Objective Spirit Research Articles

Keine Revolution ohne Reformation: Staat und Religion in Hegels Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften

Der Beitrag erörtert das diffizile Verhältnis von Staat und Religion in Hegels Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Systematischer Ausgangspunkt ist die alternative Zuordnung des Themas zur Sphäre des absoluten und der des objektiven Geistes in der ersten bzw. zweiten Fassung der Berliner Enzyklopädie (1827, 1830). Der Beitrag will zeigen, daß die doppelte systematische Verortung der Verhältnisbestimmung von Staat und Religion in der Berliner Enzyklopädie Hegels komplexe Einschätzung des modernen Staates als von der modernen Religion sowohl getrennt als auch ihr systematisch zugehörig wiederspiegelt. Zu diesem Zweck behandelt der Beitrag zunächst den systemarchitektonischen Grundcharakter von Hegels enzyklopädischem Projekt, sodann die sukzessive Entwicklung einer im spezifischen Sinne modernen Konzeption von Sittlichkeit in den Nürnberger, Heidelberger und Berliner Fassungen der Enzyklopädie und schließlich die systematische Annäherung der Sittlichkeit des modernen Staates an die Geistigkeit der modernen Religion in den beiden Berliner Fassungen der Enzyklopädie.

Autonomía, gobernabilidad y eticidad en la Universidad: una reflexión desde la realidad racional de Hegel

In the last decades, the changes of policies in Latin America have provoked alterations in the managing of universities, reducing their autonomy and leaving a governability deficit. These challenges generate a double legitimacy crisis: inner (foundations), and outer (State and organizations). In other words, disempowerment. This article is about the notion of university as an idea in its reality, and takes as an interpretative reference the objective spirit’s dialectics exposed by Hegel in his philosophical system, proposing a critical-comprehensive approach of the idea developing in the autonomy, governability and ethicity moments, spotting the autoconsciousness of ethics in the game of governability.

ODREĐENJE OBJEKTIVNOG DUHA KROZ ODNOS PREMA SUBJEKTIVNOM I APSOLUTNOM DUHU

Na negativni podsticaj sve prisutnije tendencije da se filozofija iskorenjuje, odvaja od svoje najbolje tradicije, nastoji se u ovom članku odrediti pojam nad kojim postoji takva vrsta sumnje da se kod njega radi gotovo o iluziji, o nečemu što zapravo ne postoji. Reč je o bivstvovanju duha. U Hegelovom shvatanju, međutim, ne samo da se ne radi o iluziji, već su pojam i bivstvovanje duha kao objektivnog apsolutna supstancija onoga čije postojanje niko neće poricati, a to je čovekov svet. Ako se pretpostavi da se do pojma objektivnog duha može doći samo kroz čvrsto držanje određenja, a da se tek nakon toga može zauzeti kritički stav i pojam staviti u razvoj i posredovanje, onda se kao neposredni cilj rada postavlja izvođenje ovog pojma kroz tri određenja: određenja duha u odnosu na prirodu, određenje objektivnog duha u odnosu na subjektivni duh i određenje objektivnog duha u odnosu na apsolutni duh sledeći samog Hegela.

The I and World history in Hegel

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I investigate the relations between the notion of the I and the conception of World history in Hegel’s philosophy. First, I address Hegel’s account of the I by reconstructing its phenomenological and logical development from consciousness to self-consciousness through recognition with the other and arguing that the project of the Philosophy of Right is normative, as it provides an account of the logical process of affirmation of the I as the normative source of the realm of objective spirit. I then argue for an account of World history as the self-conscious development and liberation of the I in time and objectivity, and I consider Hegel’s philosophy of history in light of the Philosophy of Right as the historical emergence of the I through the forms of objective spirit in history. Finally, I focus on two of the allegedly most problematic issues related to Hegel’s conception of World history: the nature and very possibility of an ‘intersubjective consciousness’ and the notion of ‘World spirit’. I conclude by outlining how the conception of World history, if reconstructed in light of Hegel’s conception of the I, can have previously unnoticed political implications.

