Hegel's Concept Research Articles

Theological-Psychological Interpretation (Refl ection) of the Phenomenon of Refl ection

In contemporary theological teachings there is no rational definition of the term and description of the methodology of religious reflection, due to the ambiguity of different empirical descriptions of this phenomenon in different religions and within one religion. In this study, the emphasis is placed not on the statement of reflection, as it is empirically described in various religious traditions, but on the analysis of one’s inner experiences, analysis and synthesis of one’s self-reflection. Analysis, synthesis and comparison of the Hegelian concept of the reflection of the spirit and the teachings of Ibn Arabi on immersion in the depths of himself through intuitive contemplation.In the course of religious reflection, consisting of self-knowledge, self-observation and introspection, the evidence base of a person’s faith is assembled “in harmonious mosaic”, and in the process of finding out one’s own path to faith, the reflecting one begins to see the source and the tools that influence the course of faith. As a result of theological understanding of the phenomenon of reflection, it was revealed that if ordinary psychological reflection is knowing oneself through the eyes of another, moreover knowing “oneself externally”, then religious reflection is knowing “oneself internally” through the eyes of “oneself externally”. This process requires a deep inner work, based on religious-psychological and at the same time rational methodology. The synthesis of these two methodologies is proposed by the author of the article on the basis of correlation of the doctrine of self-knowledge of Sheikh Ibn Arabi and the reflection of the spirit of G. V. F. Hegel.The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Reflexiones en torno al pensamiento de Gramsci y Freire : sus puntos de encuentro.

Objetivo. Buscar los puntos de encuentro entre las propuestas teóricas y prácticas de Antonio Gramsci y Paulo Freire e interpretarlos a la luz del actual contexto sociopolítico latinoamericano. Metodología. Se consideró una revisión y análisis interpretativo de las obras de Gramsci y de Freire y esta se articuló con los pensamientos de otros autores adscritos a la corriente del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano. Resultados. Los resultados del análisis interpretativo muestran que los planteamientos de Antonio Gramsci, fundamentalmente lo desarrollado en los cuadernos, tienen puntos de encuentros en la propuesta político-educativa de Paulo Freire. Conclusión. Se concluye que la perspectiva heterodoxa del marxismo gramsciano se manifiesta en el pensamiento y la propuesta político-pedagógica de Paulo Freire, con una concepción hegeliana humanista, expresada en la propuesta pedagógica, lo cual se sintetiza en la praxis para la transformación y la liberación.

Responsibility: The First Virtue of Innovation? A discussion of some ethical and meta-ethical issues concerning the concept of ‘responsibility’ in technological innovation

In this paper I investigate the concept of responsibility in the context of technological innovation, with reference to two types of responsibility: ex post and ex ante responsibility. Exposing the shortcomings of ex post responsibility in the context of innovation, I examine different ways of conceiving of a form of ex ante responsibility suitable for our current technological situation. Here I identify two positions with very different approaches to the question of the ethical status of responsibility: Hans Jonas’s concept of responsibility as an ethical principle structuring moral behavior, and René von Schomberg’s idea of responsibility as “responsiveness” linked to procedures of communication and collaboration. Rejecting von Schomberg’s concept on ethico-philosophical grounds, I argue in favor of a critical rehabilitation of some basic thoughts in the philosophy of Jonas. Finally, I suggest taking the step from the Jonasian ethics of responsibility towards the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit – a concrete social morality that disentangles responsibility from the dilemmas of subjectivist morality.

Hegel, the Arts and Cinema

Alain Badiou embarks on a close reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics to consider how his own recently-developed concept of the “index”—designating the crucial point of mediation between finite works and the absolute (or the means by which “works of art obtain their seal of absoluteness”)—might figure therein, as well as to explore what Hegel would have made of cinema, had he lived to experience it. After first examining the various ways that this “index of absoluteness” functions in the Hegelian conception of art—both according to its canonical forms (sculpture, architecture, painting, music, and poetry including theatre) and its historical classifications (classical, symbolic and romantic)—Badiou proceeds to investigate whether Hegel’s aesthetic system could and should have foreseen the eventual birth of cinema, together with its general characteristics; and whether this new development would ultimately refute or confirm his famous thesis on the end of art.

