Hegelian Idealism Research Articles

Althusser’s Relation to Hegel: French Hegelianism, Marxism, and Aleatory Materialism

This essay concerns the uneasy relationship between Althusser and Hegel that can be observed throughout Althusser’s oeuvre. In the 1960s Althusser pursued a rigorous project and tried to develop a systematic account of philosophy, history, and science from within Marxism—an account that would constitute a theoretical weapon against Hegelian idealism. Althusser’s arguments in For Marx and Reading “Capital” established his presence in French philosophical corners as a Marxist and anti-Hegelian thinker. However, in posthumous publications, Althusser’s relation to Hegel appears far more complicated than his simply being anti-Hegelian. By investigating this relationship from the lens of multiple encounters, this essay carves out two notions that emerged from these encounters, notions that we call “Althusserian”: philosophy as class struggle in theory and history as a process without a subject.

Kindergartens for civilisation: the intellectual origins of the St Louis public kindergarten

ABSTRACTThis article reexamines the intellectual history of the first public kindergartens, established in St Louis, Missouri, by William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Blow in 1873. This piece argues that historians have overlooked a critical influence on the establishment of the first public kindergartens; namely, Harris and Blow’s conviction that children’s intellectual, psychological, and moral development recapitulated historical stages of human cultural and sociological evolution. This belief in cultural recapitulation deeply informed how they viewed the kindergarten curriculum and the role of public education—including the public kindergarten—in a liberal democratic society. Consequently, the first public kindergartens stand as a patent example, not of romantic reform, but of a late nineteenth-century state-centered liberalism grounded in Harris and Blow’s ethnocentric views of cultural and child development, as well as their Hegelian institutional idealism. Finally, this article illustrates how Harris and Blow transposed widely circulating theories of biological and cultural evolution, a belief in Western cultural superiority, and their vision of a civilised social order onto the biology and psychology of the child. As such, this paper illustrates how the metaphors and categories used to describe the stages of child development have made ethical claims with far-reaching implications.

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.

Back to Materialism. Reflections on Marx’s Conceptionof Labour, Praxis, Cooperatives and Libertarian Socialism

From Marx to Althusser, the materialist approach has tended to assume that individuals (that is, workers, proletarians and other social actors) unconsciously reproduce the social structures of capitalism that alienate them. It is assumed that individuals accept the conditions forced upon them and no longer seek to rebel against a world that substantially impoverishes their labour, their spirit and their creativity. In this paper, I suggest that by favouring Marx’s concept of alienation almost exclusively, there is a considerable risk that materialist thought will take only a negative path and remain stuck in the very Hegelian idealism that it intends to surpass. Whilst I acknowledge Marx’s significance to materialism, I argue that his stance should be combined with that of the anarchist and libertarian French thinker Proudhon. Proudhon presents a conception of the worker as more than just alienated. Workers can also cooperate and experience a reciprocity seemingly at odds with the character of capitalism. Under Proudhon’s influence materialism takes a positive turn, enabling us to avoid falling into the utopianism that the theory of social economy employs to critique capitalism—a utopianism that renders its critique even less effective than that of Marx. Today, Proudhonian theory also allows us to envisage the end of capitalism without necessarily rejecting the very concept of work. It thus improves on theories of ‘basic income’, for example, which persist in seeing in work nothing but negativity.

Ful-filling the Copula, Determining Nature: The Grammatical Ontology of Hegel's Metaphysics

ABSTRACT Both Continental and analytic traditions have tended to associate Hegel's idealism with metaphysics and therefore as divorced from and even pernicious to reality. Hence, contemporary Hegel studies have tended to concentrate on discrete elements of his philosophy while attempting to avoid its metaphysical dimensions and their systematic pretensions. I seek to show that rather than dwelling in abstraction, Hegel's metaphysics, as presented in his Logics, recount the thought determinations through which being comes to be grounded and, thus, scientifically knowable as nature. Such categorical determining is essentially linguistic, taking place through the grammatical forms of judgment (Urteil) and their outcome in the syllogism. The centrality of these grammatical forms reveals the anthropological goal of Hegel's metaphysics, where the fully determined copula of judgment presents itself as the object of natural science, for us.

