Habermas on Disenchantment

Again we come to the difficult topic of modernity. In company with the pragmatists Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, Jürgen Habermas speaks of modernization as a progressive rationalization, carrying forward the spirit of the Enlightenment. But in this area Habermas principally draws on the great early 20th century neo-Kantian founding father of sociology Max Weber, who further analyzed this as a “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of (our understanding of) the world. Literally, the German means something like “de-magicking”.

Neither Weber nor Habermas sees the rationalization associated with modernity in terms of a simple global opposition between science and religion. Following Weber, Habermas treats rationalization as a development within the world’s religious traditions, in which religion itself moves progressively away from magical thinking and supernaturalism, and toward universalizing ethics. This is at the same time a movement away from particularism, toward greater degrees of universalism. However, I don’t think Habermas adequately recognizes the extent to which such an approach is already anticipated by Hegel.

I would not want to lose sight of the poetic and artistic kinds of “enchantment” that in no way depend on irrational belief in the supernatural. Such artistic, musical, or dramatic expression may itself be of high spiritual import. As Habermas also points out, while it is appropriate to condemn superstition and prejudice, the metaphorical and indeed spiritual “magic” associated with poetry, music, and other artistic creativity need be in no way contrary to reason.

As background for his development in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas briefly surveys some of the more influential 20th-century accounts of modernity. He holds that the most thorough and well-rounded investigations are still those conducted a century ago by Max Weber. In distinction from cultural anthropology, sociology defined itself as an account of specifically modern society.

“Among the classical figures of sociology, Max Weber is the only one who broke with both the premises of the philosophy of history and the basic assumptions of evolutionism and who nonetheless wanted to conceive of the modernization of old-European society as the result of a universal-historical process of rationalization. He opened up rationalization processes to an encompassing empirical investigation without reinterpreting them in an empiricist manner so that precisely the aspects of rationality of societal learning processes would disappear” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 143).

That empirical investigations need not be conducted in a narrowly empiricist manner strikes me as very true. One hint of where he is going with this is his interest in applying the expansive outlook of the developmental cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget on children’s learning to the understanding of social processes of rationalization. Brandom has similarly highlighted the social importance of an account of learning from our errors.

I don’t believe most of the stories about so-called Western rationalism. It is just too vague a category, an uncritical joining together of disparate things. It is highly unhistorical to assume a direct cultural continuity from classical Greece to Western Europe. In Roman times, Greece was considered part of the East. Greek learning was introduced to Europe only in the high middle ages. I maintain that the birth of ethical reason and the extraordinary flowering of culture in classical Greece are not the unique heritage of the West, but a part of the heritage of humanity. That said, I still think Habermas makes a good case for the seriousness of Weber’s approach to this “historiographical” question.

“Weber analyzes the process of disenchantment in the history of religion, which is said to have fulfilled the necessary internal conditions for the appearance of Occidental rationalism; in doing so he employs a complex, but largely unclarified concept of rationality. On the other hand, in his analysis of societal rationalization as it makes its way in the modern period, he allows himself to be guided by the restrictive idea of purposive rationality [Zweckrationalität]” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The history of such disenchantment has been widely interpreted as a global, polar conflict and inverse proportionality between “reason” and “religion”. This makes both reason and religion way too monolithic.

In comparison with this unfortunate state of affairs, Habermas’s account, grounded in Weber, is highly valuable for its relatively less monolithic character. He treats “disenchantment” as part of a progressive development of world religions themselves. (In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, he adopts Karl Jaspers’s notion of the “axial age” — the thesis that in several disparate parts of the world, around roughly 500 BCE, religions simultaneously became less oriented to myth, magic, and ritual, and more oriented toward ethics and something resembling metaphysics. Habermas thinks that recognizing this positive role of the great world religions on a long time scale is important as a counterweight to eurocentrism.)

“According to Marx, the rationalization of society takes place directly in the development of productive forces, that is, in the expansion of empirical knowledge, the improvement of production techniques, and the increasingly effective mobilization, qualification, and organization of socially useful labor power. On the other hand, relations of production, the institutions that express the distribution of social power and regulate a differential access to the means of production, are revolutionized only under the pressure of rationalization of productive forces. Max Weber views the institutional framework of the capitalist economy and the modern state in a different way — not as relations of production that fetter the potential for rationalization, but as subsystems of purposive-rational action in which Occidental rationalism develops at a societal level. Of course, he is afraid that bureaucratization will lead to a reification of social relationships, which will stifle motivational incentives to a rational conduct of life. Horkheimer and Adorno, and later Marcuse, interpret Marx in this Weberian perspective” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 144).

“On the one hand, Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno identify societal rationalization with expansion of the instrumental and strategic rationality of action contexts; on the other hand, they all have a vague notion of an encompassing societal rationality — whether in the concept of an association of free producers, in the historical model of an ethically rational conduct of life, or in the idea of fraternal relations with a resurrected nature — and it is against this that they measure the relative position of empirically described processes of rationalization…. The action concepts that Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno take as basic are not complex enough to capture all those aspects of social actions to which societal rationalization can attach…. The rationalization of action orientations is not the same as the expansion of the ‘rationality’, that is, complexity of action systems” (pp. 144-145).

“However, I would like to make clear at the start that Weber took up the rationality theme in a scientific context that had already discharged the mortgages from philosophy of history and the nineteenth-century evolutionism encumbered by it” (p. 145).

“As sociology developed in the wakes of Scottish moral philosophy …, it found the theme of societal rationalization already at hand” (ibid).

“The most important motifs of the philosophy of history are contained in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind of 1794. The model of rationality is provided by the mathematical sciences of nature. Their core is Newtonian physics; it has discovered the ‘true method of studying nature’…. It becomes a paradigm for knowledge in general because it follows a method that raises the knowledge of nature above the scholastic debates of philosophers and reduces all previous philosophy to the status of mere opinion” (ibid).

“Condorcet wants to conceive the history of mankind on the model of the history of modern science, that is, as a process of rationalization…. The advances of the human mind are not limited by a telos inherent in it…. The human mind owes its advances not to approaching a telos, but to the unimpeded operation of its intelligence, that is, to a learning mechanism…. The concept of knowledge developed on the model of the natural sciences devalues, as if with one blow, inherited religious, philosophical, moral, and political opinions” (p. 146).

For me, the telos of a rational being is not a predefined limit or fixed configuration, but an endlessly branching source of alternatives that have some focus, but always have a hypothetical character.

Here we see Habermas’s usual negative view of teleology. For the most part, he only considers the false, non-Aristotelian kind of teleology that was so eloquently denounced by Spinoza. There is one passage later on that I previously quoted, where he does give the word telos a positive sense, in speaking of shared understanding as the inherent telos of human speech. The ambitious norm to which he gives voice is the idea that mature humans learn to think for themselves, and furthermore naturally collaborate in so doing.

“In the battle against the traditional powers of church and state, enlightenment requires the courage to make use of one’s own reason, that is, autonomy or maturity” (p. 147).

Here we are on the ground of Kantian autonomy. Habermas uses his summary of Condorcet to develop the social implications of rationalization.

“Like Kant, Condorcet sees the progress of civilization along the lines of a republic that guarantees civil liberties, an international order that establishes a perpetual peace, a society that accelerates economic growth and technical progress and does away with or compensates for social inequalities. Among other things, he expects ‘the complete annihilation of the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the sexes’; he expects the elimination of criminality and degeneration, the conquest of misery and sickness” (p. 148).

“This conception is representative of eighteenth-century philosophy of history, even if it could only reach such a pointed formulation from a contemporary of the French Revolution. Precisely this radical quality makes the cracks in the type of thinking characteristic of the philosophy of history stand out” (ibid).

“Victorian theories of social evolution can be characterized in a simplified manner as follows: They questioned neither the rationalism nor the universalism of the Enlightenment and were thus not yet sensitive to the dangers of Eurocentrism; they repeated the naturalistic fallacies of the philosophy of history, albeit less blatantly…. From the standpoint of the history of science, the situation in which Max Weber took up the rationalization thematic again and turned it into a problem that could be dealt with sociologically was defined by the critique of these nineteenth-century theories of evolution” (pp. 152-153).

Habermas points out a positive role of neo-Kantianism, particularly its perspective that a seriously scientific orientation does not require the abnegation of all serious value judgment.

“Weber himself stands in the tradition of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism…. Beyond its dualistic philosophy of science, Neo-Kantianism gained special significance for the critique of evolutionist approaches in the social sciences because of its theory of value. It brought to bear at the methodological level a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between statements of fact and judgments of value, and in practical philosophy it emphatically criticized all varieties of ethical naturalism. This is the background to Weber’s position in the controversy over value judgments in social science. He is critical of concepts of progress and evolution precisely when they play an implicitly normative role in social science” (p. 154).

“Max Weber adopted in this controversy a cautiously universalist position…. He mistrusts the rationalization processes set loose and detached from ethical value orientations — so much so that in his theory of rationalization, science and technology forfeit their paradigmatic status. Weber’s research is focused on the moral-practical bases of the institutionalization of purposive-rational action” (p. 155).

This is an interesting variant. The “purposive” rationality associated with means-ends calculations is here circumscribed by a “moral-practical” layer. This falls short of the full view that ethics is the one self-bootstrapping discipline, and still gives an elevated role to efficient causality. But it puts important qualifications on any claim that efficient causality comes unconditionally first.

“Weber regards not only science but autonomous art as a form of manifestation of cultural rationalization…. Aesthetically imbued counterculture belongs, together with science and technology on the one hand, and with modern legal and moral representations on the other, to the whole of rationalized culture. The complex that is taken to be central to the rise of modern society is, however, this ethical and juridical rationalism” (pp. 161-162, emphasis in original).

“This ethic is distinguished, from a formal point of view, in that it is based on principles and is universalistic. The soteriological religiosity of congregations grounds an abstract ethic of brotherliness that, with ‘one’s neighbor’ as a point of reference, supersedes the separation between in-group and out-group morality…. From the perspective of a formal ethic based on general principles, legal norms (as well as the creation and application of laws) that appeal to magic, sacred traditions, revelation, and the like are devalued” (p. 162, emphasis in original).

“Weber sees in this ‘a very general, and for the history of religion very important consequence of the development of innerworldly and otherworldly values toward rationality, towards conscious endeavor, and towards sublimation by knowledge‘” (p. 164, emphasis in original).

“Weber starts with a broad concept of ‘technique’ [Technik] in order to make clear that the aspect of regulated employment of means, in a very abstract sense, is relevant to the rationality of behavior…. Every rule or system of rules that permits reliably reproducible action, whether methodical or customary, that can be predicted by participants in interaction and calculated from the perspective of the observer, is a technique in this sense. ‘Thus there are techniques for every conceivable type of action: techniques of prayer, of asceticism, of thought and research, of memorizing, of education, of exercising political or hierocratic domination, of administration, of making love, of making war, of musical performances, of sculpture and painting, of arriving at legal decisions. And all of these are capable of the widest variation in degree of rationality” (p. 169).

Again we have an ambivalence. Technique clearly has a relation to efficient causality, but Weber greatly broadens its meaning.

“We can speak of techniques in this sense whenever the ends that can be causally realized with their help are conceived as elements of the objective world…. To the conditions of purposive action there belongs not only an instrumental rationality of means, but a rationality of choice in setting ends selected in accord with values. From this standpoint an action can be rational only to the degree that it is not blindly controlled by affects or guided by sheer tradition…. ‘Actions are purely value-rational when the agents, regardless of foreseeable consequences, act according to their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honor, beauty, a religious call, piety, or the importance of some “cause”‘,” (pp.170-171, emphasis in original).