SPIRITUAL ASPECTS OF V. LIPINSKY’S STATE CONCEPT IN THE INTERPRETATION OF I. MIRCHUK

The article analyzes the views of I. Mirchuk on the philosophical doctrine of V. Lipinsky through the prism of the Ukrainian spirituality and mentality. I. Mirchuk called the antaeism a key component of the Ukrainian spirituality, which affected the development of the state-political life of the Ukrainian nation. That particular feature of the objective spirit of the Ukrainian people, according to the thinker, has been the cause of both positive and negative tendencies in the formation of statehood. The close connection between the Ukrainians and the land afforded ground for V. Lipinsky to give the role of the bearer of the modern Ukrainian state to the peasant farmer. In addition, the merit of V. Lipinsky according to I. Mirchuk, was that he put his national theory of statehood on his own motivations. Another sign of the spirituality of Ukrainians, to which I. Mirchuk drew particular attention, was the concept of messianism, formed by V. Lipinsky. I. Mirchuk was one of the first, who explained the essence of this concept of the thinker, which was that the leading stratum, and the whole nation behind it, consider themselves called by the highest forces to make an extremely important, predestined mission in the history of humanity. I. Mirchuk defined V. Lipinsky’s messianism as a form of love for his neighbor, transferred from the sphere of individual relationships to the large masses of peoples.

Autonomia apesar da dependência: a construção de uma Antropologia Dimensional no diálogo entre Frankl e Hartmann

O artigo se trata de um estudo teórico onde são apresentados alguns pontos da Ontologia Dimensional de Nicolai Hartmann e a relação destes com a Antropologia Ontológico-Dimensional de Viktor Frankl. Além dos pontos em que se percebe uma clara influência de Hartmann no pensamento frankliano, procurou-se chegar a elementos do pensamento do primeiro para além daquilo que serve de fundamento à Logoterapia. Quanto à influência de Hartmann, concluiu-se pela centralidade de sua Ontologia Dimensional no esquema frankliano, atestada pelas concessões ao condicionamento “psicofísico” e pela crítica ao pandeterminismo e ao reducionismo. O resultado é a fórmula: “autonomia apesar da dependência”. Quanto aos elementos que estão para além daquilo que serve de fundamento à Logoterapia, perceberam-se possibilidades fecundas de diálogo, como por ocasião da discussão em torno da vida espiritual “a-temporal” e do “espírito objetivo”.

El imaginario social de la mujer venenosa: ciencia, metáfora y hermenéutica

Son muchas las supersticiones que rodean al ámbito de lo femenino, y que hacen de la mujer el elemento constitutivo esencial de una amplia variedad de imaginarios sociales. Este trabajo presenta el análisis de uno de esos aspectos: el papel de la naturaleza femenina como poseedor de un veneno de efectos nocivos para su entorno, el fujo menstrual, que convierte a toda mujer en una potente hechicera por naturaleza, en un ser dominado por la irracionalidad, frente al espíritu objetivo y científico del hombre y, por tanto, inferior. Esta idea aparece en los primeros tratados médicos de la Antigüedad clásica, perdurando incluso en las obras científicas de auctoritates del mundo de la medicina hasta el Renacimiento y en libros de texto médicos actuales

Rival Versions of Objective Spirit

AbstractTo assert the primacy of objective spirit is to claim that certain distinctively human capacities, such as thinking and acting, are not capacities we have as individuals considered singly but are in some way dependent on shared public norms or social institutions. In this essay, I provide a brief history of arguments for the primacy of objective spirit from Hegel to the present, identifying three distinct strategies for defending this thesis: the teleological argument, the sociological argument and the quasi-transcendental argument. Although it has now become quite common to read Hegel as advancing a quasi-transcendental argument, one similar to the argument found in Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about ‘rule-following’, I show that Hegel’s most interesting claims about the social dimensions of human mindedness are incompatible with this strategy and can only be vindicated if he is read as offering a teleological argument.