Algunos aspectos de la dialéctica del Parménides desde la óptica hegeliana

The purpose of this paper is to offer a general view of the philosophical affinities between Plato and Hegel through the analysis of the Hegelian interpretation of the Parmenides. We will show how the Hegelian approach to Plato, and his understanding of idealism and dialectics, is determined by Hegel’s debate with the philosophy of Kant. A brief expose of the differences between Kantian transcendental idealism and Hegelian absolute idealism will be needed. Then, we will show some traits of the Hegelian hermeneutics of Plato in order to understand how the first part of the Parmenides admits parallelisms with certain excerpts of Hegel’s work, both regarding its philosophical purpose as well as stylistically. Finally, the Author expounds the Hegelian evaluation of the dialectical exercise from the second part of the Parmenides. There, Platonic Dialectic fails and does not accomplish its philosophical purpose, and becomes a valuable skepticism consubstantial to philosophical thought.

Eros and Apocalypse: Herbert Marcuse in the Age of Austerity

Abstract Herbert Marcuse’s influence on students and intellectuals in the Sixties is comparable to the influence that Slavoj Žižek enjoys today. Both have developed their critical theories through Marxist materialism, Hegelian idealism, and psychoanalytical theory of the subject. Both have produced polemical texts on liberal tolerance and the need for revolutionary violence, and both have invoked the idea of utopia against the ideology of there is no alternative to the market. The article situates Marcuse in today’s context of austerity rather than the context of rising affluence the “one-dimensional” “happy consciousness” was said to inhabit. Marcuse’s critique of a system that legitimates its power through the scarcities that constant exploitation and expansion breeds is especially relevant now that the logic of austerity envelops politics, society, and subjectivity. Making comparisons to Žižek, the article provides an overview of Marcuse’s ideas before considering their value in current circumstances. A case is made for why Marcuse is relevant today and why the call for the liberation of Eros remains pertinent.

Political Ecology: a Latin American Perspective

A ecologia política é o campo no qual se expressam as relações de poder para desconstruir a racionalidade insustentável da modernidade e para mobilizar as ações sociais no mundo globalizado para a construção de um futuro sustentável fundado nos potenciais da natureza e da criatividade cultural, num pensamento emancipatório e em uma ética política para renovar o sentido e a sustentabilidade da vida. A ecologia política enraíza a desconstrução teórica na arena política: além de reconhecer a diversidade cultural, os saberes tradicionais e os direitos dos povos indígenas, o ambientalismo radical confronta o poder hegemônico unificador do mercado como destino inelutável da humanidade. A ecologia política na América Latina está operando um processo análogo ao que realizara Marx com o idealismo hegeliano, arraigando a filosofia da pós-modernidade (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida) no contexto de uma ontologia política: territorializando o pensamento do ser, da diferença e da alteridade em uma racionalidade ambiental, arraigada em uma ontologia da diversidade cultural, em uma política da diferença e em uma ética da alteridade. A descolonização do saber e a legitimação de outros conhecimentos-saberes-sabedorias liberam modos alternativos de compreensão da realidade, da natureza, da vida humana e das relações sociais, abrindo novos caminhos para a reconstrução da vida humana no planeta.

Hegel: el idealismo absoluto como slum naturalism

Hegelian absolute idealism, far from implying an annihilating negation of the finite, means the capacity of the Idea of vivifying and being in itself in everything that exists - even in the non-important and most despicable forms. We will construct the authentic Hegelian idealism trough his Lectures on Plato, where Hegel already rejects the schlechten Idealismus on unilateralism grounds and finds a trought that embraces both reality and thinking. Therefore, the Idea cannot be a Chimera or remain locked in the Mind of God but must be immanent to the human and the natural. We will show how Hegel wavers (with his affirmations of the ideality of finite and the impotence of nature) and the limits of Platonism (the resistance to lose himself in the nonsense without ground to which hair, mud and garbage would lead), but also the conceptual necessity of an Idea that should leave no aspect of reality in the shadows. Doing so would mean disregarding the syllogism of syllogisms and enter in a nihilistic spiral of the history of an error.