Habermas speaks of the historical advent on a world scale of what he calls “religions of conviction” (as opposed to a primacy of myth, magic, and ritual) as providing the basis for what he calls an “ethics of conviction” (as opposed to an ethics of obedience). He clearly sympathizes with the neo-Kantian critique of “enlightened self-interest” as an adequate basis for ethics.

“Interest positions change, whereas generalizable values are always valid for more than merely one type of situation. Utilitarianism does not take into account this categorical difference worked out by the neo-Kantians; it makes a vain attempt to reinterpret interest positions into ethical principles, to hypostasize purposive rationality itself as a value” (p. 172).

“Weber differentiates the concept of practical rationality from the three perspectives of employing means, setting ends, and being oriented to values. The instrumental rationality of an action is measured by effective planning of the application of means for given ends; the rationality of choice of an action is measured by the correctness of the calculation of ends in the light of precisely conceived values, available means, and boundary conditions; and the normative rationality of an action is measured by the unifying, systematizing power and penetration of the value standards and the principles that underlie action preferences” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This “rationality of choice” as an alternative to a sole focus on instrumental reasoning is a step in the right direction. I think, though, that ethical deliberation involves interpretive judgment, and not just “calculation in light of precisely conceived values”.

“When persons and groups generalize this type over time and across social spheres, Weber speaks of a methodical-rational conduct of life. And he sees the first historical approximation to this ideal type in the Protestant vocational asceticism of Calvinism and the early Puritan sects” (pp. 172-173, emphasis in original).

“The complex concept of practical rationality, which Weber introduces as an ideal type in connection with the methodical conduct of life in Protestant sects, is still partial” (p. 174).

Weber famously correlates capitalist economic rationality to Calvinist ethics. But he also sees the world history of religions in terms of a larger development toward reason and enlightenment. I will dwell more on the latter than on the former.

“On the one side, rationalized worldviews satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of formal-operational thought…. On the other side, however, rationalized worldviews also satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of a modern understanding of the world, which categorically presupposes the disenchantment of the world. Weber investigates this aspect of rationalization primarily in connection with the ‘ethical rationalization’ of religions of salvation. With regard to ‘all kinds of practical ethics that are systematically and unambiguously oriented to fixed goals of salvation’, Weber applies the term ‘rational’ (in the sense of a categorially disenchanted world) to ‘the differentiation between the normatively “valid” and the empirically given’. He sees in the overcoming of magical beliefs the essential achievement of the great world religions as regards rationalization” (p. 175).

Habermas has a rather high estimate of what formalism can achieve. He highlights Weber’s interesting suggestion that rationality has to do with distinguishing between normative validity and empirical givenness.

“We would fail from the start to grasp Weber’s theory of rationalization if we did not explain the sociological concept of an order of life [Lebensordnung] with the help of the philosophical concept of the actualization of value [Wertverwirklichung]” (p. 186).

Neither Weber nor Habermas is a fan of Hegel, but here we nonetheless meet one of the most important Hegelian concepts, that of processes of actualization.

“Weber could not have put forth a theory of rationalization had he not been convinced as a neo-Kantian that he could view processes of value actualization from the outside and from the inside simultaneously, that that he could investigate them both as empirical processes and as objectivations of knowledge, that he could tie together the aspects of reality and validity. The disenchantment of religious-metaphysical worldviews calls for an analysis of just this kind” (p. 187).

This seems to lay the ground for a happy convergence between this neo-Kantian view of value both from the outside and from the inside and a Hegelian view of processes of actualization.

“Weber speaks of normative validity and legitimacy when an order is subjectively recognized as binding. This recognition rests directly on ideas that harbor a potential for grounding and justification, and not on self-interest” (p. 189, emphasis in original).

Habermas directs our attention to questions of grounding and justification, and our handling and pursuit of them. This, he argues, will yield better sociological interpretation than the appeals to interests that are standard in the tradition derived from utilitarianism. He points out how Weber applies the standard neo-Kantian distinction between facts and norms to criticize different manifestations of ethical naturalism.

“In his exchange with Stammler, Weber, in the tradition of neo-Kantianism, stresses two differentiations: the difference between de facto regularities of behavior and normative regulations of conduct and the difference between the meaning of a validity claim and the fact of its actual recognition. Weber then criticizes the confusion of descriptive statements about accepted standards of evaluation and established norms with statements that recommend, express, or justify norms” (p. 191).

Next he returns to Austin’s notion of performativity, or doing things in language. When we do things in language, we are implicitly taking what I would call a second-person attitude. Habermas contrasts this with an “objectivating third-person attitude”. What we call facts are implicitly third-person expressions; by analogy, I want to suggest, interpretations are implicitly second-person expressions.

“Questions regarding the ideal validity of norms, whether for the theoretician or for those involved themselves, can be posed only in the performative attitude of an actor (or of a participant in discourse), whereas questions concerning the social ‘validity’ or currency of norms, questions of whether norms and values are or are not actually recognized within a group, have to be dealt with in the objectivating attitude of a third person. Corresponding to this at the semantic level is the distinction between value judgments and judgments of fact. Weber rightly insists that statements of the one type cannot be inferred from statements of the other type” (ibid).

In Habermas’s terminology, “social validity” is expressly defined as having an empirical, factual reference. But he also recognizes “ideal validity”, which applies to questions of value, and is linked to performative, second-person, doing-in-language.

“In this rational reconstruction of processes of cultural (and societal) rationalization, the social scientist can not confine himself to describing de facto views; he can understand the empirical power of convincing new ideas, and the devaluation, the loss of power to convince, of old ideas only to the degree that he becomes aware of the reasons or grounds with which the new ideas established themselves” (p. 192, emphasis in original).

We should seek not a history of ideas, but a history of reasons.

“In the analysis of the development of religious and metaphysical worldview, it is especially important to separate constellations of validity from constellations of causality” (p. 195).

The investigation of validity has to do with reasons, and is different from the investigation of causality. He looks beyond what Weber achieved.

“What first strikes one is that Weber limits the rationalization of worldview to the standpoint of ethical rationalization [Ethisierung]; he traces the development of a religiously grounded ethic of conviction — more generally, the development of posttraditional legal and moral representations…. But the rationalization of worldviews could have been traced equally well in two additional dimensions: Weber could also have investigated the transformation of cognitive and expressive elements looking back from the perspective of modern science and autonomous art” (p. 197).

From the point of view of debates about the furtherance of enlightenment, it is interesting that Weber does not follow the cliché that Habermas illustrated in referring to Condorcet above. Where Newtonian physics serves as role model and driver of enlightenment for Condorcet, Weber apparently applies instead a somewhat empirical variant of the Kantian primacy of practical reason.

“Rationalization is tied to a theme that is common to all world religions: the question of justifying the unequal distribution of life’s goods…. What is new is the idea that individual misfortune can be undeserved and that the individual may cherish the religious hope of being delivered from all evil, from sickness, need, poverty, even from death” (p. 201).

The unequal distribution of life’s goods is a serious ethical matter. I would however not at all call it a cornerstone of the world’s religions, though it is true that institutionalized religion has often played a less than admirable role in relation to matters of economic justice.

“The revaluation of individual suffering and the appearance of individual needs for salvation — which made the question of the ethical meaning of what is meaningless the point of departure for a religious thought pushing beyond local myths — did not fall from heaven. They are the result of learning processes that set in as the ideas of justice established in tribal societies clashed with the new reality of class societies” (ibid).

I have grave doubts about the trope of individual salvation, and about an “ethical meaning of what is meaningless”. I am doubtful about the applicability of Piagetian learning processes to transitions from tribal societies to class societies..

“The question of the justification of manifest injustices is not, however, treated as a purely ethical question; it is part of the theological, cosmological, metaphysical question concerning the constitution of the world as a whole. This world order is so conceived that ontic and normative questions are blended together” (p. 202).

I must be blunt here. On behalf of the universe, let me just say that there is no justification of manifest injustices. But I assume Habermas does not really mean that there is such justification, only that many or some people have come to believe that there is. I am surprised that he is not more clear about it though.

He mentions theodicy in this context, with very little detail. The Theodicy of Leibniz is actually a quite interesting work, in the tradition of the arguments of Proclus on the goodness of the world. To say that the world is good, and to say that particular manifest injustices are justified, are two entirely different things. Proper theodicy in the sense of Proclus and Leibniz is concerned with the former, and not with the latter.

Nonetheless I think Habermas is onto something important with this, when he says above that the justification of injustices is not treated as a purely ethical question, and that ontic and normative questions are blended together in the constitution of the world as a whole. Ideology falsely ontologizes contestable value judgments.

Neo-Kantianism often seems to work by developing contrasts. Habermas follows Weber’s development of what I would call a rather lame schematic contrast between Eastern and Western religion, although it was relatively enlightened for its time. Its limits are noticeable for example when in passing he repeats Weber’s summary judgment, without any explanation, that the practice of yoga is irrational.

“Weber contrasts above all the two basic conceptual strategies: one, the Occidental, employs the conception of a transcendent, personal Lord of Creation; the other strategy, widespread in the Orient, starts from the idea of an impersonal, noncreated cosmos. Weber also refers to these as transcendent and immanent conceptions of God…. In the one case, the believer seeks to win God’s favor, in the other to participate in the divine” (ibid).

This very coarse schematism can only be fitted to the case of Greek philosophy by classifying Greek philosophy as Eastern rather than Western. In the Roman world, Greece was in fact considered part of the East. With Aristotle and Plotinus, I too consider that the participatory view is rational and ethical, while the favor-seeking one is not.

“The religious foundation of ethics is also different in the two traditions; the hope for divine grace stands in contrast to the idea of self-deliverance through knowledge in Asiatic religiosity” (ibid).

This also is too simple. Speaking at this very shallow level, Buddhism classically denies the reality of the substantial self whose divinity Hinduism classically aims to recover. The notion of an (implicitly active) self-deliverance does not fit well with Taoism either. Some translations literally have the Tao Te Ching advocating “non-action”. In any case, the Tao seems closer to a notion of grace, even if its workings are impersonal.

“A negative attitude to the world first became possible through the dualism characteristic of the radical religions of salvation” (p. 203).

Following Weber, Habermas seems to consider a negative attitude toward the world to be an essential dimension of the rationalization that led to modernity. That is because Weber’s model for the origin of modernity is the ethical severity of Calvinism and Puritanism, which is taken to represent a negative attitude toward the world. By contrast, I would hold that there is nothing inherently progressive or ethical about a negative attitude toward the world, or dualism, or an emphasis on individual salvation.

“To be sure, Weber is inclined to assume that a world-affirming attitude can be maintained only where magical thought has not been radically overcome and where the stage of a dualistic (in the strict sense) interpretation of the world has not been reached. But he could have tested whether or not this was the case only through a comparison of Confucianism and Taoism with Greek philosophy; such a comparison could have determined whether radical disenchantment, a dualistic worldview structure, and affirmation of the world might not also go together. World rejection would then depend more on a radicalization of the thought of salvation, which led in religions of conviction to an accentuation of the dualism found in all world religions” (pp. 203-204).

“A negative attitude toward the world resulting from an orientation to a sacred value that transcends the world or is hidden in its innermost recesses is not, however, per se conducive to the ethical rationalization of life-conduct. World rejection leads to an objectivation of the world under ethical aspect only when it is connected with an active mode of life turned toward the world and does not lead to a passive turning away from the world” (p. 207).

