This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel on Love: The Early Theological Writings Recognition and Spirit: Hegel's Appropriation and Critique of Fichte Hegel's Philosophical Theology: Love, Reconciliation, True Infinity.

Except for the work of Hiralal Haldar published in 1927, Pucelle's book is the first systematic account of the influence of German idealism in England. On the flyleaf he quotes Muirhead's remark in his study of Coleridge that "the history in England of what at the present day is known as idealistic philosophy still remains to be written". The implication may seem somewhat unfair to Muirhead's own subsequent effort to fill the gap in The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy. But (...) this is not the case. Muirhead characterized his own work as "studies" and made no attempt to write a complete history, whereas Pucelle gives a full account of the idealist "school" and even sketches in the related currents of thought in poetry and theology. Careful comparison reveals that he has tried as far as possible to avoid going over the ground that Muirhead had already covered. Thus he gives a full account of the work of Ferrier, where Muirhead was only interested in Ferrier's abortive struggle to understand Hegel; but when he comes to the Essays in Philosophical Criticism he is content simply to indicate their nature and the reason for their importance, and to refer his readers to Muirhead's full analysis. Even in the case of Bradley, who is treated at length by both authors, the two discussions are complementary in that Muirhead was concerned with the development of Bradley's thought while Pucelle treats it as a system. (shrink)

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be (...) considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to (i) reject the notion that one can ascribe no metaphysical commitments to Hegel; and (ii) argue that the kind of metaphysics one ought to ascribe to Hegel is a robust yet immanent/naturalist variety. I begin by exploring two reasons why one may think Hegel’s philosophical system has no metaphysical commitments. I argue that one of these reasons is based on a particular understanding of Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher, whereas the second reason (...) is centred on a particular understanding of the philosophical viability of metaphysics as a form of enquiry simpliciter. My discussion of these ways of seeing the motivation for regarding Hegel in an anti-metaphysical way concludes with a rejection of the interpretation of conceiving Hegelianism without metaphysics. I then move on to address what I take to be the more pertinent and serious issue of what kind of metaphysician Hegel was. To this end, I argue that the best way of understanding Hegelian metaphysics is by conceiving of it as a combination of Aristotelian first philosophy and Kantian critique. To put this in the form of a slogan, I interpret Hegel’s metaphysics as a form of speculative naturalism. (shrink)