Contradições da democracia e opinião pública

Este artigo consiste numa análise interdisciplinar com o auxílio de teorias filosóficas, sociológicas e políticas sobre as contradições da democracia e sua relação com a opinião pública a partir de três perspectivas: num primeiro momento aborda os modelos normativos de democracia diagnosticados por Habermas em Inclusão do Outro, e sua proposta de procedimento deliberativo com vistas a superar os limites dos modelos liberal e republicano; depois de expor um diagnóstico basilar dos modelos democráticos, apresenta alguns pontos concernentes às contradições da democracia contemporânea a partir das análises sociológicas e da ciência política de Charles Tilly. Num terceiro momento, aborda a democracia a partir do conceito hegeliano de opinião pública tendo em vista três componentes: a fenomenologia, a lógica e a política da opinião pública.Palavras-chave: Contradição; Democracia; Opinião Pública.

Human Beings as Ends-in-Themselves in Hegel's Philosophy of History

In this paper the author asks why Hegel considers history's "slaughter bench" to be one its redeemable features and how this is compatible with his conception of human value, specifically his simultaneous insistence that human beings are not to be regarded as ever mere means for historical development, but as ends-in-themselves. The author answers these questions by comparing his conception of human value to that in Kant's formula of humanity, to which Hegel clearly alludes, and situating Hegel's conception inside his philosophy of history. The argument is that Hegel thinks human beings are never mere means because they aim at freedom simply in virtue of holding convictions, however misguided these may be, in this way sharing in the aim of history's own development. The article concludes by bringing Hegel's account of human sacrifice to bear on W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction.

헤겔의 노동(勞動, Arbeit) 개념을 통해 본 천지공사(天地公事) 연구

헤겔의 노동(勞動, Arbeit) 개념을 통해 본 천지공사(天地公事) 연구

Marx's Conception of Dialectical Contradiction in Commodity

AbstractIn this paper, I clarify the structure of dialectical contradiction in Marx in order to show how it is influenced by Hegel. To this aim, I focus on the only place where Marx systematically develops the concept of dialectical contradiction, namely, in his analysis of commodity in the first chapter of Capital. Here Marx claims that the commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value. To make this claim intelligible, I first discuss Hegel's conception of ‘the thing’ [Das Ding] in the Science of Logic and demonstrate how for Hegel ‘the thing’ is the contradictory unity of matter and form. With this Hegelian machinery, then, I turn to Marx to show how use-value and exchange-value constitute the matter and the form of commodity, and argue how they contradict each other.

Passing for recognition – deaf children’s moral struggles languaging in inclusive education settings

ABSTRACTCritical theoretical approaches to the concept of recognition emphasise the Hegelian concept of a morally motivated struggle to obtain an identity that can be characterised as authentic. This paper takes the concept of a struggle for recognition, Erwing Goffman’s concept of “passing”, and the cross-disciplinary concept of languaging as its theoretical points of departure. Data from two empirical studies – one of children with cochlear implants in a school for the deaf and one of these children languaging with typically hearing peers – are presented. The data show that the deaf children in the mainstream kindergarten and school frequently display the behaviour that Goffman coined passing: they pretend to understand, strive to appear as if they were typically hearing, and deploy a range of strategies designed to conceal that they have trouble understanding their peers. Goffman’s work on passing is combined with the data at hand in order to understand passing both as a challenging and exhausting activity and as a symptom indicating that the deaf children experience stigma in Goffman’s sense. Passing can be understood as a struggle for recognition, but since passing is a strategy at odds with the idea of an authentic identity presupposed in Critical Theory, behaviours of passing might be understood as a moral problem that can be displayed and analysed in various ways. The paper concentrates on questions of what Axel Honneth calls “solidary recognition” and suggests that the methodological implications of the way that children’s languaging practices are approached should be subjected to further investigation.