Here we see Habermas is to an extent at least tentatively trying out possibilities. I appreciate his acknowledgement that a negative attitude toward the world is not a requirement. I also appreciate the explanatory role he gives to practical reason in a Kantian sense. On Hegelian grounds though, I am doubtful about the positive role he assigns to “objectivation of the world”.

“The essentials of a rationalizable worldview are as little lacking in Confucianism and Taoism as they are in Greek philosophy” (p. 210).

I would tend to agree, at least as far as Confucianism is concerned. Taoism is a more difficult case. Habermas sincerely wants to be both universal and definite, and to avoid a “Western” ethnocentrism. I think he deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt on that. But there are still real limits to what can be achieved with formal analysis of historical material at this level of generality.

New Biography of Hegel

Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg (German ed. 2019; English tr. 2023) is a highly acclaimed new biography of Hegel. Even more so than the also good one by Terry Pinkard, it provides evidence refuting longstanding misinformation about Hegel, and especially his political views. It gives more of a sense of what kind of person Hegel was and what his core values were than anything I’ve seen before. This background will be good to bear in mind for the upcoming treatment of Heidegger’s claims about Hegel.

Hegel comes across as warm, sociable, witty, deeply concerned with equality, and personally courageous. Vieweg says that his extensive engagement with the arts has been underappreciated, and that Hegel’s lectures on art basically gave birth to art history as a discipline. He also says the place of both ancient and modern skepticism in Hegel’s formation has been underestimated, and in particular that Hegel’s distinctive notion of negation reflects a skeptical heritage.

“The two pillars of [Hegel’s] thinking are freedom and reason…. He is the most famous figure in modern philosophy, arguably its greatest master…. Today, Hegel’s portrait deserves to be finally liberated from clichés and grotesque fairy tales” (ibid).

“Reason” in Hegel generally means something holistic, never mere logic chopping. “Freedom” is a key topic throughout German Idealism, and a subject of much ambiguous rhetoric. Its meanings include both civil liberties and something called free will. But Hegel at least — like Paul Ricoeur — has a clearly non-voluntarist notion of free will that is one of his most important ideas (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing).

Vieweg emphasizes Hegel’s deep commitment to democratic or “republican” politics. Hegel took personal risks as a firm supporter of the moderate Girondin faction of the French Revolution, as well as defending the legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code, which ended the legal basis for aristocratic privilege. He repeatedly went to great lengths to defend students who had been arrested by the police. He could have been charged with treason for delivering a letter to a revolutionary in Paris.

“In Berlin, Hegel established himself as the premier intellectual opponent of the Restoration…. The secret police were watching him all along…; it was widely known that Hegel supported traitors and revolutionary students” (p. 3).

“Hegel was among ‘the first to really conceptualize people as social beings. He ushered in a normative, free era of thought ” (p. 6).

“According to Hegel, … a person is the ‘sum of their deeds’. It is our actions that show what lies deep within us” (p. 9).

Robert Pippin has very thoroughly developed this point in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.

“A life should not be seen as ‘internally congruent’ but rather full of ‘strange interwoven branching paths’, which are affected by contingencies…. In Hegel’s own words, the particularity of a person, the unique, the ‘individual character’, is the most important thing” (ibid).

Individual character is emergent, and it is an accomplishment. I think Paul Ricoeur’s work on “narrative identity” is more Hegelian than Ricoeur himself recognized..

“Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy, one of Hegel’s favorite books, posits that a biography should depict a person’s character such that the reader can discern the subject’s ruling passions. Hegel describes these quintessences, these crucial inner attitudes and motivations, by the Greek word pathos, and calls them the ‘self-justifying power of the mind, which holds rationality and free will'” (ibid).

“A life should be reconstructed in all its dimensions and perspectives, its changing circumstances, experiments, continuities, and moments of transition, for it contains all the errors and confusions of a human ‘I’: an ‘independent unity’ of countless deeds and episodes, synthesizing diverse personality traits that were, when they were being lived out, incoherent and full of self-contradictions. The identity, that which stays ‘true to itself’ throughout the changes, should and can only be determined afterwards” (pp. 9-10).

Similarly, unity of apperception is an emergence, and a tendency that reconstitutes itself at every moment. It can be treated as static only in hindsight, and it is never pre-given.

“[B]iography is but a medium for a plea for free thought. To use Lawrence Stern’s words: it must be an attack on stupidity, on any and all superstition, on vanity, on rationalizing dogma and fanaticism, on scholars lolling on the floor with their inkpots, on pompous philosophers. The most important thing to clarify is that Hegel sought to make philosophy the most rigorous form of knowledge, and that reason and freedom remained the common thread and continual credo of his entire life” (p.11).

In this example of unity of apperception and biography, we can see how the theoretical and the practical are being thoroughly intermingled.

“Let us get this straight: at every stage of his work, Hegel stood for free republican ideals, against the Restoration and conservative models of thought” (p. 12).

“To philosophize: to think and live freely” (p.13).

“They were up against a strong and despotic nobility” (p. 18).

“With respect to his budding philosophical interests, we may note his occupation with Epictetus’s understanding of freedom and self-determination, which was inspired by Aristotle’s thoughts on prohairesis” (p. 22).

With this reference to Aristotle and Epictetus, we again have an indication that Hegel’s talk of free will should not be interpreted voluntaristically.

“As early as 1787, in Stuttgart, the seventeen-year-old Hegel distanced himself from the religious vision that ‘all-powerful God rules at will'” (p. 25). “He referred to Rousseau’s view of God in Émile, which turns against the superstition inherent in all religions and against the notion that God brings happiness and unhappiness, and portrays God as connected with all ideas of understanding and good” (p. 26).

For years, I could not understand why Kant and Hegel would esteem Rousseau so highly, when Rousseau is an anti-rationalist voluntarist. The answer is that it was not his rather shallow “philosophy” that attracted them, but his practical and literary views of politics and religion and human goodness. And much of Hegel’s engagement with Rousseau was through the poet Schiller.

“Hegel was also a great admirer of poetry…. Hegel liked Schiller’s tone” (p. 28). “Schiller likened Rousseau’s philosophy to Prometheus’s fire which provided arms against the horrors of poverty and ‘demonic self-interest'” (p. 29).

The French Revolution’s “declaration of inalienable human rights and its first article — ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ — as well as Rousseau’s and Kant’s philosophy of autonomy — were suggestions and challenges for the young Hegel” (p. 32).”The [French] Revolution was motivated by philosophy; Hegel called it ‘the dawn of freedom’…. [F]reedom means rights for all humanity” (p. 36).

“[R]eports from the French capital proclaimed the the importance of philosophy for revolution — ‘the breath of life which is philosophy has reached every atom of civil society’ — and educated people far and wide on the concept of human rights” (p. 37).

All this is what Hegel means by freedom — human rights and civil liberties, nothing metaphysical.

[The poet] Hölderlin called his friend a genius; Schelling saw Hegel, with his bold and Kant-inspired philosophical revolution, as the one who would most ‘tear apart the web of stupid superstitions'” (ibid). “Rousseau’s and Kant’s ideas would help him construct a more profound subjective religion, a folk religion, which ‘goes hand in hand with freedom’…. Religion is one of the most important subjects, a Hegelian fragment declares. Hegel also loved Schiller’s Sturm und Drang poem ‘The Gods of Greece’…, with its provocative line ‘For gods were more human / and so humans were more divine’, not to mention Goethe’s creed, his invective against childlike faith. Meanwhile, Rousseau saw humankind not as burdened by original sin but as born free and good” (pp. 43-44, emphasis in original.).

“Schelling quoted Lessing almost verbatim in a letter to Hegel: ‘Orthodox concepts of the divine are not for me — hen kai pan! [one and all!] I know no other. Hölderlin also invokes hen kai pan in Hegel’s journal” (p. 44, emphasis in original).

This candid remark by the revered literary figure Lessing, along with Lessing’s enthusiastic endorsement of Spinoza, created a huge stir when publicized by the anti-rationalist literary figure F. H. Jacobi in the 1780s. Jacobi was a proponent of intuition and immediacy as superior to reason. He claimed that reason leads to atheism and anarchy.

“Theologians tore down Rousseau’s arguments, which Hegel proceeded to rebuild in his critique of Tübingen’s Christian teachings: ‘respect for Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant’s virtue and morality'” (p. 45).

“Supernaturalist theology, according to which rights have their origins in heaven and are a revelation, went against the autonomy of reason…. The second theological pillar Hegel attacked is original sin” (p. 46).

Rousseau may have been the first modern European writer to publicly oppose original sin. But such a belief is also utterly alien to Plato and Aristotle.

“At the core of Hegel’s thinking is the famous image of the Reich Gottes: an inner life, not a physical church or a positive religion but an invisible church, a realm of morality. One enters not not through external forces like subordination, cults, or belief in miracles but rather, as Hegel answers Kant, by speaking and conducting one’s life in accordance with moral law” (pp. 46-47).

Invisibility here is not any kind of occult property, but a poetic name for universality. There is a close link between universality and considerations of equality.

“While still in Tübingen, Hegel diagnosed society as being harmfully detached from nature; instead, he advocated, people should recognize the power of nature. Much as we emphasize the legitimacy of spirit and the laws of reason, he wrote, ‘we must do the same when considering humankind in general: the sensuality of their lives, the dependence of the inner and outer natures, the effects of their surroundings, the desires of their senses’. And reason is to life as spices to a dish: it determines the taste of the whole thing. Like a light that shines through all of nature, reason is not a substance of old metaphysics but ‘looks, like light, different for each object'” (p. 47).

“Meanwhile, enlightenment through the cultivation of understanding is indispensable despite deficits. Hegel always based his philosophical understanding of nature on the latest science…. [W]ithout this kind of analytical understanding, there could be no reason” (ibid).

“Spinoza’s deus sive natura argued against the dualistic division between spirit and nature…. Reason and sensuality, moral law and bliss are all equally important to the development of humankind and free will. This comes from the view that humankind ‘is made of sensuality and reason together’ and is also how [Hegel] critiqued Enlightenment conceptions of bliss, ‘those hawkers of empirical cure-alls’, as well as Kant” (p. 48).

And I want to say that this non-division of reason and sensuality is good Aristotelianism, even if many of Aristotle’s later readers downplay it.

“Pyrrhonist skepticism… would be very important to Hegel (p. 42). “Hegel lived at the height of the revival of skepticism and Pyrrhonism (an ancient form of radical skepticism). [Hegel’s first biographer] Rosenkranz insisted that the principle of harsh, unbiased, true skeptical inspection was key to Hegel’s philosophical development. The revival of skepticism in the 1790s, especially Pyrrhonism and skeptical Kantianism, is often unfairly dismissed as a marginal event in Hegel’s life. But we are missing a huge part of Hegel’s thinking if we do not consider them. His conception of negativity was, without a doubt, a turning point in his philosophical growth. [The leading Pyrrhonist] Sextus Empiricus was, starting in Tübingen, a symbol for the exclusivity of Hegel’s absolute ideals of freedom. The young Hegel’s critical and skeptical thinking begins with Fichte’s response to Leonhard Creuzer and Gottlob Ernst (Aenesidemus) Schulze. He went from his philosophical critiques of the Frankfurt parallel reading on Plato and Sextus to his Jena Skeptizismusuafsatz (On Skepticism) to the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a self-fulfilling skepticism” (p. 49).

Hume already pointed out that ancient Pyrrhonic skepticism is very different from the kind of skepticism that people began to worry about after Descartes. For one thing, skepticism came to be regarded as a nihilistic position to refute, rather than as the kind of intellectual scruples we see Hegel reaching for here.

