Hegel's Treatment 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.

Endless History: Hegel's Flawed Account of Amerindians

Abstract In this article, I argue that Hegel's treatment of Amerindian peoples is rooted in an exclusionary perspective of Reason, which establishes a particular form of life as its defining standard-bearer. This stance results in a distinct form of epistemic misrecognition and injustice that disregards the potential contributions of Amerindian resources and worldviews to the lexicon stablished throughout the modernity. To present an alternative viewpoint, I examine the insights of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, whose pluriversal conception of reason and history challenges one-sided portrayals of rationality. My aim is not to ‘fit’ Amerindian concepts into our familiar modern philosophical vocabulary. Instead, I wish to consider Hegel's philosophy through the lens of encounters and epistemic recognition with those who have been denied it. In particular, the application of an ‘ethnographic pact’ as a mode of translation constitutes a valuable contribution to ongoing decolonial discussions. I assert that this approach calls into question Hegel's notions of progress and universal reason, suggesting that his philosophy of history might have taken a divergent path if it had not been entangled in a self-centric epistemic framework. While these considerations remain subject to further development, they offer a fresh perspective for comprehending Hegel's argument beyond his own epistemic limitations.

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.

Understanding Hegel's Logic: On Houlgate's Hegel on Being

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External or Intrinsic Purpose—What comes first? On Hegel's Treatment of Teleology

AbstractHegel's philosophy of biology is one of the strongest chapters of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. It can be argued that Hegel's understanding of organicity underscores the explanatory power of ‘dialectical thinking’, as Hegel himself claims. Hegel's interpretation of organicity is based upon the logical development of categories in his chapter on Objectivity of his Logic. If we compare Hegel's treatment of teleology in the Logic with his interpretation of organicity in his Philosophy of Nature, a mismatch can be found. In the Logic, Hegel introduces the notion of life (Leben) after the chapter on Objectivity, i.e. after elaborating on external teleology. In his Philosophy of Nature, the notion of the inner purposiveness of organicity belongs to the externality of nature. This article compares Hegel's treatment of teleology in his Logic and his Philosophy of Nature, reconstructs possible explanations for mismatches and offers a possible solution to the question whether the notion of life should be regarded as the last part of the chapter on teleology or the first part of the chapter on the Idea.

Hegel's Later Theory of Cognition: An Additive or Transformative Model?

AbstractThis article investigates Hegel's later theory of perception and cognition, identifying and analysing its general assumptions about the relation among the mind's activities. These often unremarked upon assumptions, I claim, continue to underwrite recent interpretive controversies. I demonstrate how a correct understanding of such assumptions points us toward an alternative interpretation of Hegel's model of the mind. I argue that this new model changes how we understand (a) Hegel's later notion of ‘non-conceptual content’ and (b) his distinction between human and animal minds—two areas that constitute the fault line dividing interpretations of late Hegel. To isolate the relevant assumptions, I use Matthew Boyle's influential conceptual distinction between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ models of rationality. I demonstrate that Hegel himself addresses the basic issues characterizing this distinction and clarify how approaching his work in these terms presents considerable interpretative and conceptual advantages, including allowing us to defend the position that Hegel adopts a ‘transformative’ framework of mind. To support this argument, this paper closely analyses Hegel's treatment of sensation (Empfindung), which has not yet been systematically addressed by scholars. I show how sensation can be best understood as part of Hegel's later ‘transformative’ framework for cognition. I also show how this framework can be extended to other parts of Hegel's theory.

Hegel’s Interpretation of the Liar Paradox

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel develops a subtle analysis of Megarian paradoxes: the Liar, the Veiled Man and the Sorites. In this paper, we focus on Hegel's interpretation of the Liar. We note that in Hegel's treatment there are positive suggestions for a new analysis of the paradox. Faced with the Liar's sentence ‘µ’ that says ‘“µ” is false’, Hegel's idea is that the conjunction ‘µ and not µ’ is to be held true, but the two conjuncts ‘µ’ and ‘not µ’, separately taken, are untrue. Other parts of Hegel's work confirm the idea that a true contradiction for him is made of two untrue sentences, which is an interesting but unusual account of inconsistency. In this paper, we explore the plausibility of the hypothesis with the lens of the contemporary theories of paradoxes. We compare Hegel's view with standard dialetheism, and we present Hegel's idea of truth which underlies the theory.

