nothing to do with any state of affairs referred to, but simply conveys that a certain process has resulted in the localization of the cat on the mat. That is, roughly, what he does in the Phenomenology.

If to be true is to be the result of a certain kind of process, then everything true is path-dependent. What kind of path ends in truth? For the Phenomenology, it is one that resembles what is often called today the “hypothetico-deductive” model of scientific inquiry. It has four stages (forget the three-stage “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” stuff):

  1. an hypothesis is formed (Hegel calls it a “certainty”);
  2. it is tested against reality (“experience”);
  3. it fails, i.e. encounters significant anomalies (“contradictions”)
  4. the hypothesis is revised (“sublated”) to accommodate them.

The distinctive features of the Phenomenology, as opposed to scientific inquiry, are two: first, the hypothesis always fails and requires revision; and second, the testing carried out can be ethical in nature: an hypothesis promises the success of certain courses of action, and it is when these fail that the certainty needs revision. Since the revised hypothesis is the “truth” of the process, I will call the whole development a “truth-process

This characterization of the truth-process is formalistic, for in the Phenomenology it applies to a huge gamut of contents. The relation between the formalistic process and its content is therefore contingent; and, moreover, the relation between a particular case of the process and anything that ever actually happened is also contingent. History does not in fact exhibit truth-processes of this kind, except very rarely; the facts of history, Hegel tells us in the Preface to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, present us with a “slaughter bench,” a panoply of meaningless suffering. The question is not whether the available facts constitute a truth-process, but whether they can be reconstructed—or, better, reconstrued— or, better still, construed—as one.

Such construal requires, at minimum, omitting all kinds of random events and circumstances which, in reality, accompany the stages of the truth-process. These often include the intentions of the people engaged in a truth-process. Hegel justifies such omission of intentions as the “cunning of reason” (though it often amount to the “cunning of Hegel”). Though truth processes almost never actually happen, they are “rational” for Hegel when they are construable as testing just one part of a certainty at a time, via a series of minimal changes (“determinate negations”).