Vieweg’s phrase of “self-fulfilling skepticism” in connection with the arc of development across Hegel’s Phenomenology seems to mean the same kind of thing that I mean when I provocatively suggest that Hegelian “absolute” knowledge is principally distinguished by a thoroughgoing recognition of the relativity and conditioned character of knowledge claims.

“The heated controversies on skepticism were a huge motivation for Hegel’s astonishing philosophical development between 1790 and 1810. And [the skeptic] Schulze, an astute man who attacked Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was an especially important agent provocateur. Schulze pushed Fichte and Hegel to revise their ideas and drafts more carefully. It all started in the Stift [Tübingen]: skeptical thinking instilled in the young revolutionaries both Pyrrhonic and skeptical Kantian methods, ‘a fundamentally unique part of transcendental philosophy’, two forms of anti-dogmatism par excellence” (ibid).

“Hegel was taken by the Pyrrhonists’ understanding of themselves not as lethargic doubters but harsh, unbiased scouts and inspectors who weighed pros and cons. He loved the Greek root word, skepsis, meaning investigation and proof, and Hume’s characterization of skeptics as diligent inspectors and critics. The principle of isothenia — for every opinion there is an opposite, equally valid opinion — is a cry against mere opinionation. Hegel had encountered this isothenic-antinomian motivation in Plato’s Parmenides as well as in Aristotle. The implicit or explicit presence of isothenia and antinomy would assist Hegel’s future conceptions of negativity and contradiction” (p. 50).

The skeptics’ real point is to advocate suspension of judgment. We could advocate suspension of judgment without making the positive claim that all opinions are equal, and this would allow us to embrace a kind of skepticism without destroying the possibility of discourse. Saying all opinions are equal is like saying everything is an illusion. It obliterates distinction, but without distinction there can be no meaning or understanding. In spite of this, there have been a few people who tried to seriously sustain such a claim. Hegel too sometimes writes as if things were more evenly balanced than I think they could be, but he certainly would not countenance any wholesale obliteration of distinctions.

“The images of the ‘free republican’ and of a rationally formed society of self-possessed, free agents were a big part of this ‘young generation’s ideal’. Such a way of life would require a republican national education. All people, regardless of culture, nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, and so forth are born free, and all have the right to a free life…. Their ideal of freedom and brotherhood were part of the reason for Hegel’s interest in stoicism, especially Epictetus [who was himself a slave], who doubled as a symbol of overcoming slavery through education. Meanwhile the ideals of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius took equal rights and freedom to a new, universal level: the polis became cosmopolitan. We are all citizens of one state. The world is a public under a great law, the general law of reason” (pp. 51-52).

Here we see a French Revolution style linking of freedom with equal rights. And on this kind of topic, we get to see Stoicism in a sympathetic light.

I should write on Epictetus one of these days. His ethical focus is almost entirely independent of the representationalist-realist dogmatism in Stoicism that I often use as a negative reference in contrast to Plato and Aristotle. (Many other aspects of Stoic ethics, physics and logic are interesting as well. It is what Kant calls dogmatism that I object to. The historic characterization of then-dominant Stoicism as “dogmatism” by other ancient philosophers is the source of Kant’s usage of the term.)

“Hegel was an ardent advocate for separation of church and state: only in the ‘unhappiest countries’ do ‘religious leaders rule’. Hegel was also against the idea that religion and morality are inherently inseparable; he insisted, in fact, that they be divided. National religion (Volksreligion) and freedom of conscience must be able to coexist. Hegel favored free thought as portrayed in Schiller’s Don Carlos, … and he referenced Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as he argued for a diversity of religions and perspectives. Neither church nor state, he also argued, nor ‘fanatic priests nor decadent despots’ could issue ‘any commands or prohibitions’ on morality and religion; otherwise, as he would later add, there arises fanaticism, his word for fundamentalism. Neither church nor state can send out moral overseers, judges who measure morality with ‘a religious ruler'” (p. 52).

Genuine morality cannot be based on obedience to commands. (But fortunately, Plato and Aristotle never proposed such a thing.)

“In 1794, German idealism was born in Jena, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, a text that sparked the single most creative decade in the history of philosophy” (pp. 58-59).

“Meanwhile, there were stormy skies ahead for the French Revolution…. As [Hegel] would later say, Robespierre’s answer to everything ‘was la mort!‘ [death!]. Despite these profound conflicts, Hegel remained — unlike many contemporary German intellectuals — loyal to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity and would eventually become the philosopher of modern freedom” (p. 59).

“Something is not true just because people posit or assume it, because it is an accepted fact, or because everyone agrees that it is so. As for censorship, Hegel’s thoughts on positive religion, as well as his Rousseau- and Kant-inspired Life of Jesus, would have generated tremendous outcry…. Hegel wisely kept [these] manuscripts to himself” (p. 60).

“The second constant was his employment of poetic devices in philosophical argumentation, his appeal to the senses, his use of his vast literary knowledge. This set him apart from Kant and Fichte, whose literary and artistic knowledge was rather limited” (ibid).

This is a significant point. Hegel employs a great many figures of speech, and has a high linguistic awareness. This is not just idiosyncrasy.

“His Berne writings, for example, combined Lessing’s Nathan and its thoughts on religious tolerance with ancient Greek tragedy, which thematizes human accountability and responsibility (Oedipus Rex) and the collision of different ethical principles (Antigone)” (p. 61).

“He was concentrating on developing a unique, systematic way of philosophizing, in which he does not separate the themes of religion, art, and education” (ibid, emphasis in original).

That is an interesting different take on “system”.

“Ultimately, Hegel’s thoughts culminated in a radical critique of all authoritarian religion. For him, the important thing was to develop a new way of educating people…. Going back to Lessing, Rousseau, and Kant, Hegel believed that only a natural and rational religion could count as a religion, not this positive faith that only served to establish external authority. No one should be blindly obedient to laws they have not themselves made. And religions of obedience are founded not in the freedom of the will or any kind of freedom at all but in subordination….The court of moral law, as he put it, has the question ‘Rational or irrational?’ engraved over its doorway” (pp. 62-63).

“Thinking of Lessing, he wrote that if Jesus teaches a pure moral religion, how could Christianity become positive, that is, authoritarian? ‘The objectivity of divinity goes hand in hand with corruption and the enslavement of humankind’…. This ‘downfall’ replaces reason with miracles. The higher power lies in a totally unknown world, which we do not share…. The most disturbing thing is that, in the name of this ‘objective’ God, one ‘murders, slanders, burns, steals, lies, and betrays’. Such a distorted religion is the ‘tool’, ‘advocate’, and ‘fiery praise of the ungodly crime’ of soul-sucking despotism. With that said, Hegel knew that rights cannot exist without positive rights and that religion cannot exist without positivity” (p. 63).

“Nothing had done more to make religion authoritarian than belief in miracles” (p. 64).

“After the fall of the Jacobins, Hegel distanced himself from the folk religion idea and ended up emphasizing the separation of church and state. All his ponderings about folk education wound up being fundamentally unviable; his search for a close connection between Rousseau and Kant brought no great results. But as he considered original sin, his folk education project came back into the picture. He began attacking both theological and Kantian positions by emphasizing human self-respect: People are not sinners nor carved out of crooked timber, and they must never be treated with disdain” (p. 65).

“While Hegel was in Berne, his theories did not paint a picture of decadence and decay, even though he was influenced by Rousseau…. Hegel foresaw no downfall, nor was he pessimistic. Instead, he describes a human tendency toward authoritarian despotism and argues against subordination and for an ideal of freedom. One can see how he distanced himself from Rousseau. Inalienable human rights, he writes, are the ‘beautiful sparks of reason’; slaves and servants will not behave like sheep forever. The supposedly subordinated ones have no duty toward a higher power, since they have human rights. Yet rights and duty are indivisible…. When people are subjugated, they are wounded in the most profound way. People’s rights are infinite, inalienable, and absolute. In the Berner Briefen, Hegel asks: Why did it take humanity so long to realize that this dignity lies at the center of things?” (ibid).

“[M]easured, carefully articulated withdrawal from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling was accompanied by praise of their work…. [Hegel] called for dignity, human freedom, and a cosmopolitan, anti-despotic way of thinking…. Now he proposed an anti-Kantian ‘amalgam of sensuality and reason’. One must not divide intention from result, reason from sensuality…. So Hegel bid adieu to Kant’s deontology, despite having consulted it for many early fragments about freedom. This was inevitable: Hegel focused on friendship and love, while Kant worked ‘in a world of intangible ideas’, a stranger to the five senses…. He … pits love against asceticism. Ascetics want to tax every thought, control every feeling, crush one’s joy, love, friendship and social life — things that Hegel valued tremendously his whole life long” (pp. 66-67).

The friendship and love and anti-ascetism here all sound like Aristotle.

“Hegel further opposed the dogma of the ‘sin we are naturally born with’, that is, original sin. He believed that people must take responsibility for their actions; only then can free will exist…. One is only responsible for one’s actions if one undertook them knowingly and with an awareness of the law…. People are not deficient because of their sensual desires; they are natural beings, not sinful weeds in God’s garden”(p. 67).

Free will here basically means unimpaired reason.

His first systematic-philosophical manuscript from 1795 “is full of reservations about Fichte’s, Kant’s, and Reinhold’s notions of freedom. In the first place, they all think they need to master nature: they conceptualize the unity of reason and nature, but one is the master while the other is mastered…. Free thought does not come from assuring people that there is support from on high…. And in regard to nature, there can be no relationship of ‘master’ and ‘slave'” (p. 68).

As Brandom has especially emphasized, Hegel is utterly opposed to the idea of “mastery” that is sometimes foisted on him.

“Hegel … identified the fatal flaw in all abstract concepts of unity: How does one derive different concrete things from a vague, even empty unity?” (p. 70). Manuscript 41 from 1795 says “where subject and object, or freedom and nature, are thus unified, so that nature is freedom and subject is not to be divided from object, that is divine” (p. 71). “With unified thought, it cannot be about master and servant; it cannot be that the subject is powerful while the object is submissive, nor vice versa. Right after arriving in Frankfurt, though it created a huge burden of proof, Hegel would say that the true hen kai pan [one and all] is love” (ibid).

“In the fight against ‘living in chains’, against being ‘rowers in a galley’, against political and religious despotism, against all master/slave structures, Hegel employs the principle that people must live exclusively by laws that they have made for themselves” (p. 76).

“[T]he core of modernity is freedom of thought (Meinung, ‘opinion’), knowledge (Wissenschaft), art, and religion. The ‘coincidental differences of opinion and belief’, people who think or believe differently, must be respected. A good citizen should believe whatever they want; yet the Holy Inquisition and colonizers ‘avenged the offended majesty of God through murder’, upon indigenous peoples, pagans, Muslims, and Jews…. These hypocrites profess sympathy or love toward people whom they really see as deeply mistaken just because they have differing beliefs…. [A] clear distinction must be made between legality and morality. A ‘virtuous state’, whether it comes from religious fundamentalism or a Robespierre-like regime, tends to exclude all people who think differently, making them seem like deviants and promoting fanaticism” (pp. 76-77).

“Hegel repeatedly distinguishes between beautiful, free imagination and its ‘adventurous excesses and images of a terrifying world’. The latter is the source of prejudice” (p. 78).

“The ideal of his youth can be summed up in a single word: freedom. Freedom as Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, and Fichte defined it, in the spirit of the French Revolution” (p. 87).

“From the Romans, who owned slaves and indulged in their vices, to the wild ‘barbarians’ and the Italian city-states, to the monarchies that held their people in bondage, it is an ambiguous history, full of great scientific and artistic achievements but also of banning and censorship…. Christianity preached love of one’s fellow humans and equality; yet under the Spanish cross, entire populations of Native Americans were being wiped out. The English sang songs praising the destruction of India” (p. 97).