Krausism and its legacy

ABSTRACT Krausismo or Krausism (named after an early nineteenth-century German philosopher named Karl Friedrich Christian Krause) was one of many overlapping ways of thinking about the politics of reform in nineteenth-century Europe. It was once more widely known than it has become, notably because of its connection to the thought of both Pierre Leroux and Lorenz von Stein. The aim of this article to show how this way of thinking about reform had its origins in the federal side of the political thought of Rousseau and Kant and, subsequently, in Hegel's concept of civil society. It was reinforced, with Krause, by a strong emphasis on individual capability that paralleled the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher's conception of the relationship between individuality and the division of labour. Like many of these reform movements, Krausism disappeared from historical view, mainly because of the difficulty its supporters faced in finding ways to reconcile political pluralism with unitary sovereignty. Part of the point of the paper is to try to show why these attempts still have a bearing on thinking about federalism.

A marcha do Estado racional hegeliano: uma reflexão sobre os múltiplos momentos da unidade do espírito

O objetivo deste texto é refletir sobre o conceito hegeliano de Estado, analisando seus principais elementos ou momentos, não sem observar a peculiaridade do sistema de Hegel, o caráter racional do Estado. Um leitor atento poderá notar em Hegel uma preocupação permanente com o paradoxo que já sacudia Parmênides, a saber o do uno e o múltiplo. Pois bem, o Estado hegeliano tem por objetivo conciliar a multiplicidade das particularidades, em sua subjetividade, com a unidade objetiva da ordem comunitária. Sendo um pensador moderno, Hegel enfatiza a importância da particularidade na composição do todo orgânico do Estado; mas, por outro lado, resgatando bastante dos conceitos antigos, tanto de Platão quanto de Aristóteles, Hegel não deixa de exigir que a disposição destas particularidades seja voltada para a universalidade do corpo orgânico objetivo.

Hegelova estetika i svetski marksizam - komunistički ideal Mikhaila Lifšitsa

This paper discusses the materialist reading of Hegel's Aesthetics by Soviet philosopher Mikhail Lifshits in his writings in the 1930s. Engaged in the development of Soviet Marxian aesthetic theory, Lifshits adapted the Hegelian conception of art as a form of truth and actualisation of the Idea in a sensible form as ideal. However, he rejected Hegel's tragic fatalism regarding the historical fate of arts and their sublation in a new supra-sensual stage of the Spirit's development. Lifshits sought the only answer to the historical destiny of arts in the Marxian dialectic of history. Here, he identified the aesthetic ideal with the realisation of communism. It is on this basis that throughout the 1930s Soviet aesthetic theory combined readings of Hegel, Marx, Engels and Lenin in order to develop its own version of art's autonomy, one that was anchored in the concept of the ideal. The ideal in its historical and trans-historical dimension was seen as bridging between sensuousness and truth, and pointing towards the Communist ideal. The paper argues that this concept of the ideal pointed towards a dialectical futurity that could not succumb to the official Stalinist formulations of dialectical materialism. Unlike the Stalinist victory of "socialism in one country" as the consummation of the historical dialectic, the question of the historical destiny of arts pointed at communism as an incomplete and yet historically actualisable ideal.