Hegels Kritik des Subjektivismus der neuzeitlichen Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie im Naturrechtsaufsatz

It could seem prima facie that when Hegel sought to ground Law in the teleological structure of the objective spirit instead of in the free will he was returning to the Aristotelian concept of politics. It will be shown, however, that Hegel did not seek to ground the State and Law in a predetermined order that precedes any activity of the subject. Instead, he thought of Law as the connection between legal norms and legal relations within which Law is realized.

A Pragmatics of Political Judgment

I. Introduction: A Pragmatics of JudgementTo take part in politics is to judge and in judgement we seek rectitude and finality. We attempt to establish what is the case in matters of right and wrong, advantageous and harmful, just and unjust. We declare what should be done. But judgement in politics is marred by faults-bias, lack of measure, automatism, dependency on the object of judgement, inefficacy-and due to these faults each judgement is open to be corrected by a counter-judgement, to be corrected in turn, and so it goes: 'endless wrangling' in Edmund Burke's terms. Yet we continue to judge. Is this not monstrous? Each participant in a political scene insists on judging others despite it being evident that no participant can claim to speak for the whole, despite the evidence that all participants-failing violence-have to co-exist. Why the ostensive act of communication when no dialogue is sought with the object of judgement? Is the real goal just to shore up one's own position? In critical and polemical judgement-one side calling the other 'terrorist,' the other side responding 'colonizer'-there is no subjectivisation of the object of judgement, not even a pedagogy, just the command 'disqualify that voice, count it for less.' Critical judgement itself does not seek to change the very object that it claims must be changed. The monstrosity of judgement is evident: it arrogates rectitude yet perpetuates error; it claims to put an end to controversy yet fuels it. The task of this paper is rid ourselves of this, one of our forms of monstrosity.The first question is if political judgement so evidently fails to correct the other or to accurately guide future action then what does it do?When philosophers explore the question of judgement, they often take an epistemological or a normative approach. The question is either one of what kind of knowledge forms a basis for correct judgement, or what source of normative criterion forms the basis for evaluation. In the Principles of Philosophy Descartes defines judgement as an affirmation concerning both the existence and the nature of objects falling under the senses. The process of hyperbolic doubt begins in the philosopher's recognition that many of his 'past opinions' and judgements were founded on unguaranteed principles and inexact knowledge. It is the faculty of will in its adolescent haste to overtake and surpass the faculty of judgement that causes error in judgement. Descartes's project is to search for clear and evident first principles from which to deduce perfect knowledge of objects. This is the route of epistemological foundationalism.1Isaiah Berlin chooses this route in his essay on political judgement. He searches for a foundation of judgement either in a supposed science of politics based on the laws of history, or in the nature of practical reason. His embrace of the latter leads him to repeat Aristotle's tautology of defining phronesis (practical wisdom) as the knowledge possessed by the phronimon, the wise man. Berlin's exemplar is Bismarck, apparently a match for Aristotle's supposed subject of knowledge, Pericles.2 In line with Berlin, Vincent Descombes defines political judgement as an instance of practical rationality: a deliberation that leads directly to action. To identify error in political judgement he seeks normative criteria and finds them not in reason, nor in communicative action, but in those norms and ends that are internal to social roles and professions (Hegel's objective spirit). An actor will be said to have made an error in judgement when it contradicts such norms. Society, and its natural evolution, is thus the ultimate judge.Here Descombes joins Hannah Arendt who condemns the French Revolution for the Jacobins' attempt to change society itself-in contrast with the American Revolution, which focused on constitutional change alone. In her lectures on Kant's political philosophy-reconstructed as the third volume 'Judging' of The Life of the Mind-Arendt conceives of political judgement as the activity of a disinterested spectator rather than an actor. …

El bien universal y la buena conciencia: análisis de los conceptos de la conciencia del deber puro y la conciencia moral actuante en la Fenomenología del espíritu y la Filosofía del derecho de Hegel

The present work aims to analyse the dynamics between the concepts at stake within the transition from morality to ethical life in Hegel’s “Philosophy of Objective Spirit”. Our hermeneutical and conceptual resource consists in the complementary readings of the dialectical movements of “morality” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and in his Phenomenology of Spirit. First of all, we will examine the concepts of abstract good and conscience (das Gewissen) that appear in the Philosophy of Right. Secondly, we will examine the meaning of such concepts (the moral worldview and conscience or acting moral consciousness) in the Phenomenology of Spirit as complementary concepts. Finally, we offer a formulation and analysis of the meaning of the overall transition from morality to ethical life, starting from the dialectic articulation of both concepts, and the emergence of ethical freedom as an overcoming of moral freedom.