HEGEL, DEWEY, AND HABITS

In this paper, I argue against Terry Pinkard's account of the relation between Deweyian pragmatism and Hegelian idealism. Instead of thinking that their affinity concerns the issue of normative authority, as Pinkard does, I argue that we should trace their affinity to Dewey's appropriation of Hegel's naturalism, especially his theory of habits. Pinkard is not in a position to appreciate this affinity because (1) he misreads Dewey as an instrumentalist, and (2) his social-constructivist account of Hegel – which he shares with Pippin and Brandom, is not able to correctly take the measure of Hegel's naturalism. On my reading, Dewey's philosophy is concerned above all with understanding and making objective the proper relation between reason and habit, with our achieving an equipoise in which thought is informed by intelligent habits and where habits are instituted by past thought and inquiry. In achieving this equipoise, one's bodily nature becomes a form in which subjects can realize their freedom. I claim that the origin of this thought can be found in Hegel, and that Dewey, when seen through this lens, is a type of left-Hegelian naturalist.

W. E. B. Du Bois and The souls of black folk

In this book, Stephanie J. Shaw brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, Shaw reads Du Bois' book as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Demonstrating the importance of the work as a sociohistorical study of black life in America through the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, Shaw charts Du Bois' successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel's philosophy of history. Shaw adopts Du Bois' point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk.

The Cathedral of Humanity on Halsted Street Jane Addams, Auguste Comte, and Edward Caird

Abstract Jane Addams played an integral role in the development of a pragmatic ethic. Influenced by Darwinian naturalism, Addams found her religious calling as the founder of an American settlement house, Hull House. On a postgraduation European tour Addams visited Toynbee Hall and met followers of Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity and adherents of Edward Caird's Oxford Hegelian idealism. Comte's account of the social organism provides Addams with an alternative to Spencer's social Darwinism, one more compatible with Addams's social gospel ethics. Caird's Hegelian interpretation of the evolution of Christianity shaped the settlement movement. Addam's saw her American settlement house as the perfect environment for developing American democratic and humanistic faith.

MIND AND MATTER IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

In chapter 8 of Dorian Gray, Dorian reflects on the terrifying discovery, which he has made the previous night, that the painting has been somehow altered to express his own moral state. He speculates thus on a possible explanation for the change in the picture: Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? – that what it dreamed, they made true? (Wilde 93) At the end of the chapter, he thinks along similar lines: Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? (103) Wilde's references to “atoms” encapsulate something of the complexity and paradox which characterise the novel's representations of the mind and its connection with the body. Atoms make up the painting and Dorian's own body, and this reminder of the materiality of both reminds us, in turn, of the possibility that Dorian, and all human selves, may occupy an insignificant yet inescapable place in the wider processes of the physical world. Most pervasively in the novel, and in the fin de siècle more generally, anxieties about one such material process – that of evolution, and especially of degeneration – haunt representations of the self. In Dorian's thoughts about “atoms” lies the still more extreme possibility that the very distinction between organic and inorganic may be blurred, a vertiginous sense that human evolutionary kinship extends beyond even the simplest organisms to matter itself, and that the category of the human is thus under greater threat than ever in the light of scientific theories of the material world. At the same time, the questions that Dorian asks himself envisage not the reduction of the mind to matter but the near-opposite of this: the possibility that “thought” may somehow “influence” the matter of the painting. In a fantastical version of the Hegelian idealism which forms an important part of Wilde's philosophical position, the mind may prove to be the ultimate reality, independent of and dominant over matter, as the state of Dorian's mind is mysteriously given sensuous form in the transformations which the painting undergoes. The atoms of the painting, like the human mind, take on an ambiguous relationship to the material world. The atoms are not fixed but fluid; like the mind itself, they are material and yet seem to act in ways contrary to physical laws of cause and effect, always in process and resistant to external comprehension.

