Hegel's Discussion Research Articles

Where Did Hegel Go Wrong on Race?

AbstractWhere exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? Moellendorf helpfully tells us that Hegel's treatment of race begins systematically in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and that he went wrong philosophically in the use of the biological category of race. This is basically correct but requires precisification. This article considers why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological. Race's biological status can be problematized from the standpoint of contemporary biology and from the standpoint of Hegel's system. The textual placement of Hegel's systematic discussion of race in the philosophy of spirit makes clear that Hegel conceived of race in spiritual terms. Hegel took race to be a biospiritual category. Hegel was clearly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race, that there is a plurality of biological human races. He regarded race as a robust natural kind. His preferred list of races includes Caucasians, Negros, Mongolian, Malaysians and Americans. One noteworthy feature of his understanding of race's physical aspect was his focus on the formation of the skull and the face. At the same time, he clearly held that there were other deeper physical differences that accounted for the spiritual differences of race. Hegel was perfectly clear that race has a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He held that that the members of racial groups essentially shared certain fundamental, heritable, moral, intellectual and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race and that these differences were such as to support an objective ranking. This shows that Hegel took the category of race to be the sort of category we today would characterize as ‘racialist’. Hegel's concept of race was the racialist concept of race.

Hegel contra Hegel: Eurocentrism, Colonialism, and Progress

Abstract This study aims to investigate whether some of the Eurocentric and colonialist contents of Hegel's thought are open to criticism with elements of his own philosophy. First, I intend to show that some of these contents can be organized around the connection between ‘spirit’ and ‘progress’. I then construct an interpretation of Hegel's notion of spirit, based upon which I discuss its possibly pro-colonialist tendencies, arguing that disconnected from the philosophy of history it establishes a connection of autonomy and critique crucial even for anti-colonialist thought. Furthermore, following Adorno's criticism of Hegel, I investigate the possibility of finding in the ‘progress in the consciousness of freedom’ an experiential dimension capable of capturing its regressive moments. This analysis then leads to a discussion of colonization in the reconstruction of capitalist society presented in the Philosophy of Right, which reveals an important discrepancy, so I argue, concerning the Eurocentrism of the Philosophy of History. Finally, I propose a comparison of Hegel's discussion of colonization with Marx's theory of ‘primitive accumulation’, and evaluate thereby the pertinence of Hegel's connection between imperialism and the critique of capitalism.

The Beginning of Hegel'sLogic

AbstractThis article discusses two topics, both commonly referred to using the label “the beginning of Hegel'sLogic”: (1) Hegel's justification for the claim that a science of logic must begin by considering the concept of “pure being”. (2) Hegel's discussion of the concepts “being”, “nothing”, and “becoming” in the first chapter of hisLogic. Discussing recent work on both of these topics, two primary claims are defended: Regarding (1): the strongest interpretations of Hegel's case for beginning a science of logic with the concept of pure being are those which take him to argue that this concept must be necessarily both “immediate” and “mediated” at the same time. Regarding (2): The widespread tendency to take Hegel's treatment of the concepts of being, nothing, and becoming as an example with which to illustrate his “dialectical method” should be replaced with an interpretation of that chapter which understands it to rather make possible the kind of dialectical transitions which make up the rest of Hegel'sScience of Logic.

Taking the Teleology of History Seriously: Lessons from Hegel's Logic

AbstractTo oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right.

Hegelian restorative justice

AbstractIn the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claims that crime is a negation of right and punishment is the “negation of the negation.” Punishment, for Hegel, “annuls” the criminal act. Many take it that Hegel endorses a form of retributivism—the theory that criminal offenders should be subject to harsh treatment in response and in proportion to their wrongdoing. Here I argue that restorative criminal justice is consistent with Hegel's remarks on punishment and his overall philosophical system. This is true, in part, because restorative justice integrates Hegel's instructive discussion of confession and forgiveness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel claims that true moral relationships allow space for persons to confess their moral shortcomings and forgive the shortcomings of others. Restorative criminal justice brings the perpetrators and victims of crime together to offer confessions and forgiveness and to work to heal the various wounds caused by crime. I do not claim that Hegel must be read as advocating restorative justice. While Hegel tells us what punishment does, he does not commit himself to any form of punishment. What I offer here is a rational, progressive reconstruction and extension of Hegel's conception of crime and punishment.