In several of his writings Hegel suggests an identification of his absolute idea/spirit with Aristotle's God in theMetaphysics. This suggestion is remarkable since it indicates that Hegel regarded his philosophy in line with classical positions in ancient metaphysics. Although there is increasing discussion of the relation between Hegel and Aristotle it is still doubtful what it was that Hegel seemed to find at the highest point of Aristotle's philosophy. To clarify this relation within the realm of (...) first philosophy I will first give a short reconstruction of Aristotle's conception of God in order, second, to confront this conception with the absolute idea/spirit in Hegel. Against Ferrarin, I will not primarily discuss the conception of actuality/activity and infinite subjectivity; rather I will focus on Aristotle's and Hegel's ontological understanding of truth. The new thesis in my paper is that Hegel can relate his theory of the absolute idea/spirit to Aristotle's God on the basis of their shared understanding of truth. This understanding allows both of them to find the highest realization and thus the fulfillment of truth in the self-thinking thinking of God (Aristotle) or the self-thinking thinking of the absolute idea/spirit (Hegel). When Hegel seems to return to Aristotle at the end of his system, this return has its systematic link in the idea of a fulfilled truth which is God or the Absolute in the sense of self-thinking thinking. Although Hegel's return to Aristotle's theology has a certain plausibility, it is also limited by the fact that for Aristotle God's self-thinking thinking is not a process of self-determination, as Hegel finds it to be and which leads him to miss a crucial feature of Aristotle's theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking by Stephen CritesLawrence S. StepelevichStephen Crites. Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 572. Cloth, $65.00Unlike either Wittgenstein or Heidegger, or his contemporary, Schelling, there is really no “Early” or “Later” Hegel. The fundamentals of his system were, if not always fully articulated, nevertheless present from the (...) very beginning of his career. There is, in Hegel, a remarkable consistency in the development of his thought, in which the elements that comprised his final system can be detected in his earliest efforts—and it is only in this sense that one can speak of an “Early” or a “Later” Hegel. That his final expression was indeed the result of an effort, a struggle to fuse and clarify seemingly disparate elements, is the thesis of Professor Crites. In this case, the specific disparate elements that are considered are those which confronted Hegel from his earliest days as a student of theology, those elements expressed in the “Christian Drama.” Crites sets out the eight revered acts of this drama: the creation, the fall, God’s covenant with Israel, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church, and the last judgment. It is his contention that Hegel “critically engaged the claims of this mythos and the social practices associated with it.” And so, the essence of Crites’s well-written and well-researched study is to set out how this drama served as a “template that affected the way he framed other topics in the ever-widening range of his philosophical inquiry.” It is to his credit that Crites does not consider his own explication of Hegel’s preoccupation with the gospels as some sort of a “secret” key that could unlock the full meaning of Hegel’s philosophy, but nevertheless, as he rightly stresses, this preoccupation cannot be ignored—for it ultimately exercised a crucial role in the formation of that which is now taken as Hegel’s mature thought.Unlike most studies of Hegel’s development—and there are more than a few—Crites avoids taking a retrospective posture, a concluding a priori stance which would allow him to point out where and why this or that particular element was rejected or retained by Hegel, His method is historical, intent upon following Hegel’s own sometimes tortured development, until, finally in this course, we reach a point where we suddenly see that Hegel “shows clear signs of becoming what we can only call a Hegelian—or better still, he shows signs of being Hegel!”The source of this inner development begins, and is traced from, Hegel’s initial appearance as “The Model Pupil of Stuttgart” to that moment in when he stands revealed as embodying that Absolute Knowledge which concludes the Phenomenology. This path from Stuttgart to Jena, which Hegel himself might have had in mind when he spoke of the philosophical “highway of despair” is detailed by Crites with a sure hand. Every stumbling block is noted, and every new resolution ıs marked, from those first essays composed during the bitter days as Hauslehrer, through the steady advances [End Page 540] of “the Jena ‘Philosophy’ ” until the passage completes itself in the Phenomenology and its termination in the “Recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.”More than half of Crites’ extensive study is devoted to explicating how the subject of religion is dealtwith in the course of the Phenomenology. In this survey of Hegel’s most well-known work, its fundamental leitmotif emerges clearly into focus: the identification of the “portentous power of the negative” with the Death of God. This death, which is philosophically reflected in dialectical negativity, is the central moment of the gospel drama. In this act, Absolute Spirit must itself suffer and die, for “Not only the Christian God incarnate, but the absolute spirit suffers, suffers its Golgotha and dies.” It is only from this sacrifice that new life can arise—for out of it comes “the resurrection of a new human-divine totality.” What Hegel has retained of the gospel... (shrink)