Putting Ruist and Hegelian Social Thought in Dialogue

This article first considers Hegel's treatment of Ruist thought, especially the Berlin-era lectures. While Hegel and Hegelian thought cannot integrate non-Western material, five interesting analogues in their social thought deserve consideration: the family as society's relational foundation; ritual as cultural language; Hegelian necessity as Ruist fate; rulers as relational centers; and tools for evaluating ritual.

Of Spiritual Failure: The Matter of Hegel's Pyramids

This article critically examines GWF Hegel's treatment of the Egyptian pyramids in his Aesthetics as an aporia at a crucial juncture of his systematic philosophy. For Hegel, the pyramids are the aesthetic and historical moment at which 'Spirit' begins to extricate itself from matter. However, this article claims that such a transition is only possible through a repression and a forgetting of the material situation upon which it is predicated. In forming this argument, this article will examine Hegel's dismissive treatment of the pyramids in six sections. In the first and second sections, the pyramids will be situated within Hegel's larger project. In the third section, the article will look at his writings on the pyramids themselves. The fourth section will examine Jacques Derrida's critique of 'Hegel's semiology' as a way to open up a critical perspective. The fifth section turns to Hegel's writing on geology in Philosophy of Nature as a way to focus on the materiality of the pyramids. And finally, the sixth section concludes by considering their labor and the construction. Each of these latter sections attempts attempts to highlight aspects of the pyramids that fundamentally challenge the Hegelian transition from matter to 'Spirit'.

The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism ed. by Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok

Reviewed by: The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism ed. by Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok Jessica J. Williams Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok, editors. The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 267. Cloth, $99.99. In his introduction, Gerad Gentry notes that "the imagination is important not only because it is central to one of the most productive and influential periods in the history of philosophy, but also because it represents a topic of substantial relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy" (2). Readers with contemporary interests in the imagination who are looking for a general introduction to its treatment by German Idealists and Romantics will be disappointed. Most of the essays in this volume presuppose familiarity with the respective philosophers and their technical vocabularies. Specialists, especially those who work on German Idealism, will find much of interest in this volume, which is divided into three parts: "Kant and the Imagination" (part 1), "The Imagination in Post-Kantian German Idealism" (part 2), and "The Imagination in German Romanticism" (part 3). As a Kant scholar, I found the essays in part 1 especially rewarding. Each of these essays contributes to current debates in the secondary literature. In his contribution, Clinton Tolley addresses Kant's claim that the imagination is "a necessary ingredient in perception itself" and pursues a Sellarsian line of interpretation that takes the role of imagination to be that of generating complex images of objects. Tolley argues that while sensibility provides intuitions independently of the imagination and the understanding, the imagination generates images of intuitions, which are the representational content of perception. Tolley [End Page 824] briefly gestures at the role of the imagination in generating a priori representations of space and time, a topic that Tobias Rosefeldt treats in significant detail in his contribution. While the recent scholarship on this topic has focused almost exclusively on the role of the imagination in generating the a priori representation of space, Rosefeldt focuses instead on the role of the transcendental imagination in generating the a priori representation of time, in particular, the representation of the direction of time, which makes his essay a particularly important one for the current debate. Günter Zöller argues that to properly understand the imagination's contribution to cognition, and especially the sense in which it is "productive" without being creative, we must pay attention to the metaphors that Kant uses to describe the function and status of the imagination, which come from biology and chemistry. This essay is a welcome contribution to the recent literature that highlights how Kant's interest in the emerging special sciences shaped the critical philosophy. While the first three essays deal with the imagination's contribution to cognition, Keren Gorodeisky considers the free lawfulness of the imagination in aesthetic judgments. This is part of her overarching account of the unity of reason in Kant, one that preserves the fundamental differences between theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgments while also accounting for their underlying unity in terms of lawfulness. While she is right to emphasize that aesthetic judgments are made through feeling, and thus arise from a fundamentally different source than cognitive or practical judgments, I found it curious that she did not discuss the role of reflection in aesthetic judgments, which connects aesthetic judgments with reflective judgments in science. Even if one does not accept all of the details of her interpretation, she offers a compelling account of the centrality of the imagination for all aspects of human rationality. The essays in part 2 address the way that later German Idealists extended and modified Kant's account of the imagination. Johannes Haag considers how Fichte's account of the imagination as "the ground of both the categories and objects of experience" nevertheless tries to preserve objectivity (109). Meghant Sudan examines Hegel's treatment of the imagination as unifying the receptive and reflective capacities of the mind. Gerad Gentry continues themes from Gorodeisky's essay and examines Hegel's treatment of the free lawfulness of the imagination as the key to the necessity and unity of reason. In part 3, Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal address the role of the imagination in interpretation...