Hegel on Market Laws and External Teleology

AbstractBy highlighting the logico-metaphysical undergirding of Hegel's discussion of the market, this article brings to light certain proto-Marxist or proto-socialist tendencies in Hegel as well as key disagreements with Adam Smith, which have been missed by recent studies like Herzog's Inventing the Market (2013). For Smith, market laws function like an impartial arbiter that rewards honest effort; his main worry is that individuals may fail to display virtues like honesty, probity and frugality, thereby hindering the smooth functioning of the market mechanism. For Hegel, by contrast, the market is a de-personalized player in its own right that imposes its arbitrary rule, a rule that does not reflect in any way the virtues and efforts of market participants. This assessment is easily overlooked, unless one realizes that Hegel believes the market to be functioning according to the structures that he discusses in the ‘Objectivity’ section in his Science of Logic. As a consequence of this assessment Hegel attributes a different role to the state than Smith does: Rather than aiding and shaping individuals, by means of institutions, education and health care, the state needs to address the structural functioning of market laws and, to some extent, inhibit its free-flowing functioning. Individuals need to re-appropriate their own social relations by organizing them along the lines of the logical organism or internal teleology. After outlining Hegel's interpretation and assessment of the market structures with the help of the Logic, I will discuss Hegel's demand for an organic state, that sublates and oversees the market, thereby safeguarding the important personal freedoms enjoyed by market participants.

Bad Habits: Habit, Idleness, and Race in Hegel

AbstractRecent discussions of Hegel's conception of second nature, specifically focused on Hegel's notion of habit (Gewohnheit), have greatly advanced our understanding of Hegel's views on embodied normativity. This essay examines Hegel's account of embodied normativity in relation to his assessment of good and bad habits. Engaging Hegel's account of the rabble (Pöbel) in the Philosophy of Right and Frank Ruda's assessment of Hegel's rabble, this essay traces the relation between ethicality, idleness and race in Hegel. In being a figure of refusal in its affirmation of idleness, the rabble disallows the progressive revision of the project of modernity central to Hegel's philosophy. Hegel's discussion of the rabble is thus key to assessing the production of race within Hegel's notion of ethical life.

Metaphysics Supervenes on Logic: The Role of the Logical Forms in Hegel's "Replacement" of Metaphysics

In this paper, I seek to explain Hegel's view that his "logic" replaces metaphysics. I argue that Hegel's discussion of logical forms of judgment and syllogism in book III of The Science of Logic is meant to be the foundation of his reformation of metaphysics. Implicit in Hegel's discussion of the logical forms is the view that the metaphysical concepts discussed in books I and II of the Logic supervene on the role of subject and predicate terms in the logical forms discussed in book III. Hegel thus has an explanation for the nature and significance of metaphysical concepts that resembles Kant's "metaphysical deduction." In addition to illustrating the dependence of metaphysics on logic, the present interpretation provides a new picture of the structure of Hegel's Logic that emphasizes the explanatory priority of its Doctrine of the Concept.

Syllogistic reasoning as a ground for the content of judgment: A line of thought from Kant through Hegel to Peirce

AbstractIn this paper I develop Paul Redding's suggestion that Peircean abduction and Hegel's discussion of the syllogism can be seen as a working out of Kant's treatment of the reflecting power of judgment, particularly concerning its role in conceptual change. After some historical background I regiment a use of singular terms, kind terms, and predicates across Hegel's three syllogistic figures and reconstruct an account of comprehension and extension for this system suggested by Peirce. In doing so I show that reasoning according to the ampliative syllogistic figures affects the content of these three classes of terms in precise ways. I close with a treatment of inference by analogy (associated by Hegel with the third syllogistic figure) as an exercise of reflection, and I discuss two cases in the history of science, one in astronomy and the other in biology, where a reflective exercise associated with analogical inference revised our understanding of the domain in question.