“Positive faith creates a master/slave structure, through abstract opposition and heteronomy. This is no sign of the ‘Reich Gottes’ (Kingdom of God), for nothing that rules me, within or without, can be godly…. Hegel looked to Aristotle to demonstrate the unity of humanity and God. The actualization of divine reason in an active life, as an individual, containing opposition, must be understood in this way (p. 101).

“Nothing that rules me can be godly” — I like that.

“Humans and God must be imagined as being of the ‘same nature’, which is spirit itself imagined by spirit (human beings)…. In 1799, Hegel described the divine as ‘the highest freedom, whose existence and relationship to the world comes in the form of beauty’…. Miracles illustrate the extreme of positive or objective religion; the ‘most ungodly’ lies in creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing]. In the context of religion, too, Hegel is concerned with the insufficiency of unity without diversity: disdain for the diversity of life leads only to fanaticism. If the divine is pure, shapeless, and unconnected, then it follows that everything else must be impure and loathsome. It also leads to the idea that people who worship different gods are ‘unbelievers’. Those who hate all gods but their own must ‘carry a hatred of all humankind in their pocket'” (pp. 101-102).

“To Hegel, an avid reader of Shakespeare, love between two people… represents the ‘finding of one in the other’…. ‘The more I give, the more I have. The individual finds within the other a way to be free” (p. 102).

“Hegel did not see humans as Fremdlinge (aliens) in nature or Pfichtlinge (dutiful beings) in the moral world. Regardless of categorical imperatives, they have a right to happiness and well-being, to act on their desires; duty and desire cannot be pitted against each other. In religion, God must be imagined as a ‘friendly being’, and humans must be not only beings of duty but beings of joy, love, and laughter…. In Frankfurt, Hegel changed his terminology, ‘unifying’ morality and legality into a higher term. As Rosenkranz puts it, ‘first came simply life, later came ethical life” (p. 103).

“Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book 12, was particularly important for his understanding life as identity” (p. 106).

“Truth is freedom from ruling / being ruled” (ibid).

“Beginning in the autumn of 1801, he was close to Goethe, and they often went together to the theater” (p. 113).

“Dogmas generally come in the form of presuppositions without evidence: assumptions, revelations, empty assurances…. Each of these approaches assumes that there is something before reflection, beyond reflection — spontaneous, given facts, the unchangeable. All are variations of the myth of the given. An unexamined assumption, a pure reassurance, cannot found or ground a philosophy, because critical examination remains suspended. Immediacy, if merely assumed, is fraudulently acquired: a fatal leap into belief or faith, akin to an appeal to oracles” (p. 120).

“Instead of ‘I = I’, the postulate is ‘I should be I’, only a demand for unification, a unification that will never happen” (ibid).

“No logical path leads from pure unity to duality or diversity, and vice versa. In Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, the One is supposed to metaphorically radiate outward. Fichte also made an illegitimate leap in logic, from the ‘I’ to the ‘not-I’…. Finding evidence (Beweis) for the beginning forced Hegel to drastically change his strategy of thinking while still in Jena” (p. 128).

“Reading Aristotle and Fichte, Hegel understood thought and will as different but not as confronting each other; in each, the theoretical and the practical are connected…. Reason must stand against both dogmatism and skepticism — against Plotinus’s example of empty unity, empty monism, and against Sextus’s example of mere division, empty dualism…. Philosophical thinking cannot accept pure immediacy, or anything prereflective…. [T]he key concept of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) aims at a philosophy of concrete self-determination” (p. 130).

“True ethical life must overcome extremes, both for private subjects that are only for themselves and for empty and abstract generalities” (p. 133). “True ethical life claims the identity of the universal and the particular in form and content: concrete freedom” (p. 134).

Vieweg quotes from an 1803 fragment, “Geist is not being, but becoming; it comes from negation and, having prepared for itself the ideal element of nothingness, can move freely. Geist is but the elevation of its other; this other self is nature; Geist makes this other and itself the same…. Geist recognizes that this nature, or otherness, is not actually other. This knowledge makes Geist free, for the first time truly Geist…. Only by leaving itself and returning to find itself can Geist prove itself Geist” (p. 139, ellipses in original).

“With a precise categorical definition of development, he countered the relativist mantra of procedure as an endless cycle of self-creation and self-destruction up until the bad infinity of St. Neverland Day. There is no lottery without a payout; the purpose of being-in-oneself becomes real when it becomes for-oneself…. Second, he defined the relationship with oneself as knowing” (p. 140).

“Hegel fought against the fiction of pure, unconditional immediacy, and abhorrent dogmatic assurances of a pure immediate, setting against these assertions the skeptical climbing of the ‘rope ladder of logic”. Skepticism was his weapon against what is supposedly sacrosanct, primordial, prereflective doubt, or skepsis, is the opposite of the pure immediate” (p. 142).

“[H]e continued his debate with skepticism and sharpened his concept of negativity, a point whose importance is still underrated” (p. 143).

“The monadic-solipsistic ego is only able to achieve self-consciousness in a thinking self-relation through the sublation of its imaging and yearning self-relation, only through knowledge of the will, which is thus conceived as a universal will and is essentially being-recognized” (p. 144, emphasis in original).

“He was working to overcome the paradigm of consciousness” (p. 148, emphasis in original).

“Hegel wrote a popular, accessible essay called ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ This little gem is an excellent place to start on Hegel’s philosophy; it addresses the main barrier to philosophy — namely, that it is too abstract: ‘Metaphysics, thought, and abstraction are words that make everyone run away more or less as if from the plague’. Hegel’s answer to the titulary question is perhaps surprising: it is the uneducated who think abstractly, not the educated. Abstract thinking means, for example, seeing in a murderer nothing but the abstract fact of being a murderer, thereby denying them everything else — their concreteness, the fact that they may also be a strong, attractive person on whom the sun likewise shines; an uneducated person thinks abstractly, reducing a person to a single predicate” (p. 185).

“‘The answer that Robespierre gave to everything: whatever anyone said, thought, did, or wanted, he cried, La mort! It became repetitive’. Schelling’s absolute knowing is the same: ‘great broom, sweeping everything away'” (p. 186).

“Hegel wrote the Philosophy of Right inspired by the spirit of 1789. The Restoration proved a danger to his publishing it. (It is a double irony that Hegel-haters today call him a Restoration ideologue.)” (p.269).

“Hegel was a danger to the Restoration. In his lectures and books, he insisted fearlessly on free thought. He supported students who stood accused of treason” (p. 270). “Hegel spoke with hotheaded youths, sympathizing with their yearning for freedom and discouraging nationalism and anti-Semitism, evidently with some success…. [H]is Philosophy of Right proved that theories of nationalism, especially those that excluded Jewish and French people, were absurd” (p. 271). “The secret police, inevitably, kept an eye on him, for he was supporting ‘traitors’…. And yet, despite all this, there are still those who call Hegel a Restoration apologist. They should read the Philosophy of Right, which is arguably history’s greatest book against Restoration ideology, against nationalism, colonialism, and racism, and for a modern society of freedom and justice” (p. 272).

“The preface to the Philosophy of Right is one of the most misunderstood texts in philosophical history….. [Hegel] would be vilified for his universalism and his rejection of German chauvinism, nationalism, and racism at key moments in later history — 1870, 1914, and 1933″ (p. 274).

“Not everything that exists is ‘actual’ (wirklich); only rational forms have that attribute. Positive rights cannot be equated with the right of reason (Vernunftrecht)…. What exists is not the standard, as the Prussian state would have it, but rather reason: the standard and the court where ‘rights’ must justify themselves. In a lecture Hegel said, ‘What is actual (wirklich), is rational. But not all is actual, that exists” (p. 275).

“In colloquial speech, actuality encompassed every ‘stunted, transitory existence’. Vieweg quotes Hegel, “But when I speak of actualization (Wirklichkeit), one should instantly wonder in what sense I use this expression, for I also discussed actuality in the Logic and I do not just mean contingencies, which do exist. I have precisely distinguished actuality from Dasein, existence, and other categories'” (ibid).

“The prologue also includes one of the most beautiful metaphors in philosophy: ”The owl of Minerva begins her flight when dawn breaks’, The cliched, pessimistic interpretation is that philosophy comes too late. But Hegel described the French revolution as a glorious sunrise: for the first time, there was a constitution based on rights” (ibid). The modern world represents the ‘dawn’ of history, the highest stage of freedom. First, it suggests that a free society can realize the singular freedom of all subjects. Dawn and sunrise stand for the French Revolution” (p. 276).

“Relationships such as master/slave and despotism are not forms of freedom: both ‘master’ and ‘slave’ are unfree, as is the despot; they are ‘in the same relationship’ of unfreedom. People’s reciprocal recognition is intrinsic to Hegel’s free will. The idea of interpersonality appeared in the Encyclopedia back in 1817: a person is ‘realized only in the being of other people’; only then am I ‘a real person for me‘. The principle of recognition is fundamental in the Philosophy of Right. It is the substance of true community, of friendship, love, family, state. Abstract right demands that I ‘be a person’, and with regard to intersubjectivity, ‘respect every other “I” as a person, a subject with rights’…. All actions that do not respect a person as a subject with free will or interfere with their freedom are unfree. Third, Hegel has a concept that goes back to Kant and Fichte: every being with free will is — unlike a thing — its own end” (p. 281).

“The three dimensions — recognition, inviolability, and the end in itself — all concern people’s equality in their ‘humanity’, with their right to personality/personhood and are the foundation of human rights…. Every being with free will has the absolute right to recognition of their person” (ibid).

But at the same time, “Equating arbitrariness with freedom is a theoretical fallacy” (p. 296).

“Having finished the Philosophy of Right, Hegel became one of the main inspirations for the explosion of poetry in the 1820s…. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, which were about modern and Romantic literature and art in general, were especially important to them” (p. 318). “Hegel was a big part of the Berlin musical scene….’Hegel was especially at home in the company of Berlin women, and quickly they, too, came to care for and look after him, the good and humorous professor'” (p. 320).

“Hegel’s success and polemical statements also inspired jealousy, hatred, and rejection….Hegel had friendly, collegial relationships with many fellow intellectuals…. But he also had influential enemies” (p. 327). “The nobility, correctly, did not find Hegel to be a Prussian political philosopher, a royalist; in fact, he was one of the most philosophically dangerous enemies of the Restoration” (pp. 327-328).

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Plato and Aristotle on Religion

Aristotle’s statements about “god” have sometimes troubled both religious people and non-religious people. For the believers they seem to say too little, and yet for nonbelievers they seem to say too much. But views that generate opposite complaints might be taken to represent a happy medium of sorts. In this troubled world of ours, so full of religious strife, the generous and optimistic spirit of Plato and Aristotle has much to be commended.

I use the lower case “god” to translate Plato and Aristotle’s ho theos, which can also be rendered “the god”. Many have read an incipient monotheism into this term.

In the course of their philosophical work, Plato and Aristotle address many issues relevant to religion, without attaching themselves to any particular creed or orthodoxy. Conventional Greek religion in their day was more concerned with ceremonial observance than with specific belief. Plato nonetheless criticizes the very human foibles attributed to the gods in Greek mythology, and generally rejects argument from authority in favor of shareable reasoning. For Plato, worthiness of the designation “god” implies a virtual identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful. A god would, for example, be incapable of jealousy. Aristotle shares this positive perspective, and does not speak about mythology at all, except in a literary way.