Die Katholische Tübinger Schule: Zur Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung by Stefan Warthmann (review)

Reviewed by: Die Katholische Tübinger Schule: Zur Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung by Stefan Warthmann Donald J. Dietrich Die Katholische Tübinger Schule: Zur Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung. By Stefan Warthmann. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 2011. Distrib. David Brown Book Co., Oakville, CT. Pp. xi, 639. $138.00. ISBN 978-3-315-09856-4.) This scholarly work is a dissertation done at Tübingen University and, not surprisingly, exhibits an astounding control of the primary and secondary sources. In sometimes repetitive detail, Stefan Warthmann explores what is meant by “school.” Is the school to be defined by the faculty belonging to it? Is it to be the institutional group supporting the Theologische Quartalschrift? Is the school to be defined by the direction that it set for theological reflection right into the modern era? Warthmann extensively analyzes the issues raised by these questions, but selects “direction” as the concept to describe the school. [End Page 373] The school itself originated as a vigorous reaction to the Enlightenment and was nurtured by the romanticism, idealism, and historicism popular in early-nineteenth-century Germany along with the pastoral theological impetus provided by Johann Michael Sailer. The founders of the school itself were Johann Sebastian von Drey, who set the romantic, organic, and historical tone of the theological methodology, which was then reinforced by Johann Adam Möhler. Other early scholars in this tradition who carried forward the methodology of “doing theology” were Franz Anton Staudenmaier and Johann Evangelist von Kuhn; they went beyond the subjectivism of Friedrich Schleiermacher and were influenced by a Hegelian idealism that could support doctrinal development. For these theologians, doctrine was tied to the ongoing expressions of the historical Christian communities as they reflected within their historical contexts. Truth did not change, but rather matured or unfolded in an organic fashion. Clearly, such an approach could be viewed by some as potentially endangering the transcendental truth offered by the institutional Church. Warthmann provides his most significant contribution by stressing how the scholars in this school’s tradition responded to accusations of infidelity and influenced other theologians and church historians in France, England, Italy, Spain, and the United States as they all wrestled with the role of historical development in the theological enterprise. Such scholars as Cardinal John Henry Newman; Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P.; Karl Adam; and Josef Rupert Geiselmann have contributed in a major fashion to the influence of this school. Warthmann also explicates the contributions of other scholars such as Karl Werner, Fritz Vigener, and Georges Rouzet. Clearly the school goes beyond its original institutionalization in Tübingen. The school helped formulate a “direction” that theologians who wanted to embrace modernity could take. As he explores the school’s influence, Warthmann carefully investigates the general relation of philosophy to theology and so can comment on the role of neo-Scholasticism as a rival direction. Specific concepts such as “living tradition,” historically maturing, and the “kingdom of God” model have permeated the entire Tübingen tradition and have been given new life through the efforts of Karl Rahner, Cardinal Walter Kasper, and the Second Vatican Council. Warthmann has thoroughly studied the birth and continuing life of this school and has analyzed how it has created generations of conversation partners with those theologians following other directions. He concludes by stressing how important it is to recognize that unity can be delineated by embracing the notion of multiplicity. Warthmann’s work is certainly not the last word in the scholarship stimulated by the worldview formulated by this school, but his study of this theological direction can help isolate the directions to be pursued by other contemporary scholars. [End Page 374] Donald J. Dietrich Boston College Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press

Identidade idealista e Mimesis dialética na estética negativa de Adorno

Adorno points out the philosophical transcendence of art but –against Hegel– he does it on the base of the convergence of art and philosophy. That convergence is founded on the dialectic of mimesis discovered in the aesthetic experience. Adorno incorporates to philosophy the aesthetic element of mimesis, whichis what permits philosophical reason, in the first place, to surpass the identity imposed by hegelian idealism; and in the second place, to constitute itself in dialectic to think what cannot be thought, that is, the concrete. Key words: Adorno, Hegel, identity, dialectics, mimesis, art, philosophy.