Hegel's Complete Views on Crime and Punishment

AbstractIn this article, I argue that Hegel's complete and mature view of crime and punishment is more robust than many interpretations of theUnrechtpassage in the ‘Abstract Right’ section of Hegel'sElements of the Philosophy of Rightsuggest. First, I explain the value of revisiting the interpretation of Hegel as a simple retributionist in the contemporary debate. Then, I look at Hegel's treatment of crime and punishment in the section on abstract right to show the role of punishment in Hegel's account. Next, I argue that this needs to be situated in Hegel's broader social philosophy and that we can accomplish this by looking at how theUnrechtpassage fits in theElements of the Philosophy of Right’s dialectical structure. I do so by building on the sections on civil society and state in the part ofElements of the Philosophy of Rightdealing with ethical life(Sittlichkeit), which include considerations of prevention and rehabilitation. I contend that this analysis reveals an account of punishment as more complicated than simple retribution.

BONDSMEN AND SLAVES: SERVILE HISTORIES IN HEGEL AND NIETZSCHE

ABSTRACTRecent readings of what is commonly known as the dialectic of master and slave have tended to focus either philosophically on concepts such as desire, reflection, and recognition or historically on the specific nature of the economic relation it evokes. In this paper I challenge that division of proper objects, arguing that Hegel's dialectic and its reception raises the question how the nature of servitude (whether that of a bondsman or that of a slave) structures not only the emergence of historical agency but also the relationship between history and philosophy. The importance of reflection in Hegel's treatment of the dialectic of lord and bondsman is both clearly stated and structural. Alexandre Kojève's reading of this dialectic makes explicit that human history originates in it, but, unlike Hegel, Kojève does not emphasize the product of the slave's labor. Judith Butler's reading of the dialectic in Hegel and Kojève locates the difference between Hegel's bondsman and Kojève's slave within the structure of servitude itself as a Foucauldian opposition between “body” and “life.” In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche differentiates between two varieties of servile work on the basis not of what is produced but instead to whom service is rendered, announcing what turns out to be a problematic familiar from both the Old and New Testaments: the impossibility of service to two masters. In a typically perspectival turn, Nietzsche shows that servitude is a condition of possibility not only of human history but also of its academic study. Self‐conscious historians must thus take into account not only the dependence of their object of study upon relations of servitude but also their own place within such relations.

A Brief Sketch of the Possibility of a Hegelian Cosmopolitanism

The following paper investigates the possibility of an account of cosmopolitan thought inspired by Hegel's treatment of Kant's ethical theory and his associated social concept of recognition. Cosmopolitanism requires the agent to recognize themself as a global agent participating in a shared community, but conventional political strategies do not possess the resources to satisfy this demand for self-understanding. Such a self-understanding is enabled by the objective freedom of a common shared humanity grounded in rational self-determination. The paper shows that it is possible to extrapolate Hegel's outline of the state in the Philosophy of Right (perhaps contrary to Hegel's own intuitions) to describe a global community coherent with such a subject.

Hegel's Pathology of Recognition: A Biopolitical Fable

ABSTRACTThis article examines the figures of life and death as rhetorical and material conditions for self-consciousness and mutual recognition, notoriously described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It turns to Hegel's treatment of life and death, concepts that—according to Hegel's mature system—anticipate and prefigure the struggle for recognition and its master-slave dialectic. Part 1 analyzes the Philosophy of Nature, with attention to how the sex relation, species-life, and the diseased body “pathologically” figure the life and death of the nonhuman (animal) organism. Part 2 takes up Hegel's “Anthropology,” which opens his Philosophy of Mind, exploring the problematic relationship between (reproductive) sex and love as an incipient politics of woman, family, civil society, and state. Part 3 brings Hegel's world-historical system into dialogue with contemporary biopolitics, arguing that recognition today is driven by a world-historical discourse on bios and that Hegel's “pathological” figures might occasion a productive critique of affirmative biopolitics.

The Substance of Ethical Recognition: Hegel's Antigone and the Irreplaceability of the Brother

Goethe thought that Antigone's celebrated speech of defiance, attesting to the irreplaceability of Polyneices, was surely spurious. This motive for her action, he thought, bordered on the comic. Hegel, however, takes seriously the irreplaceability of the brother and women's desire for reciprocal recognition. Burke argues in this article that the speech, which is indeed authentic, plays such a central role in Hegel's treatment of the play not only because the concept of recognition plays a central role in Hegel's philosophy but because the brother-sister relation is unique among relations of recognition in its equality. The significance of Antigone's burial ritual is to be seen in light of Hegel's relationship with his sister, Christiane. The ritual elevates the harmony between the two sexes not found in the family or civil society.