Reception of Plato and Aristotle in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions was largely filtered through the complex history of neoplatonism. At the same time, neoplatonism — and especially the work of its founder, Plotinus — greatly influenced later theology. Although Plotinus was nominally a polytheist, his philosophy focuses intensely on the relation of all things to the One. Augustine in his Confessions describes his reading of Plotinus as a halfway point toward his conversion to Christianity. During the Islamic Golden Age, an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus circulated under the title Theology of Aristotle.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the emperor Julian briefly attempted to overthrow Christianity, while claiming support from the later neoplatonic philosophy of Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Athenian successor Proclus treats the works of Plato as themselves divinely inspired, while also broadly embracing the polytheisms of all nations. Proclus wrote a Platonic Theology as well as an Elements of Theology, and championed a theological interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides at great length. The Athenian neoplatonic school was eventually closed by the Christian Roman emperor for its persistent advocacy on behalf of pagan traditions.

The Alexandrian neoplatonic school under Ammonius sought to distance itself from the Athenian school’s advocacy of paganism, while at the same time shifting its curriculum to focus much more on Aristotle rather than Plato. Ammonius’ students included both the Christian John Philoponus and the pagan Simplicius, who between them authored the majority of the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle. Without endorsing all the details of either of their work, I find it inspiring that they were able to coexist within the same school.

Religion and politics both need more dialogue and less denunciation of the other. Plato and Aristotle and discussions of their work have much to teach us along these lines.

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

Fichte’s Ethics

Fichte’s System of Ethics (1798) has been called the most important work of moral philosophy between Kant and Hegel. Unavailable in English till 2005, it is apparently a source for some key themes in Hegel’s Phenomenology. It also shows the more nuanced side of Fichte that impressed Paul Ricoeur. Fichte was an unusually powerful speaker, reportedly electrifying audiences with his intensity and bold rhetorical strokes. His thought greatly influenced German Romanticism.

Fichte begins by asking, “how can something objective ever become something subjective; how can a being for itself ever become something represented (vorgestellt)?” (p. 7). He continues, “No one will ever explain how this remarkable transformation takes place without finding a point where the objective and the subjective are not at all distinct from one another…. The point in question is ‘I-hood’ [Ichheit], intelligence, reason, or whatever one wishes to call it.”

“This absolute identity of the subject and the object in the I can only be inferred; it cannot be demonstrated, so to speak, ‘immediately’, as a fact of actual consciousness. As soon as any actual consciousness occurs, even if it is only the consciousness of ourselves, the separation [between subject and object] ensues…. The entire mechanism of consciousness rests on the various aspects of this separation of what is subjective from what is objective, and, in turn, on the unification of the two” (ibid; brackets and emphasis in original).

Fichte revives an explicit appeal to “intellectual intuition” that Kant had proscribed and I find untenable, but carefully limits its scope, mainly using it for the existence of “the I”. Importantly, as the above quote shows, he does not claim to have a direct intuition of the identity of subject and object.

Next he asks, “how we ever come to take some of our representations to be the ground of a being” (p. 8), and answers, “I find myself to be acting efficaciously in the world of sense” (ibid).

This seems like a good pragmatist insight. Here and above, he asks questions about the status of representation and how it comes to be that anticipate aspects of Brandom’s work in this area.

“Insofar as I know anything at all I know that I am active” (p. 9). “I posit myself as active” (p. 10). Hegel criticized Fichte’s reliance on “positing” or postulation of various key notions.

Fichte goes on to specify that “I ascribe to myself a determinate activity, precisely this one and not another” (p. 11), and determinate activity implies resistance. “Wherever and whenever you see activity, you see resistance as well, for otherwise you see no activity” (p. 12). “[F]reedom can never be posited as able to do anything whatsoever about this situation, since otherwise freedom itself, along with all consciousness and all being, would fall away” (p. 13).

Throughout his career, while picking up and intensifying Kant’s occasional voluntarist rhetoric and even aiming to build a system around it, Fichte made things more interesting and complicated by emphasizing that objectivity always involves a resistance to free action. Fichte goes on to specify that activity involves a kind of agility — i.e., ways of acting successfully in spite of the the object’s or the world’s resistance. Here we find ourselves on the threshold at least of the territory more fully explored by Ricoeur in Freedom and Nature (see Ricoeurian Choice; Voluntary Action).

“I posit myself as free insofar as I explain a sensible acting, or being, as arising from my concept, which is then called the ‘concept of an end'” (p. 14). “[T]he concept of an end, as it is called, is not itself determined in turn by something objective but is determined absolutely by itself” (p. 15).

Freedom here is acting in accordance with concepts or ends. While Kant and Fichte both tended to identify this with a kind of exemption from the natural order, this second move is separable from the first. The need to treat freedom as an exemption presupposes a view of natural causality as completely rigid. But more fluid “tendencies” also exhibit the resistance that Fichte makes characteristic of objectivity.

He then claims in effect that the resistance we encounter in the world of sense is actually nothing but an appearance. “[N]othing is absolute but pure activity…. Nothing is purely true but my self-sufficiency” (p. 17). I think Hegel and Ricoeur would each in their own way regard formulations like this as one-sided, and as a step back from his previous acknowledgement of resistance to our action as a basic fact of life, but that is in part because Hegel and Ricoeur both in a sense vindicate appearance itself as being something more than mere appearance.

Fichte is not actually contradicting himself or going back on a promise here, but moving to a different level. I think his point is that objects as separate are ultimately always a matter of appearance. I would agree as far as strictly separate objects are concerned, but I see objectivity in the first instance as a resistant but non-rigid sea of non-separate relations, tendencies, and currents that is not just an appearance, and is only secondarily divided into separate objects that insofar as they are separate are just appearances.

He comes a bit closer to Hegel again when he says “it is the character of the I that the acting subject and that upon which it acts are one and the same” (p. 28; emphasis in original).

But a few pages later he concludes that “all willing is absolute” and that the will is “absolute indeterminability through anything outside itself” (p. 33). “As an absolute force with consciousness, the I tears itself away — away from the I as a given absolute, lacking force and consciousness” (p. 37). One of Hegel’s main concerns in the Phenomenology was to show the inadequacy and undesirability of this ideal of total “independence”. I take “absolute force” as a kind of poetic language in Fichte’s rhetorical style that I would not adopt.

He repeats Kant’s claim that the will has “the power of causality by means of mere concepts” (p. 41). I agree that concepts can have a kind of efficacy in the world, though I would not call it causality in the narrow modern sense. On the other hand, I think talk about will as if it were a separate power not encompassed by the union of feeling and reason is misguided. I don’t think there is any will-talk that doesn’t have a better analogue in feeling-and-reason talk. So the question of the will’s causality does not even come up for me.

“According to Kant, freedom is the power to begin a state [Zustand] (a being and subsistence) absolutely” (p. 41). I don’t consider formulations like this to be typical of Kant’s thought as a whole. It rhetorically recalls voluntarist views in the Latin medieval tradition that saw human freedom as a sort of microcosmic analogue of creation from nothing. The notion of literal creation from nothing, though it achieved wide circulation in the monotheistic traditions, is actually an extreme view in theology whose main use has been to support radically supernaturalist claims of all sorts that are entirely separable from the broader spiritual purport of the world’s religions. Scholars have pointed out that creation from nothing is not inherent to the Old Testament text, and only emerged as an interpretation in the Hellenistic period with figures like Philo of Alexandria. One of Kant’s great contributions was actually to have developed other ways of talking about freedom that do not presuppose any of this kind of strong supernaturalism. (I adhere to the view commonly attributed to Aristotle in the Latin tradition that nothing comes from nothing in any literal sense.) Fichte of course was not at all a supernaturalist like Philo; but like Kant and even more so, in relation to freedom he nonetheless used some of the same rhetorical strategies originally developed to “rationalize” supernaturalism. (And if nature already participates in divinity, supernaturalism is superfluous.)

Fichte improves things by specifying, “It is not the case that the state that is begun absolutely is simply connected to nothing at all, for a finite rational being thinks only by means of mediation and connections. The connection in question, however, is not a connection to another being, but to a thinking” (ibid).

Much as I welcome this emphasis on mediation and connections, it is important to mention that he earlier strongly relied on the claim of a limited kind of direct intellectual self-intuition (pp. 25ff). Fichte was honest enough to acknowledge that he did not have inferential grounds for his strong notion of “I-hood”. The texture of his thought is a unique hybrid of a sort of inferentialism about things in general with an intuitionism about self. The points at which he relies on intuition are the same places where he applies the bold rhetorical strokes for which he initially became famous and popular with the Romantics. But in the long run, it is his emphasis on mediation — both in the form of inference and in the form of resistance to our projects — that holds the greatest value.

In a somewhat Kantian style that seems both more abstract and more simple and direct than that of Kant himself, Fichte sets out to “deduce” first the principle of morality, then the reality and applicability of the principle. For Fichte, the single principle of morality is the “absolute autonomy of reason” (p. 60). Reason is finite, but depends on nothing outside itself. Consciousness is always limited and in that sense determined by the objects it “finds”, but in conscience there is a pure identity of subject and object. Here again we can see how Hegel was in part taking up Fichtean ways of speaking.

Unlike Hegel, though, for Fichte “Conscience never errs and cannot err, for it is the immediate consciousness of our pure, original I, over and above which there is no other kind of consciousness. Conscience is itself the judge of all convictions and acknowledges no higher judge above itself. It has final jurisdiction and is subject to no appeal. To want to go beyond conscience means to want to go beyond oneself and to separate oneself from oneself” (p. 165).

From this it seems clear that Fichte recognizes no standpoint higher than that of Conscience. He identifies morality with good will (p. 149). Hegel on the other hand regards mutual recognition as a higher standpoint than that of the autonomy of Conscience. Although Fichte briefly refers to the concept of mutual recognition he had developed in Foundations of Natural Right (1797), the System of Ethics revolves mainly around a version of Kantian autonomy: “the formal law of morals [Sitten] is…. do what you can now regard with conviction as a duty, and do it solely because you have convinced yourself that it is a duty” (p. 155).

Surprisingly, he says “all free actions are predestined through reason for all eternity” (p. 216), and claims to have reconciled freedom with predestination. This provides a noteworthy additional perspective on his earlier love-hate relation with Spinoza.

“The world must become for me what my body is. This goal is of course unreachable; but I am nevertheless supposed to draw constantly nearer to it,…. This process of drawing nearer to my final end is my finite end.”

“The fact that nature placed me at one point or another and that nature instead of me took the first step, as it were, on this path to infinity does not infringe upon my freedom” (pp. 217-218). This theme of “drawing nearer” and the “path to infinity” was sharply criticized by Hegel, but I rather like it.

I worry a bit when he says “The necessary goal of all virtuous people is therefore unanimous agreement [and] uniformity of acting” (p. 224). He did however also say that “anyone who acts on authority necessarily acts unconscionably” (p. 167; emphasis in original).

“I possess absolute freedom of thought… freedom before my own conscience…. [I]t is unconscionable for me to make the way in which I tend to the preservation of my body dependent on the opinions of others” (p. 225).

“What lies outside my body, and hence the entire sensible world, is a common good or possession” (ibid). “[I]n communal matters, I ought to act only in accordance with the presumptive general will” (p. 228). “I should… act in such a way that things have to become better. This is purely and simply a duty” (ibid). “As a means for bringing about the rational state, I have to take into account the present condition of the makeshift state” (ibid). In the case of unjust tyranny and oppression, “every honorable person could then in good conscience endeavor to overthrow this [makeshift] state entirely, but only if he has ascertained the common will” (ibid; emphasis in original).