All subsequent English Hegelians were more or less influenced by this eloquent and enthusiastic manifesto. Although later generations were sometimes repulsed by the romanticism of this first adept, they were persuaded that something great could be recognized in Hegel's rational theology. Indeed, I believe this theology attracted the English mind much more than did Kant's critical and negative attitude towards "natural theology." Stirling with his alarming and agitating proselytism awakened Hegelianism on the foreign soil; (...) indeed, he eventually created a new type of English thought, more metaphysically minded than any of the typically English philosophers of modern times. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that changes in academic philosophy in the twentieth century reflected a process in which a discipline that had been earlier closely tied to institutional religion became increasingly laicized and secularized.1 In line with this idea, the idealist philosophy that had flowered within British philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century can look like the last and ill-fated attempt of a Victorian religious sensibility to guard itself against a post-Darwinian God-less view of the world and (...) ourselves.2 Such a view generally represents, I believe, the attitudes of many contemporary philosophers to British philosophy prior to the transforming work of Russell and Moore of about one hundred years ago. Against the luxuriant and mystical metaphysics of the idealists, fuelled by religious longing, the “new philosophy”, it is thought, affirmed the brute materiality of the world and its independence from mind, be it divine or human. A similar development is commonly understood as carrying from Hegel through the “young Hegelians” to the mature Marx. Thus for Feuerbach, for example, Hegel’s idealist doctrine that “nature or reality is posited by the idea” was “merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God”.3 Hegel’s philosophy had thus provided a “last place of refuge and ... rational support of theology”, and escaping from this condition (more prison than refuge) required rejecting idealism and confronting the fact that “the true relation of thinking and being is simply this. Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. By HANS Kii'NG. Translated by J. R. Stephenson. New York: Crossroad, 1987. Pp. 601. $37.50 (cloth bound). This is an imposing book (first German edition, 1970), not only in length, but in breadth of presentation. Kiing, in the introduction, outlines the philosophical, theological and cultural milieus out of which (...) class='Hi'>Hegel's theology and philosophy emerged. In the next 400 pages (seven chapters), Kiing thoroughly articulates the historical development of Hegel's theological and philosophical thought as expressed in his successive writings, specifically examining and evaluating the christological elements. Kiing's final chapter interprets Hegel's Christology in light of recent biblical historical/critical methodology, by way of a prolegomenon to a future Christology. The book concludes with five integral historical/theological excursus which take up specific questions that arise out of this Hegelian enterprise, for example: "Does God suffer?," "The Dialectic of the Attributes of God," "Immutability of God?". In the preface to this English edition, Kiing states that the purpose of this work is to "provide theologians with an introduction to Hegel's theological and christological thought.... [It will be] a many-leveled 'invitation' into Hegel's life and 'thought, with particular reference to his religious world, and then into his theology and Christology " (p. ix). "Moreover,.this book is an introduction to Hegel's thought by way of 'prolegomena to a future Christology '. In ·these pages we endeavour to return... a provisional reply that will take us some way in the right direction" (p. x). Why did Kiing look to Hegel for the clue to a future Christology? His thesis is that "the biblical message concerning a God who is by no means separated from the world but rather operates within it, and who is by no means stuck immovable and immutable in an unhistorical and suprahistorical realm but rather performs living acts in hi&tory can be better understood [along the lines of Hegelian thought] than in terms of the metaphysics of either classical Greece or the middle ages" (p. xii). Any student of historical or philosophical theology/christology will be captivated by Kiing's treatment of.the development of Hegel's ilhought. Undoubtedly he has mastered Hegel's life, writings and 698 694 BOOK REVIEWS thought, and presents these in a clear, complete and engaging manner. Kiing notes that Hegel, beginning with his student days at Tiihingen, was influenced by three strong cultural and intellectual currents: the Enlightenment as it specifically culminated in the thought of Kant, the French Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic movement. Kiing shows that, while the young Hegel was acquainted with the Bible, and even,though he already displayed an interest in the role of religion (folk religion) as formative of society, nowhere was he "seized in a lively and inward fashion by the Christian faith, by the figure of Christ himself" (p. 54). To rthe contrary, Hegel's early experience of Christianity was lifeless and joyless. During his subsequent time in Bern, Hegel's evaluation of Jesus un· derwent a transformation. Hegel became fascinated with Greek religion, not because it was true, but because it embodied the culture and spirit of the people. Developing this train of thought, he stated that "The supreme end of man is morality, and his religious bent is pre· eminent among his aptitudes for promoting that end" (p. 69). In light of this, Hegel considered Jesus,to lack the humane and universal scope of Socrates, who was " the paradigm of a free, good and humane Hellenism and of harmony with nature, world and state " (p. 63). Jesus' teaching was too much an authoritarian imposition upon people rarther than, like Socrates', a nurturing of their inner spirit and life. Shordy, as reflected in his Life of Jesus, Hegel's view of Jesus was to change. Now he was placed above Socrates, not because he was acknowledged to be the eternal Son of God, nor because he reconciled mankind to God by his death on the cross, but rather because he per· sonified the divine ideal of virtue that is so necessary for social order. " Whart is... (shrink)