Hegel's Contradictions

Perhaps one of the most difficult passages in Hegel's Science of Logic is his treatment of contradiction. If each moment of Hegel's logic is understood to constitute a sort of proof and since contradiction itself is presented as a moment of the logic, then in what sense can one comprehend a proof of contradiction as such? It is difficult to formulate this in any way that does not sound fundamentally incoherent, since it is not just at odds with our ordinary way of thinking but also with the overwhelming majority of the Western philosophical tradition. The basic problem, essentially, is this: if Hegel's logic includes contradiction as one of its moments, then how is Hegel's entire philosophical project not simply incoherent?In the first part of this article, I will attempt to demonstrate one way in which Hegel's treatment of contradiction could in fact be considered coherent, through a close reading of the relevant passages. In this reading, I will particularly focus on the function of Hegel's dialectical concept of sublation (aufheben), and attempt to show (by example) how analysing Hegel's nuanced use of sublation can help us to work through some of his logic's complexities. The overall purpose here will be to present a systematic (as opposed to historical) exposition of Hegel's concept of contradiction and to illustrate the important role that this concept (as the contradiction of contradiction) plays in Hegel's logical method.

Hegel’s Misunderstood Treatment of Gauss in the Science of Logic

This essay explores Hegel's treatment of Carl Friedrich Gauss's mathematical discoveries as examples of Analytic Cognition. Unfortunately, Hegel's main point has been virtually lost due to an editorial blunder tracing back almost a century, an error that has been perpetuated in many subsequent editions and translations. The paper accordingly has three sections. In first, I expose mistake and trace its pervasive influence in multiple languages and editions of Wissenschaft der Logik. In second section, I undertake to explain mathematical significance of Gauss's discoveries. In third section, I take a look at deeper implications of Hegel's treatment of Gauss's work as a window onto nature and limitations of analytic cognition. In conclusion, I seek to explain how linear method embodied in deductive reason leads by its own inner principle, according to Hegel, to its dialectical Aufhebung (sublation). The result is a kind of deliberately circular reasoning that he describes as the Absolute Idea..

In seinem Anderen bei sich selbst zu sein

This essay argues for a distinctly post-Kantian understanding of Hegel's definition of freedom as being at home with oneself in one's other. I first briefly isolate the inadequacies of some dominant interpretations of Hegelian freedom and proceed to develop a more adequate theoretical frame by turning to Theodor Adorno. Then I interpret Hegel's notion of the freedom of the will in the Philosophy of Right in terms of his speculative metaphysics. Finally, I briefly examine Hegel's treatment of agency in the Phenomenology ofSpiritin order to establish important continuities between the early and late Hegel.

Specifications

In the Postscript to his Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger suggests that one important aim of his investigation into the relation between truth and art is to subject to scrutiny Hegel's famous thesis on the end of art. The purpose of my essay is to contribute to this project by reexamining aspects of Hegel's discussion of art in the Phenomenology of Spirit that appear to subvert his own thesis. Hegel's treatment of ancient Greek drama and, specifically, some of his remarks on comedy, not only bring Hegel's claim about the end of art into question, but also lend new insights into the possibilities for the relationship between truth and art in our age.

Die Souveränitätsfrage in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie

SUMMARY In this article Cristiana Senigaglia examines Hegel's treatment of the question of sovereignty in his political thought. The concept of sovereign power, as developed in the writings of Bodin had been received in German thinking in the seventeenth century and the word Souveranität adopted as the German language equivalent. But as long as Germany was not a unitary state, the concept raised special problems for German thinkers. When Hegel set out his original theory of the State in 1817, his state clearly included the attribute of sovereignty but he did not develop any explicit discussion of the concept. This was developed in his writings from 1819–20, where he did set out a specific theory of sovereign power, which he saw as inseparable from the existence of the State. The article analyses Hegel's theory, and notes he attributed to sovereignty two aspects, internal and external. This produced the result that while the internal sovereignty of the State is a necessary condition for the peace and security of its citizens, the external sovereignty of the state prevents the development of any effective international order, and means that the relations between states will always produce the unending struggle for superiority described by Hobbes in his Leviathan.