“How then can one become aware of that upon which everyone agrees? This is not something one could learn simply by asking around; hence it must be possible to presuppose something that can be viewed as the creed of the community or as its symbol.”

“It is implicit in the concept of such a symbol or creed that it presents something not in a very precise or determinate manner, but only in a general way…. Moreover,… the symbol is supposed to be appropriate for everyone…. [T]he symbol does not consist in abstract propositions but rather in sensory presentations of the latter. The sensible presentation is merely the costume; what is properly symbolic is the concept. That precisely this presentation had to be chosen is something that was dictated by need… because they were not yet capable of distinguishing the costume that the concept had received by chance from the essence of the concept” (p. 230).

“[W]hat is most essential about every possible symbol or creed is expressed in the proposition, ‘there is something or other that is supersensible and elevated above all nature’…. What this supersensible something may be, the identity of this truly holy and sanctifying spirit, the character of the truly moral way of thinking: it is precisely concerning these points that the community seeks to determine and to unify itself more and more, by mutual interaction” (pp. 230-231).

Here we see some anticipation of Hegel’s account of religion in the Phenomenology.

“Not only am I permitted to have my own private conviction concerning the constitution of the state and the system of the church, I am even obliged by my conscience to develop this same conviction just as self-sufficiently and as broadly as I can.”

“Such development… is possible, however, only by means of reciprocal communication with others.” (p. 233).

Like Hegel, he makes mutual recognition a foundation of religion.

“The distinguishing and characteristic feature of the learned public is absolute freedom and independence of thinking” (p. 238). “Since scholarly inquiry is absolutely free, so must access to it be open to everyone” (p. 239).

“No earthly power has the right to issue commands regarding matters of conscience…. The state and the church must tolerate scholars” (ibid).

“All of a person’s efficacious acting within society has the following goal: all human beings are supposed to be in agreement; but the only matters that all human beings can agree on are those that are purely rational, for this is all they have in common” (p. 241).

“Kant has asserted that every human being is himself an end, and this assertion has received universal assent” (p. 244).

“The moral law, which extends to infinity, absolutely commands us to treat human beings as if they were forever capable of being perfected and remaining so, and this same law absolutely prohibits us from treating human beings in the opposite manner” (p. 229). Fichte argues at some length that this last point would be true no matter how dismal we might judge actual history to be.

Unfortunately, Fichte retained some of the prejudices of his time and place. He thought women should be subordinate to men, and his contribution to early German nationalism was not without a chauvinistic side.

The Phenomenology’s Ending

Having more or less completed a walk-through of Hegel’s Phenomenology in the company of Harris’ unique literal commentary, the first thing I want to comment on is Brandom’s decision not to cover the Phenomenology‘s last two chapters (on Religion and Absolute Knowledge) in A Spirit of Trust. Brandom argues that the actual climax of Hegel’s work is the end of the preceding Spirit chapter, where Conscience finds its completion in mutual recognition, confession, and forgiveness. This allows him to avoid entering into controversy on the secondary point of the status of historical, socially instituted religion. As my own coverage illustrates, this is indeed a thorny area. Brandom develops his own somewhat minimalist treatment of absolute knowledge, carefully avoiding the connections with historical religion and the issues of the latter’s status that Harris explicitly brings out.

In a historically Christian culture, it is difficult to speak of confession and forgiveness without implicitly invoking religious connotations. Clearly they can also be given a purely ethical meaning, though, and this is what Brandom does.

It seems clear that Hegel thinks the standpoint of Conscience already stands on the threshold of absolute knowledge, requiring only an explicit consideration of mutual recognition and forgiveness to complete it. In this regard, Brandom is right. Moreover, I think Brandom’s parallel path to absolute knowledge ultimately yields conclusions compatible with those that Harris draws from following the remainder of Hegel’s argument. They both give absolute knowledge a mainly ethical rather than theological (or epistemological) meaning.

Harris thinks, though, that the Religion chapter is the one place where Hegel does argue for a linear, progressive historical development. Brandom replaces this with references to Enlightenment political theory that Hegel does not explicitly discuss at all in the Phenomenology. Here we are concerned with the transition from ancient Greek recognition that “some are free” to Kantian/Fichtean and modern democratic recognition that “all are free”. For Hegel himself, this goes through historical Christianity.

Brandom charts an alternative linear development to “all are free” that goes through the attitude-dependence of norms in secular traditions of natural law and social contract theory. While I have serious issues with the political and legal voluntarism of these traditions, I do think Brandom’s alternate genealogy of the modern “all are free” is probably more factually historical than the path Hegel himself traces through the Unhappy Consciousness, primitive Christianity, and the Reformation.

Another important point that Harris makes, though, is that Hegel treats historical religion because he wants to be maximally socially inclusive. The peasant-wife with her cows in Sense-Certainty could be deeply touched by historical religion, but is most probably totally unaware of Enlightenment political theory. Harris says that religion already gives the most naive “natural” consciousness the sense that there is something greater than itself, which begins the path to Self-Consciousness and Spirit.

Another alternative path to the more political sense of “all are free” (which I like better than the one through natural law and social contract theory) goes through the more explicitly democratic concerns of the Spinozist movement and the French Encyclopedists (see Enlightenment).

Circling Toward Absoluteness

Hegel prominently refers to “absolute” knowledge as a kind of circle. Here I think he has in mind Aristotle’s notion of the “perfection” of circular motion. This in turn presupposes a Greek notion of “perfection” that — unlike the more theological sense it acquired later — is intended to be something realizable or finitely achievable, a kind of completeness within itself of a finite essence with respect to its ends that is still compatible with life and motion, and indeed requires the latter. The perfection of absolute knowledge also has to be construed in a way that is modest enough to allow for the contingency that comes with inhabiting a world. It is actually much more ethical than epistemological.

The circle metaphor here also involves an aspect of returning to the beginning. The immediate subjective “certainty” that throughout Hegel’s long development has been distinguished from real essential “truth” finally becomes adequate to the expression of “truth”, in part by going through development and learning from its mistakes, and in part by letting go of its self-centered pretensions.

The specific kind of completeness within itself involved here has to do with the way knowing, doing, and forgiving are brought together. Harris in his commentary says that for Hegel the putting together of knowing and doing — when its implications are followed out — leads “logically” to what Hegel has been calling the breaking of the hard heart, which Hegel also identifies with the forgiveness stressed in historic religious traditions.

“‘Immediate Dasein‘ [concrete, implicitly human being] already has no other significance than that of ‘pure knowing’ for the active Conscience. My conscientious conviction is that I have done the best I can in the circumstances as they are known to me; my ‘pure knowledge’ is precisely that it is my duty to do that. We expect, in simple justice, to be forgiven for the errors caused by ignorance; the [Sophoclean tragedy] Oedipus at Colonus already makes this point quite clearly. Of course, in my uneasy ‘shifting’, I do learn how ‘impure’ my motives always are. But the forgiving community comprehends and forgives the fact that I saw the whole situation in my way, and defined my duty according to some personal interest that is not universally (or as Kant would say ‘categorically’) imperative. Thus the community reduces ‘actuality’ to the pure knowledge of what the inevitable conditions of acting are.”

“The ‘determinate Dasein‘ that arises from action and judgment in their ‘relationship’ is the forgiving that comprehends the action in its concreteness. The acceptance of the action as ‘conscientious’ — or as objectively rational — involves as its ‘third moment’ the Spirit that says ‘Yes’ (rather than ‘No’, as the moral spirit must say). When the two sides are thus reconciled, the ‘universality’ or ‘essence’ in which both are comprehended is the ‘I = I’ or ‘the Self’s pure knowing of itself’.”

“This ‘pure knowing’, as a concrete experience, is necessarily both an achievement (for the two sides do indeed clasp hands in reconciliation) and an end or goal to be achieved (for we may spend a lifetime trying to comprehend the objective rationality of the other’s act or judgment)…. [I]n principle, this is how the singular rational self — the recognized Conscience or justified sinner, simul peccator et justus [simultaneously sinner and justified] in Luther’s phrase — both constitutes the community, and is constituted by it” (Hegel’s Ladder II, pp. 720-721).

“If consciousness is to come to the comprehension of what ‘truth’ is, (or what the word signifies) through a process of self-criticism that we [readers of the Phenomenology] simply observe, then we must necessarily begin from the side of the ‘for-itself’. The communal substance of our rationality is the ‘in-itself’ which can only gradually come to be ‘for itself’; and its last step must be later….”

“It is, of course, the motion of ‘the Concept’ as self-critical that drives both sides onward; but it is a mistake to identify the motion of the Concept with philosophy as speculation (or even as both speculation and critique) because the concrete historical movement of the whole world… is so essential to it. The lesson that philosophy is not to be understood apart from its history is widely understood; what Hegel’s science of experience teaches us is the much more demanding imperative that philosophy and religion must be comprehended together in the context of the actual history of the human community” (p. 722).

“The Concept” is Hegel’s term for concrete human thought for which there is none of the separateness that the object always has for what he calls Consciousness. This realizes Aristotle’s suggestion that in the case of pure thought, we ought not to separate the act of thinking or the thinker from the thing thought.

In the corresponding part of his separate quick overview Hegel: Phenomenology and System, Harris says, “The Self of Cognition has been shown to be the mediating moment between the finite spirit and the absolute Spirit. It is the self of the infinite community — the incarnate Logos, the ‘I that is We’. Now we have to show (on the one hand) how this absolute Concept comprehends all the experiences that have led us to it and (on the other hand) how we, as singular consciousness, actually comprehend it. We all embody the Concept (before we do any philosophizing at all) because it comprehends us — that is, it provides the context of all that we intelligently say and do, and of everything that we understand about what is unintelligent.” (p. 92).

“The human self is Yorick [the skull contemplated by Hamlet, as Hegel recalls]; our singularity is identical with our ‘thinghood’…. Finally, the sensible thing has to be understood as the essence of the self. This happened for us in the stabilization of the moral self as Conscience” (p. 93).

Conscience already identifies (its own point of view on) what it actually does as a direct expression of its essence. But what Conscience actually did and its consequences also have the same kind of retrospective, socially available “objective” status as Yorick’s skull.

Finally “It is the perfection of Conscience in Forgiveness that gives rise to the singular self as the pure knowing of the community” (ibid).

Next in this series: Yorick

On Being a Thing

The next few paragraphs of Hegel’s final chapter are concerned with the notions of “thing” and “object” in an apparently completely general way, from the point of view of what happens with them in “absolute” knowledge.

Immediately after the paragraph I quoted in the previous post, Hegel specifies that “The surmounting of the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly as meaning that the object showed itself returning into the self” (Baillie trans., p. 789). This once again rules out any subjectivism that would abolish objectivity altogether.

Hegel continues, “It has a more definite meaning: it means that the object as such presented itself to the self as a vanishing factor; and, furthermore, that the emptying of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood, and that this externalization of self-consciousness has not merely negative, but positive significance, a significance not merely for us or per se, but for self-consciousness itself. The negative of the object, its cancelling its own existence, gets, for self-consciousness, a positive significance; or, self-consciousness knows this nothingness of the object because on the one hand self-consciousness itself externalizes itself; for in so doing it establishes itself as object, or, by reason of the indivisible unity characterizing its self-existence, sets up the object as its self. On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness has just as really cancelled this self-relinquishment and objectification, and has resumed them into itself, and is thus at home with itself in its otherness as such” (pp. 789-790).