Hegel on the Normativity of Animal Life

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to show that and how animal organisms are appropriate subjects of normative evaluation, on Hegel's view. I contrast my reading with the interpretive positions of Sebastian Rand and Mark Alznauer. I disagree with Rand and agree with Alznauer that animal organisms are normatively evaluable for Hegel. I substantiate my disagreement with Rand, and supplement Alznauer's interpretation, by spelling out the role that the ‘generic process’ or ‘genus process [Gattungsprozess]’ plays within Hegel's account of animal organisms and their normative evaluability. In the course of my discussion, I highlight the main differences that Hegel purports to identify between animal and vegetable organisms and suggest that the upshot of those differences is that some but not all plants are normatively evaluable, by his lights. I also situate Hegel's discussion of theGattungsprozesswithin the debate on biological functions in the philosophy of biology over the last few decades.

Method and the speculative sentence in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

ABSTRACT While Hegel's discussion of the ‘speculative sentence’ occurs in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit, commentators rarely link it to the larger program of this text. Instead, this discussion has typically been received as a guide to the Science of Logic's presentation, as an independent theory of judgment, or as a reflection on the constraints and capacities of language generally. In this paper I argue that the speculative sentence can and should be linked to the Phenomenology itself. Specifically, I show that Hegel's discussion both mirrors and supplements the ‘Introduction's’ explication of immanent phenomenological method. Establishing this parallel in turn allows us to identify a class of sentences throughout the Phenomenology as properly speculative and methodologically substantive. At the same time, this interpretation helps clarify several characteristics that Hegel ascribes to the speculative sentence, but which have gone unaddressed by commentators.

Jokes and the Performative in Austin And Derrida; or, The Truth is a Joke?

Jokes and the Performative in Austin And Derrida; or, The Truth is a Joke? Jeffrey T. Nealon (bio) There are disadvantages in being excessively solemn. — J. L. Austin, "Performative Utterances" Through comedy then. — Jacques Derrida, Glas The genealogy of this essay on jokes comes not so much out of a happy, laughter-filled context, but in the context of a death—most specifically, Jacques Derrida's death. I was asked to write something about Derrida's legacy on the tenth anniversary of his death in 2014, and the initial impetus on such an occasion is to follow out a trajectory that one learns from Derrida himself: when asked to mourn someone in print, immediately double down on the question by looking at how the topic of mourning is treated in his or her texts. And that could indeed present a rich itinerary: few people have engaged the work of mourning as centrally as Derrida.1 But I have to say, thinking back on Derrida's work, on what I found most admirable and useful within his texts (and given the few dozen times I had interacted with him over the years, what I took away from his personality), it was not mourning that I wanted to recall—not the Derrida of lack and loss, prayers and tears,2 but the Derrida of a certain kind of malicious performative joy. The Derrida of Glas, for example, who gleefully links G. W. F Hegel, that great thinker of normativity and dialectical progress, with the saint of queer transgression Jean Genet. Whatever else it is, a text like Glas is a tour de force comedy routine (and the genre is literally comic, a circle—the beginning is the end, Finnegans Wake style).3 And the joke is aimed squarely at [End Page 1] that most serious and tragic of philosophical projects, Hegel's. Indeed, to what two specific episodes does Derrida very economically reduce Hegel's entire corpus in the opening pages of Glas? (1) Hegel's discussion of the phallic columns of India; and (2) the status of flower-religion (2–3). These two seemingly frivolous throwaways in Hegel are, like so many other bits of marginalia (recall what Derrida does with Friedrich Nietzsche's "I have forgotten my umbrella"),4 going to be shown to be the heart and soul of a very serious project, and Derrida will perform this analysis in a magisterial and singular way … with numerous lowbrow jokes thrown in as well, musings for example on the chiasmic crossings between Derrida and derrière. In any case, to close this opening parenthesis, it's the joyful way Derrida does his work—its performative aspects, the illocutionary force of his work—that has really stayed with me over the years. And of course 1974's Glas is just the warm-up for Derrida's real comic tour de force—"Limited Inc abc" (hereafter simply "Limited Inc"), his late-70s back-and-forth with John Searle, over Derrida's essay on J. L. Austin and performative utterances. I'll get to all that soon enough, but I can't help but note right off the bat that Searle, if he had taken time to look twice at Derrida's work, should have seen it coming: the great comics really know how to take down hecklers. In any case, it's this underappreciated, comic, performative Derrida that I want to think about in this essay, and while this Derrida certainly doesn't get as much methodological play as the "prayers and tears" Derrida, I'm going to try to make some larger claims about the joke being crucial to Derrida's itinerary, especially surrounding his attraction to the performative. (I'll likewise suggest that even as Austin tries to keep the joke under control, its logic remains central to his work as well.) To anticipate some things I'll repeat and expand on later, the joke allows us to think in a very economical way about the performative deployment of force and provocation; the necessity and nonsaturability of context; the signature style of delivery; the idiomatics of timing; and the success or failure of a speech act being largely delinked from...