Review of Hauke Brunkhorst’s Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions

Critical theory spelled out as learning progress in the medium of law can hardly do anything but retrospectively smooth out any elements of social struggles that deviate from the objective spirit. This comment argues that the voices of those who neither are in nor have been allowed entry into the learning process are hardly visible any more in the gray light of the coming twilight from which the learning processes are described. It does so by questioning the role of the global South in Brunkhorst’s book and aims at scenting out blind spots in Brunkhorst’s narration of the connection between international law and the liberation movements of the South.

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.

Review of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.The most fun an academic can have, at least on the job, comes from encountering a package of ideas one never expected to see that turn out to be deep and interesting. If, before I encountered Carsten HerrmannPillath's and Ivan Boldyrev's (henceforth, HPB) joint work at a conference two years ago, I had been asked to list canonical dead philosophers whose work might inspire fresh insights about current issues in economic methodology, I would have put Hegel near the bottom. Imagine anyone being so muddled about economic reasoning that that they could be set straight(er) by Marx! HPB's new book convinces me that this would have been a completely misjudged expectation.By this comment I do not mean to endorse HPB's view that what both the academy and the policy world need now is a general embrace of Hegelian economics. Nor am I about to repeat the experience, which I recall with a shudder from much younger days, of actually reading Hegel's Philosophy of right. But I will go this far: the authors make a compelling case for the proposition that Hegel is the most important fountainhead for a coherent set of ideas about both economic behavior and political economy that, when expressed in an idiom closer to that of contemporary social science, deserve to be represented in both methodological and policy debates. Furthermore, as I will explain, going beyond anything to which HPB allude, if someone thinks (as I did) that the current German model of capitalism is largely a path-dependent consequence of Bismarck's cunning in designing a welfare state that needed paternalistic oversight by a Junker aristocracy, then HPB's book reveals that that is wrong too, or at least simplistic. German-style capitalism has deep intellectual roots, and they can be found in Hegel.Before I get to economics, I will comment on HPB's basis for putting a convincing 21st-century gloss on Hegel's pure philosophy, which, as someone trained by analytic philosophers, I had previously found utterly archaic. Hegel, famously, goes on constantly about spirit, and, even more off-puttingly, about a kind of spirit he calls objective. This phrase smells like mysticism and, in its 19th-century context, nationalism to boot. Liberal cosmopolitan economists like me can hardly imagine a more repugnant mixture than that. But HPB make a convincing case that objective spirit is in fact Hegel's pre-Darwinian name for an element of the ontological furniture that so-called externalist philosophers of mind, following Tyler Burge (1986), Daniel Dennett (1987), Edwin Hutchins (1995), Ron McClamrock (1995), Andy Clark (1997), Radu Bogdan (1997, 2000, 2009, 2010, 2013), and Tad Zawidzki (2013), have established as central to an adequate science of human behavior: the socially scaffolded but primarily self-narrated person. I have argued repeatedly-but see especially Ross (2005, 2014)- that the standard story economists tell about the philosophical foundations of their most important theoretical concept, economic agency as inferred from revealed preference, snaps in a satisfying gestalt switch from incoherence to rich profundity if only one distinguishes such socially scaffolded but richly individuated people from the neural computers studied by psychologists and neuroscientists. Only then can we understand how preference consistency is stabilized as an achievement that simultaneously embeds normative individualism and identification with points in complex vector spaces of social markers. The relevant concept to replace the mind-as-internal-computer has unfortunately been established in the literature under the label of the 'extended mind' (Menary 2010). Since this suggests that the mind begins as an internal computer that is then accessorized, in terms of connotations the label is not much of an improvement on 'objective spirit'. …

Welche Freiheit macht glücklich?