The presentation of an object as a “vanishing factor” of which Hegel speaks — though it cannot be represented statically — is supposed to be something that really happens, so this is quite different and a great deal more subtle than simply saying the object is not really real. I think Hegel’s talk about the purely relational view “negating” the object qua object and other similarly strained uses of “negation” have not helped the understanding of his work, but as Hegel himself proceeds to remind us, this is only one moment of a larger movement, and it is the multifaceted whole and its transformations we ought to be concerned with. (In general I’ve found Brandom’s explanation of Hegelian negation in terms of material incompatibility very helpful, but it’s not clear to me there is a material incompatibility in this instance. In the bigger picture, though, Hegel seems to be saying that there is a sense in which every object is a reification, and another in which all its properties can be explained in relational terms.)

“Consciousness, at the same time, must have taken up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and have grasped its meaning from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate characteristics makes the object per se or inherently a spiritual reality; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness, when the latter apprehends every individual one of them as self, i.e. when it takes up towards them the spiritual relationship just spoken of” (p. 790).

The object is a spiritual reality in the sense that there is a purely relational account of its properties. Hegel here also has in mind his dictum that Reason is the certainty of being all reality. The object as reification is clearly separate from me, but as Aristotle might remind us, its objective relational form or essence is not distinct from the shareable intelligible thought of that form or essence.

“The object is, then, partly immediate existence, a thing in general — corresponding to immediate consciousness; partly an alteration of itself, its relatedness (or existence-for-another and existence-for-self), determinateness — corresponding to perception; partly essential being or in the form of a universal — corresponding to understanding. The object as a whole is the mediated result… or the passing of universality into individuality through specification, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through cancelled individuality or specific determination” (p. 790, brackets in original).

Even the most subtle and developed articulations far removed from what we might call immediate sensation have an aspect of immediacy analogous to what Hegel describes in Sense-Certainty, in that they recognize or assert certain discrete presented or represented “things” or their existence or their truth, taking “thing” in the broadest possible sense. But Hegel wants us to recognize that in real life we never stop at what he calls mere “certainty”. Nothing is ever just immediately there. Even in the most unphilosophical kind of practical life, distinctions are unavoidable. Then any distinction we make turns out to depend on other distinctions. Distinctions implicitly introduce universal “properties” of things that can be compared. This leads to the ramified world of Perception or “things with properties”, but Perception in general still holds fast to Sense-Certainty’s initial intuition of independent “things” as pre-given reference points in the sea of interdependent distinctions, and gets into logical difficulties as a result. Finally Understanding dissolves particular “things” into a purely universal field of constitutive relations with no pre-given terms, like what we find in mathematical physics or structural linguistics. We may experience all of the moments simultaneously in one experience of one thing. Of course, as we know, the Phenomenology is far from done at the end of Understanding and there are many other considerations to address, but these are the three basic moments of “consciousness” as that which takes an attitude toward things or objects.

I want to emphasize that this applies to all objects whatsoever, especially including those of ordinary life. Harris advocates the much narrower reading that Hegel’s main concern in this section is to implicitly suggest an application of these general notions to the preceding discussion of religion.

We have seen that what Hegel calls “absolute” knowledge does indeed have a close relation to the concerns of religion. In the Religion chapter, though I didn’t remark on it, Hegel had in passing explicitly applied the succession of Sense-Certainty, Perception, and Understanding to his schematic account of the history of religion. So, Harris’ reading between the lines here has some plausibility, but he seems for the moment to allow his interpolations continuing the focus on religion to eclipse the much more general apparent surface meaning of the text.

In Harris’ account, “it is the ‘object’ of Manifest Religion that has now to be turned over into the ‘Subject’ of ‘Absolute Knowing'” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 714). In general this seems reasonable, even though it is an interpolation in the present context.

“‘The object is in part immediate Being’. This is the ‘It is’ of Sense-Certainty; and all the modes of Natural Religion are subsumed under the ‘It is’…. For Natural Religion God is simply (and immediately) there. There is no distinction yet between His being-for-self and His being-for-another; and there cannot be any, because no ‘other’ has any independent essence of its own” (ibid).

Aside from Harris’ interpolation of religion into this discussion of the object, the last statement is historically anomalous, because the idea of a God before whom no other has independent essence belongs to traditions of strong monotheism that Hegel associates with the Unhappy Consciousness rather than with Sense-Certainty. However, if we abstract from actual history and just consider Hegel’s rather thin working notion of “natural” religion, it does seem accurate.

“Secondly the object is ‘partly an othering of itself, its relationship, or Being for Other and For-Self-Being, that corresponds to Perception’. This is how God is experienced in the Art-Religion; we make the Gods in our own image, while at the same time regarding ourselves as their servant, and envisaging our own free existence as a play for the Gods. God is thus an ambiguous relationship of Being for Other and For-Self-Being, just like the ‘thing and its properties’ in Perception” (ibid).

This interpolation seems relatively more historical, and consistent with what Hegel says elsewhere.

“Lastly, the object is ‘partly essence or as Universal, which corresponds to the Understanding’. This is how God is experienced in the Manifest Religion. Here He is the rational Force whose essence is to manifest itself” (ibid).

Hegel does seem to provocatively suggest that there is a parallel between the relation between Manifest Religion and its predecessors, on the one hand, and that between the purely relational view of mathematical physics and ordinary sensation and perception, on the other. It may seem surprising to see these categories from the phenomenology of religion reflected back into the elementary moments of “consciousness”, but this underscores how nonlinear Hegel’s overall development really is. As Harris points out, Hegel does also explicitly argue in the Religion chapter that the actual history of religion recapitulates the succession of moments he analyzed for object-oriented elementary “consciousness”. But to me, all this still seems a distraction from the new topic of “absolute” knowledge that Hegel is introducing here.

Hegel goes on to specify that the “knowledge” at issue now is not purely conceptual, but “is to be taken only in its development” (Baillie trans., p. 790). He notes that “the object does not yet, when present in consciousness as such, appear as the inner essence of Spirit in the way this has just been expressed” (ibid).

He recalls the recapitulation of Sense Certainty’s immediacy on a higher level in Observing Reason. “We saw, too, [Observing Reason’s] specific character take expression at its highest stage in the infinite judgement: ‘the being of the [Fichtean] ego is a thing’. And, further, the ego is an immediate thing of sense. When ego is called a soul, it is indeed represented also as a thing, but a thing in the sense of something invisible, impalpable, etc., i.e. in fact not as an immediate entity, and not as that which is generally understood by a thing. That judgment, then, ‘ego is a thing’, taken at first glance, has no spiritual content, or rather, is just the absence of spirituality. In its conception, however, it is the most luminous and illuminating judgment; and this, its inner significance, which is not yet made evident, is what the other two moments to be considered express” (p. 791).

Here again Hegel is considering two contrasting senses. The mere reification of a Fichtean ego as an empirical individual is rather banal; but to consider the universal Fichtean ego as an incarnated and concretely situated spiritual reality rather than in abstraction is a great advance.

“The trained and cultivated self-consciousness, which has traversed the region of spirit in self-alienation, has, by giving up itself, produced the thing as its self” (p. 792). This is a simple but vital point.

Hegel continues, “Or again — to give complete expression to the relationship, i.e. to what here alone constitutes the nature of the object — the thing stands for something that is self-existent; sense-certainty (sense experience) is announced as absolute truth; but this self-existence is itself declared to be a moment which merely disappears, and passes into its opposite, into a being at the mercy of an ‘other’.”

“But knowledge of the thing is not yet finished at this point. The thing must become known as self not merely in regard to the immediateness of its being and as regards its determinateness, but also in the sense of essence or inner reality. This is found in the case of Moral Self-Consciousness. This mode of experience knows its knowledge as the absolutely essential element, knows no other objective being than pure will or pure knowledge. It is nothing but merely this will and this knowledge. Any other possesses merely non-essential being, i.e. being that has no inherent nature per se, but only its empty husk. Insofar as the moral consciousness, in its view of the world, lets existence drop out of the self, it just as truly takes this existence back again into the self. In the form of conscience, finally, it is no longer this incessant alternation between the ‘placing’ and the ‘displacing’… of existence and self; it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of its own self; the objective element, into which qua acting it puts forth itself, is nothing other than pure knowledge of itself by itself” (pp. 792-793).

Here we have the ethical character of the path to the “Absolute”.

Harris comments, “So while, on the one hand, the moral consciousness ‘lets the natural world go free out of the Self’, to be whatever it contingently must be, it is equally true, on the other hand, that it takes that contingent natural order back into itself. In the unity of conscientious conviction, this contradiction is successfully sublated. But the community in which Conscience finds itself, and for which it claims to act, is in a state of moral anarchy, which is only overcome by the transition to the religious community of universal forgiveness. That community, having returned to itself as the shape of religious faith, has only to recognize itself in the ultimate community of finite Spirit, from which its religious journey began. That ultimate community of Spirit was able to make the religious journey because, in the final sublation of the standpoint of moral judgment, it is reconciled with humanity at all times, and in all places. It does not need to judge, but only to comprehend, i.e. to integrate the other as a member” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 719). I feel like we are back on track here.

He argues further that “In this final form, the ‘Manifest Religion’ ceases to be a revealed religion (in any but the historical sense) for it will comprehend that the whole range of religious ‘manifestation’ belongs to it in principle, because its God is just the intelligible force of Reason, whose very essence is to manifest itself. This concretely universal community of the human Spirit is ‘the Self’s pure knowledge of itself’. ‘Conscience’ is just its alienated, universally self-assertive shape” (ibid). Now the motivation for Harris’ interpolated argument about religion seems to make better Hegelian sense.

Harris adds, “We look over the course of the science and ask how ‘dead thinghood’ evolves logically. First we go from ‘singular thinghood for self’ to ‘universal thinghood for another’; and so to ‘the singular self that is lawgiver for the world of things’. And when we reach the third shape, we realize that we have not passed over to Kojève’s ‘anthropology’. In his world, the essential anarchy of Conscience takes us straight back to Hobbes” (pp. 719-720). (In the 20th century, Kojève promoted a subjectivist reading of Hegel that influenced Sartre and others. Hobbes famously described human society as a “war of all against all”.)

“[E]very judge must recognize the ‘sin’ of sundering knowing from doing. Absolutely pure knowing becomes possible only in and through the act of forgiving” (p. 720).

Next in this series: Circling Toward Absoluteness

Room for Faith

Kant famously spoke of leaving room for faith in his philosophy, but also wrote a historically important essay on “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone”. He tended to see religion mainly in ethical terms, and Fichte and Hegel did so likewise. Fichte lost his Jena philosophy chair over accusations of atheism that he strenuously repudiated. The generation after Hegel was notoriously divided into “Left” and “Right” Hegelians, who both attributed (nearly opposite) views on religion to Hegel that I think he would have called very one-sided. It is difficult to meaningfully comment on this kind of controversy without offending someone, or perhaps both sides.

With Hegel and other historic philosophers who lived in communities with a commonly accepted orthodoxy of some sort, it is often relevant to carefully distinguish the sometimes unspoken implications of their thought from their explicit rhetorical stance, without assuming in advance that these are perfectly aligned. In my older age though, I have come to consider that what I just called the philosopher’s “rhetorical stance” may reflect important practical, social considerations that may have merit of their own. While we should not necessarily take everything a historic philosopher says on these delicate topics at face value, if we are engaged in charitable reading we certainly ought not to assume that the philosopher’s rhetorical stance is “mere” rhetoric that need not be taken seriously.

In medieval terms, I am for the complete independence of philosophy. At the same time, I want to treat the world’s religious traditions (not just one of them) with respect. When touching on theological topics, I try to balance occasional focused sharp remarks with a general live-and-let-live policy, inspired in part by the stances of Leibniz and Paul Ricoeur.

Next in this series: On Being a Thing