Personal Freedom without Private Property? Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School critical theory has always been concerned with revealing the various ways in which economic systems and social practices can dominate or oppress. It is therefore somewhat surprising that the tradition has had relatively little to say about private property rights. Indeed, this is all the more surprising because Hegel and Marx are crucial sources of inspiration for contemporary critical theory, and both gave an in-depth discussion of the structure and legitimacy of private property. This paper offers a new analysis of Hegel's justification of private property, Marx's critical response, and the relevance of such views for contemporary critical theory. This analysis builds upon Hegel's discussion of “ Right” in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Marx's “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.”

Gender and the Ethical Given

G. W. F. Hegel's discussion of the Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit has provoked ongoing debate about his views on gender. This essay offers an interpretation of Hegel as condemning social arrangements that take the authoritativeness of identities and obligations to be natural or merely given. Hegel criticizes the ancient Greeks' understanding of both the human law and the divine law; in so doing, he provides resources for a critique of essentialist approaches to sex and gender. On this interpretation, Hegel views the conflict between Antigone and Creon as tragic because the gendered identities and obligations inherent to Greek Sittlichkeit are naturalized and withheld from scrutiny and revision. In the conclusion, I suggest how Hegel's criticisms pose a challenge to certain approaches to religious ethics.

Creation and the Critique of Capitalism in Marx, Nancy and Zizek

In light of recent rehabilitations of the theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo by Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Zizek and others, the present essay examines whether that doctrine can or cannot be a resource for the critique of capitalism. Agreeing with Nancy and Zizek that the doctrine can be of use in the critique of capitalism, the essay takes up their discussions and adds to them by analyzing the relationship between the doctrine and Marx's treatment of human agency and capitalism. By situating Marx's philosophy in relation to Aristotle's and Hegel's discussion of the infinite, I contend that, despite Marx's overt rejection of creation ex nihilo, human activity is conceived by him according to it, and that capitalism, as he presents it and as supplemented with Nancy and Zizek, can be understood to be a "decreation" of the worldhood of the world.

A Theory of Tragic Experience According to Hegel

Abstract: Hegel's theory of tragedy is often considered to be primarily a theory of the objective powers involved in tragic conflicts—for Hegel, these are paradigmatically competing ethical notions—and of the rationality which underlies and drives such conflicts. Such a view follows naturally from a close reading of Hegel's discussion of classical Greek tragedy in his Lectures on Aesthetics. However, this view gives rise to the question of whether Hegel's theory of tragedy can account for the significance of tragic experience, in particular the experience of tragic suffering; it has been argued repeatedly that it cannot. In contrast, I want to suggest in this paper that a theory of tragic experience can be derived from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This Hegelian theory of tragic experience, I argue, should be understood as complementing rather than challenging Hegel's theory of objective tragic conflict.