Practical philosophy in the classical German tradition from Kant to Hegel seems to be moralistic and even ascetic. The core of its moral and legal philosophy is a concept of freedom as independence from any longing for pleasure and happiness. Tracing the development of Hegel’s philosophy of subjective, objective and absolute spirit, however, exhibits a deep systematic connection between the forms of freedom and happiness in all their traditional and modern meanings. Many of them can be compared with modern conceptions, but others have to be saved from oblivion and defended against reductive conceptions of freedom and happiness in modern philosophy.

Equity in a Severe Style: The Phenomenology of Spirit, Conscience and Critical Legal Thinking

The outline of a critical approach to equity can be found in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, equity is essential to the articulation of the moral subjectivity of market actors. Equity as ‘moral conscience’ must be located within the concept of objective spirit as an authentic way of grasping the complexity of a normative order and its location in a broader socio-economic context. However, following Gillian Rose, the claim to ethical order made by bourgeois market society is profoundly problematic. Rose's argument points towards a study of the relationship of equity and ‘the market’ as the misrecognition of ethical community; an insight that suggests a more extended critical Marxist approach to equity might be possible.

Mimesis, law, struggle. A contribution to social ontology

In this text, I begin from a brief presentation of Edith Stein's neglected theory of collective identity in contemporary social ontology, in order to, building on and resisting her conclusions, elaborate a new differentiation of various forms of collective identity. The thesis is that there are only three basic forms of communal living and action which have a feeling of collective belonging and solidarity, that is, collective identity: the masses, associations (corporations) and communities. I go on to further develop their respective particularities through the use of the terms of mimesis, (established) law and struggle, and by using certain insights from Hegel regarding the nature of ?objective spirit?.

Consciousness, Mind, and Spirit: Three Levels of Human Cognition

The article elucidates three important concepts and realities that refer to cognitive phenomena and are often (mistakenly) used as synonyms: consciousness (slo. zavest), mind (slo. um), and spirit (slo. duh). They present three levels of human cognition: individual-experiential, individual-mental, and trans-individual-mental. Simply put: the concept of consciousness pertains to the waking mental life of a human being, while the concept of mind pertains to the ability and activity to consciously comprehend and understand contents and objects of human activity. I delineate three “types” of spirit: personal spirit, objective spirit, and the objectification of spirit in productions of human culture; I have doubts, however, about the existence of cosmic or super-cosmic dimensions of spirit, although some interpretations of quantum physics and modern cosmology suggest that such dimensions are possible.

Justice for Hedgehogs

<i>Justice for Hedgehogs</i>

A Filosofia da História como o lugar de efetivação da liberdade no Sistema da Ciência Hegeliano

Em Hegel, mais do que em qualquer outro filósofo que o antecedeu, a história ganha estatuto filosófico fundamental, pois o seuinteresse por ela está presente em todas as partes de sua filosofia. Para Hegel, a filosofia é história universal (Weltgeschichte), ou seja, história do progresso na consciência da liberdade. E, enquanto processo de ampliação da liberdade, a história ganha um lugar de destaque no sistema hegeliano, aparece na última parte do espírito objetivo, como história universal, efetivando, desta maneira, a estrutura ontológica e metodológica do conceito liberdade apresentado no último livro da Ciência da Lógica. O objeto deste estudo é, portanto a Filosofia da História Universal compreendida como um universo efetivo da ampliação da liberdade e do pensamento filosófico que consideramos como o encerramento sistemático da filosofia de Hegel, dado que as partes que compõem o espírito absoluto – arte, religião e filosofia – são independentes, compreendendo cada uma em si mesma um sistema acabado. Em suma, o nosso objetivo é precisamente o de demonstrar o lugar de destaque que ocupa a história universal no Sistema da Ciência hegeliano.

Hegel’s Institutionalism: Social ontology, objective spirit, and institutional agency

Hegel’s Institutionalism: Social ontology, objective spirit, and institutional agency