Hegel makes claims about the relation of philosophy to religion that might raise concerns for those who want to locate his philosophy generally within the modern enlightenment tradition. For example, at the outset of his Lectures on Aesthetics he claims that philosophy “has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theology”.1 What might seem to placate worries here is that Hegel of course differentiates between the forms of religious and philosophical cognition in which such a content (...) is presented: while religion grasps this content in the form of imagistic or figurative representations [Vorstellungen], philosophy grasps it within conceptual thought, an attitude which might seem to align him with that found within the German enlightenment, for example, that found in Lessing and Kant. However, it seems undeniable that, in comparison to Kant, for example, Hegel employs forms of expression for the presentation of his own philosophical thought that are redolent with the type of imagistic and figurative locutions supposedly at home in religion. Moreover, the actual imagery employed seems to refer to the type of trinitarian version of Christianity that can seem antithetical to those forms of Christian thought that lent themselves to the sort of “demythologization” characteristic of the enlightenment attitude to religious doctrine. Such factors as these make it easy to portray Hegel’s philosophy as a type of irrationalist mysticism,2 or at least as a disguised theology with a content from revealed religion, and thus aligning him more to the spirit of the Counter-Enlightenment than the Enlightenment. (shrink)

The first half of the 19th century witnessed a wide-range debate concerning the relation between the speculative philosophy of religion and the theology of that time. Referring to a remark of Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, in which he depicted Protestant theology of that time as unphilosophical and unscien- tific, a philosophical-theological controversy started in which several prominent German and Danish intellectuals took part. Among the discussed issues were the relations between philosophy and (...) theology, the legitimacy of metaphysical inter- pretation of Christian dogmas, the limits of rationality, the issue of pantheism or the relatedness of modern philosophy of religion to medieval speculative mysticism. (shrink)

This essay examines Hegel’s variegated understanding of the relationship of religion and politics, especially as articulated in his idea of state as a “secular deity” or “earthly divinity.” It does so by engaging and expanding upon themes explored by Ludwig Siep in his 2015 Der Staat als irdischer Gott: Genese und Relevanz einer Hegelschen Idee. Its focus is fourfold: 1) It affirms the special role played by a civil religion in sustaining and maintaining institutions of modern states. 2) It details (...) the religious dimension of Hegel’s theory of the corporation to explicate an account of rights understood not just formally but with reference to substantive claims oriented to considerations of social justice. 3) It ascribes to Hegel a political theology rooted in the uniquely self-causative elements of his constitutional theory and directed to ongoing reflection by community members on the conditions of their commonality. 4) It asserts that Hegel’s notion of Weltgeist furnishes elements of a transnational account of human rights, yet one that both depends upon and entails proper development of Hegel’s notion of state as an earthly divinity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 229-231 [Access article in PDF] James A. Good, editor. The Early American Reception of German Idealism. 5 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002. Pp. 2826. Cloth, $635.00. The five volumes of this set reprint an impressive collection of long unavailable texts by five largely forgotten nineteenth-century American authors, each of whom was familiar with at least some aspects of the philosophical revolution (...) that began in Germany with the appearance of Kant's Critiques and whose own writings were deeply influenced by German Idealism. Largely due to the efforts of these five authors, idealism began to rival empiricism and common-sense realism as a major philosophical movement in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century and was an important part of that intellectual context from which later movements, notably pragmatism, grew. But despite the obvious importance of these authors and texts for understanding both the American "reception" of German Idealism and the history of American philosophy, they are today virtually unknown and most of the volumes reprinted in this set are exceedingly rare. Every student of the history of American thought must therefore be grateful to Thoemmes Press and to James A. Good for making these important works once again available. Each volume is prefaced by an excellent introduction summarizing the essential biographical and historical facts, the relevant intellectual context, and the immediate and lasting influence of the work or author in question. Good's introductions also include insightful, albeit brief, comments on the philosophical contents and distinctive character of each volume. Indeed, one of the pleasures of perusing these volumes is the opportunity this affords to appreciate the originality and philosophical talent of some of these long neglected authors, particularly Marsh, Hickok, and Everett.Volume One reprints what would appear to be the first book on Hegelian "psychology" to be published in America: Psychology; or a View of the Human Soul, by Frederick Augustus Rauch (1841). Rauch (1806-41) was a German emigrant classicist who became enamored with Hegelian philosophy during his student years and was particularly influenced by the Heidelberg theologian Charles Daub. In America, Rauch became head of the Classics Department at Marshall College, where he also taught theology and philosophy. Described as "the first enthusiastic Hegelian in the United States," Rauch's Hegelianism was of the "Old" or "Right" variety. Despite its title, "psychology" is the topic of only the second half of this volume, the first part of which is devoted to "anthropology." These divisions correspond almost exactly to the similarly titled sections of Hegel's "philosophy of subjective spirit," which is the obvious model for Rauch's Psychology. The latter, however, displays none of the dialectical power of Hegel's work and is larded with empirical observations and sundry opinions on a variety of topics. It is perhaps illuminating to discover that American "Hegelianism" can trace its roots to such an eccentric and unrigorous work, which was widely read and even adopted as a textbook by several colleges in the mid-nineteenth century and thus can be described as the book that begin the process of "introducing Hegelianism to America."Volume Two contains The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, D.D.: Late President and Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in the University of Vermont; with a Memoir of His Life, edited by Joseph Torrey (1843). Marsh (1794-42), who was reputedly "the first American to study Kant," was a polymath who trained at Dartmouth College and at Andover and Union Seminaries as a classicist, theologian, and philosopher and then served for many years as the President of the University of Vermont. In addition to translating Herder and others, Marsh published the first American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, with an [End Page 229] introductory essay of his own. This work, the first edition of which appeared in 1829, proved to be extremely popular and was instrumental in introducing Kantian and post-Kantian speculation to the New World. Though one of the founders of the Transcendentalist movement in America, Marsh's... (shrink)

