The Origins of Human Rights: a Hegelian Perspective

Abstract

models, furnishes us with an example of how do this successfully, since its discoveries so readily lend themselves technological advances. Empiricists such as Jacobi move easily the conclusion that knowledge which does not conform the pattern of Galilean or Newtonian science and hence serve the survival imperative does not qualify as knowledge at all. The implicit criticism in Hegel's remark (and which he enlarges on in the article cited) is simply that there are other cognitive interests and hence presumably other ways of knowing. What he particularly rejects inJacobi (and I believe indirectly also in Hobbes and Locke) is the assumption that human life must be a perpetual, incomplete striving after satisfaction, either cognitive or material. Hegel's philosophic project rests on the belief that we pursue knowledge, at least in part, out who or what we are, not just for the sake of mastering nature. For Hegel, self-knowledge is only possible if we comprehend the world in its fullness and richness, experiencing it completely, i.e., through all possible shapes of consciousness. But the empiricist epistemology frustrates our selfreflective aim because it furnishes only a highly abstract, diminished image of man and society. No one could truly discover himself' or find satisfaction in contemplating Hobbes' natural man, precisely because he is only constructed by abstraction from everything social and historical. Here, as in Jacobi, the manifold is diminished almost to the point of annihilation.