Rethinking Hegel's Conceptual Realism

Readers of Hegel are frequently impressed by his seemingly idiosyncratic use of the term "the concept" (der Begriff) throughout his works. A recent wave of interpreters have held to a "conceptual realist" view, according to which Hegel uses this term to refer either to the monistic structure of reality or to indwelling essences of natural entities. In this essay, the author offers a way to avoid these conceptions of Hegel's conceptual realism by explaining his view of the "isomorphism" between concepts and the world. The isomorphism recommended, however, is metaphysically deflationary, for Hegel's conception of conceptual form creates a conceptually internal standard for the adequacy of concepts; it depends on his view of the negative relations between concepts and the objects they represent. This standard of conceptual adequacy is also "graduated" in that it allows for a lack of fit between concept and world. Nevertheless, the possibility for a "maximally isomorphic" fit between concept and world obtains through the teleological realization of concepts, which marks especially the world of human culture (law, art, religion, and so on). The author contends that some of the most seemingly exaggerated claims Hegel makes about the concept can be understood when we consider the significance Hegel ascribes to human making, which offers the best cases of maximally isomorphic concepts. But the framework here provides an interpretive key for the way Hegel sees concepts imperfectly realized in the natural world as well.

Tragedy and the Tragic: A Study of Ernst Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Beginning and the End

This paper is a comparative study between Ernst Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Beginning and the End, paralleled with the authors’ concepts of tragic vision; based on the development of the theory of tragedy from Aristotle to Hegel as well as the personal philosophy of life as tragedy of both authors. Based on the researcher knowledge, tragedy concept in the selected novels is rarely and insufficiently highlighted by few scholars and critics. Moreover, it is a comparison of novels from different cultures—Arabic literature and literature in English—in order to bridge the gap between them. The novels are stories where every day moral dilemmas often present profound paradoxes with which heroes and heroines must deal. Tragedy, in the same vein, is such a paradoxical story where we have to deal at any rate with our everyday moral dilemmas, where we are sometimes called upon to make difficult choices not between right and wrong, but between what we might define as two rights. Hegelian concept of tragedy focused on dissension and war of dichotomies between good and bad, as well as what is right and what is wrong. The tragic elements in the two novels make them Hegelian tragedies par excellence.

Las disonancias de la libertad (II). Destino, tragedia e historia universal en Hegel

This article is a sequel to a previous study which analysed the function that the idea of destiny plays in the genesis of German Idealism. This article focuses on the concept of destiny in Hölderlin, the idea of freedom incarnated in the dramas of Schiller and the hegelian concept of universal history.

Las disonancias de la libertad (I). Destino, tragedia e historia universal en Hegel

This article is a sequel to a previous study which analysed the function that the idea of destiny plays in the genesis of German Idealism. This article focuses on the concept of destiny in Holderlin, the idea of freedom incarnated in the dramas of Schiller and the hegelian concept of univer-sal history.

Subjectivity and Transcendence: The Primacy of Truth and Goodness in Hegel and Levinas

AbstractThe Hegelian concept, with its all-encompassing power, epitomizes the kind of totality-oriented thinking that Levinas, a philosopher of genuine alterity, sharply criticizes. This paper investigates this antagonism by focusing on a notion that is pivotal for both authors, the notion of subjectivity. Hegel makes transcendence into an immanent dimension of the subject whereas Levinas conceives transcendence as the subject’s relation with radical exteriority. The decisive question is whether Levinas falls back into the failures of so-called ‘philosophies of reflection’ or whether the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothing relies on an un-condition for which it does not and indeed cannot account. The paper culminates in the thesis that Hegel and Levinas reverse the order of priority of the Good and the True. While Hegel conceives of the absolute as system of truth, for Levinas the ethical ‘failure’ of totalization constitutes a necessary condition for rationality.

다산의 면역학적 타자로서의 헤겔 : 현암 이을호의 헤겔 이해

다산의 면역학적 타자로서의 헤겔 : 현암 이을호의 헤겔 이해

Delineamentos metodológicos das transições dialéticas em O Capital de Marx

O intuito do presente artigo consiste em analisar e elucidar algumas das principais características que delineiam o método dialético apresentado por Marx em sua obra principal, O Capital. Através de um dos problemas metodológicos principais apontados por Marx – a transição do abstrato ao concreto – busca-se identificar outros ângulos insuspeitos ignorados pela crítica marxista em geral. A avaliação da relação abstrato-concreto será realizada através de um paralelo para com o idealismo hegeliano, principalmente a sua lógica. A partir de tal postura, almeja-se compreender as transições entre essência e aparência, assim como os níveis lógicos de possibilidade constuídos em conjunto com estas transições dialéticas. Analisar-se-á a relação entre capital geral e capitais particulares, assim como a forma lucro, de modo a permitir estabelecer, como conclusão, de que forma o conceito dialético de capital alcança um estatuto de autorreflexibilidade próprio ao conceito hegeliano de Espírito.