Self-Knowledge, Action and the Language of Confession in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

This paper offers an outline of the central issue Hegel is concerned with in his discussion of spirit. The issue is: how can we possibly confirm our basic and comprehensive claims to validity? In the ‘Spirit’ section of the Phenomenology, Hegel focuses on what we nowadays would call ‘thick conceptions’. The corresponding claims to knowledge relate (a) to a general worldview and (b) to the objective norms embedded in this worldview. Furthermore, they also include (c) a claim to self-knowledge, which is correlated to both.Hegel suggests that if we want to validate these claims we should not look at merely given facts but at the actions performed on the basis of these claims — it's the deed that matters. But in making claims, we are also addressing others. The resulting questions are: How can they possibly recognise the action as a manifestation of the underlying principles? What follows for my self-knowledge if I accept that the judgement of others contributes to what the action really is and thus what it says about me?The first part of the paper explores the general framework underlying Hegel's discussion of spirit. The second part exemplifies Hegel's conception by referring to different cultural realisations of spirit put forward in the sixth chapter of his Phenomenology: the focus will be on Hegel's interpretation of Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone. In the brief, final part I would like to point to three features of Hegel's account of spirit that I take to be still worthy of consideration.

Visual Alterity Abroad: Hegel through Birgit Hein's Baby I will Make You Sweat and La Moderna Poesia

Foucault's discussion of the panopticon is the best-known engagement with visual epistemology, the relationship of sight and knowledge. Yet the panopticon is only one form of visual epistemology and all technologies of perspective position and situate their subjects. As a colloquial statement of visual epistemology we might say: you are how you see. This essay focuses on the cinematic episteme or how the technology of cinema configures a way of seeing and way of knowing. Specifically this essay takes up a narrower question of visual alterity. Beginning from Hegel's discussion of consciousness, it asks how within and through film we recognise our self and how can we see the other? To carry out the analysis, the essay attends in particular to two films Baby I will Make You Sweat (1994) and La Moderna Poesia (2000) by experimental and underground artist Birgit Hein. These films combine incongruous and even conflicting representational strategies that particularly enable an exploration of visual alterity. Both films on the one hand narrate a highly subjective experience of self/other relations within the context of a travel narrative: a woman seeking to recapture some sense of life, travels to an unfamiliar destination, enters into new environments and takes up relationships, sometimes intimate, with strangers. On the other hand they both rely on a form of aesthetic abstraction that leaves the film without renaissance perspective, panoptic organizing, shot-reverse shot, continuity editing, i.e. an of the typical representational strategies of alterity found in narrative films.

Structure as Process: Rereading Hauptmann's Use of Dialectical Form

Moritz Hauptmann's reliance on dialectical form as the mode of music-theoretical presentation in The Nature of Harmony and Meter remains strangely resistant to interpretation. The most influential reading of Hauptmann's work follows Riemann's assessment of it from the standpoint of harmonic dualism—an interpretive approach that, with its heavy reliance on the spatial and symmetrical representation of the harmonic field, loses sight of the temporality and the discursive unfolding of fleeting harmonic forms to which Hauptmann's text constantly draws attention. Taking this conflict of interpretations as its starting point, the present article recontextualizes Hauptmann's work by reading it in the continuity of Hegel's discussion of the emergence of sound in the Naturphilosophie; a text which, as I argue, provides Hauptmann not just with his conceptual framework and idiom, but also, through dialectical form, sets in motion a genetic mode of explanation and production of content that enables Hauptmann to present the theory of music as a perpetually nascent process.

Hegel's Voice: Vibration and Violence

AbstractThis essay is a consideration of Hegel's account of the voice. Responding, in the first instance, to Derrida's discussion of what he terms Hegel's 'semiology,' the article attempts to map out complexities in Hegel's account of voice that tend to resist absorption into the trajectory that Derrida has outlined. Hegel's discussion of music in the Aesthetics will be the focus, and an attempt is made to link the emergence of the musical voice to the fundamental determinations of time and of sound in the Philosophy of Nature. Finally, the essay will connect Hegel's understanding of music with the primordial appearance of voice in the anthropology of the Philosophy of Spirit.