REFLECTION ON GEO WIDENGREN'SPHENOMENOLOGICAL METIHOD

The article demonstrates the value of Geo Widengren's phenomenological method. This method resolves the problem of syncretism lurking in any attempt at a comparative study of religion, and is viewed against the background of the history of philosophy in Scandinavia. Widengren's method is theoretically constituted by a descriptive analysis of religious phenomena in the concreteness of its im mediate context with all its particularity and specificity. The relevance of the method for Old Testament hermeneutics is further illustrated: the justification of the. theory in relation to. the problematic phenomena is discussed. Widengren's method is analysed as a hermeneutic of transcendence contingently situated in the concreteness of human life. It is non-dialectical as opposed to Hegelian Idealism. Human life provides the common ground on which the reader comes to terms with the text of the Old Testament. The method merges the reader and the text into union. Writing a theology of the Old Testament becomes writing a theology of ourselves.

HEGEL'S LEGACY

abstractAnswering the challenge of G. W. F. Hegel's idealism and its perceived logocentrism has arguably been a defining feature of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century continental philosophy. Today, in the midst of a Hegel renaissance, Hegel's legacy within continental philosophy is far more ambivalent. In this essay, I cut across debates about the status of Hegel's idealism in order to offer a reflection on the legacy of Hegel by reconstructing a Hegelian notion of legacy. I develop this notion in response to Jacques Derrida's discussion of inheritance in Specters of Marx (1993). Both Hegel and Derrida articulate the structure of legacy, inheritance, and history on the basis of the strictures of gathering. For both, gathering is an act of memory that determines a legacy as a legacy, a history as a history. Gathering determines an event, norm, idea, or institution as something to be passed on for a future to come. While Derrida concludes that inheritance implies decision, Hegel's recollection provides the basis for what I will call a critical history, which contributes to any such decision in crucial ways.

The “Myth of the Given”: The Hegelian Meditations of Wilfrid Sellars

The “Myth of the Given”: The Hegelian Meditations of Wilfrid Sellars

Philosophical Perspectives on the Politics and Crisis of Sustainable Development in Africa

Philosophical Perspectives on the Politics and Crisis of Sustainable Development in Africa

Robert B. Pippin: Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit

In the world of Hegel studies, Robert Pippin casts a long shadow. His first book on the philosophical giant, Hegel's Idealism : The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1989), defended a daringly re visionary reading of Hegel's overall project, which has since become standard fare. His more recent venture, collected in Hegel's Practical Philosophy : Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008), breathed new life into Hegel's theory of agency by pitting it against contemporary Hobbesian and Kantian reconstructions. Now, Pippin's newest contribution to the literature, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit, returns to the subject of selfconsciousness and provides a detailed reinterpretation of Hegel's notorious masterslave dialectic. On Pippin's insightful and bold new reading, Hegel's aim in this section is to develop a novel conception of self-consciousness, defined as the practical activity of questioning and confirming the truth of one's own beliefs, which Pippin describes as a normative and social achievement rather than as a two-place observational relation. Readers at every level of familiarity with Hegel can find something of value in this book. The uninitiated will appreciate Pippin's accessible and reader-friendly prose - the text is adapted from a lecture series, and it retains a conversational style punctuated with frequent sign-posting and summary - as well as its clear articulation of Hegel's general philosophical project, couched in terms familiar to contemporary philosophical discourse. Students and scholars in disciplines outside of philosophy will benefit from the clear, concise, and philosophically rigorous account of a frequently cited but rarely read text, which is too often commandeered for philosophically negligent purposes. Finally, graduate students and even seasoned experts in the field will find value in the work, too, as it presents an overview and assessment of the interpretive project which began more than 20 years ago and