Modernity in a Wartime Tramcar: Temporal Contestations and Individual Subjectivity in Eileen Chang's "Sealed Off"

Modernity in a Wartime TramcarTemporal Contestations and Individual Subjectivity in Eileen Chang's "Sealed Off" Leihua Weng Dan: Time. We can't see it, we can't hear it, we can't weigh it, we can't measure it in a laboratory. It's a subjective sense of becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The Hopis see time as a landscape, existing before and behind us, and we move—We move through it, slice by slice. Linda: Clocks measure time. Dan: No, they measure themselves. The objective referent of a clock is another clock. The Man from Earth 2007) As modern human beings, we at least share one thing in common–we all measure and assess our physical existence in terms of time: we look forward to the future; we reflect upon the past; we synthesize our feelings of the future and of the past at the present. However, the specifics of our experiences of time radically differ, as our temporality is largely defined culturally and socially. Aristotle identifies time with motion, but Augustine associates time with the present and the eternal. Hegel introduces personality into time with his concept of the Subject of History and sets our modern temporality as linear and teleological, and he conceives of a collective unbending spirit moving toward the ultimate end, i.e., the End of History. Various important notional entities in our modern time, such as the nation-state, find their temporal basis in the Hegelian concept of time. However, even when one particular mode of time has achieved its hegemony, there still exist alternative temporalities. Though dispersed and repressed, those alternative concepts of time keep challenging, destabilizing, and contesting the dominant status of the Hegelian notion of time. Tensions and contestations between alternative modes of time and the dominant temporality can manifest themselves in cultural and ideological realms, and they can impact our psychological state, especially at times of social, cultural, and political upheaval and transformation. [End Page 286] Focusing on the literary text of Eileen Chang's short story "Sealed Off," this paper discusses two modes of temporality: one is an alterity to the dominant historical, linear, and progressive time, the other an alternative sensibility to the urbanized journalistic time of the present. The first half of the twentieth century was a period marked with social and political changes that shaped the intellectual landscape of modern China and also wrote the psychological state and mentality of several generations in the twentieth century. Different from other female writers of her time who participated in rigorous conversations or actively engaged in political movements, Eileen Chang was one of the few writers who stayed quiet and persisted in exploring what was mundane and daily. In most of her writings, Eileen Chang displays a conscious detachment from the political; however, as argued in this paper, her short story "Sealed Off" could be read as a subtle rejection of the dominant temporality and sensibility of her time as well as a reflection and critique of modernity. Published in 1944, "Sealed Off" tells of a brief love encounter during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in WWII. This love episode takes place between the accountant Lu Zongzhen and the college instructor Wu Cuiyuan. It starts when the tramcar pauses because of a blockage alarm, and it comes to its quick end when the alarm is lifted and the tramcar starts moving again on its unaltered track. By the end of the story, the protagonist Cuiyuan trembles with shock, realizing "everything that had happened while the city was sealed off was a nonoccurrence. The whole city of Shanghai had dozed off and dreamed an unreasonable dream" (Chang 251). It has been noted by scholars that Eileen Chang's writing presents a unique mode of sensitivity and modernity. Contextualizing "Sealed Off" in theories of temporality and urbanized modernity, this paper explores the narrative features of this short story and speculates that it embodies temporal contestations of two kinds: one is between the concepts of Hegelian historical time and individual "lived" moments; the other one is based upon the distinctions between journalistic fragmented information and profound...