In this article, we present for the first time Schelling’s early critique of absolute idealism within his middle metaphysics (1804–1820), which has great relevance and influence on the subsequent course of German philosophy, and, more broadly considered, on later systematic thinking about the categories of unity and duality. We aim to show how Schelling defends a form of metaphysical duality, from 1804 onwards, without relapsing into a stronger Kantian dualism. In this sense, our author rejects both the dualism between (...) nature and spirit, necessity and freedom, as well as the monist-immanent metaphysical stance later associated with Hegelian panlogism. Against Hegel, Schelling increasingly vindicates the reality of the finite and degrades the infinite to mere ideality in a movement that resembles later existentialism. Furthermore, we defend Schelling against the accusation of irrationalism that sections of Hegelianism formulated against him and present the concept of infinity without the notion of totality, which he thinks of, much like Fichte, in the light of the concept of an ‘infinite task’. Schelling’s later criticisms of Hegel are shown to be influenced by his early idealist critique of the period at hand. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis appeals to (...) the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

With Hegel’s metaphysics attracting renewed attention, it is time to address a long-standing criticism: Scholars from Marx to Popper and Habermas have worried that Hegel’s metaphysics has anti-individualist and authoritarian implications, which are particularly pronounced in his Philosophy of History, since Hegel identifies historical progress with reason imposing itself on individuals. Rather than proposing an alternative non-metaphysical conception of reason, as Pippin or Brandom have done, this article argues that critics are broadly right in their metaphysical (...) reading of Hegel’s central concepts. However, they are mistaken about what Hegel’s approach entails, when one examines the specific types of states discussed by the philosopher in his Philosophy of History. Even on a traditional metaphysical reading, Hegel is not only non-authoritarian; he also makes a powerful argument concerning freedom, whereupon the freest society involves collective oversight and the shaping of social structures so as to ensure that they benefit everybody. (shrink)

Although Hegel does not pass up the opportunity to express his deep admiration for specific aspects of the Aristotelian notion of God, he is not interested in giving a concrete account of its systematic significance for hisPhilosophy of Mindas a whole. In this article, I seek to take an overarching perspective on both the Aristotelian God and the Hegelian mind. By contrast to the common practice of focusing on Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle in hisLectures on the History of Philosophy, (...) I first examine the Aristotelian text itself and then focus on Hegel'sEncyclopaedia Philosophy of Mind, in order to explore the coincidence between the two conceptions from a systematic point of view. With regard to Aristotle, I argue that ‘God’ represents the conceptual vanishing point of his philosophy at which all philosophical sciences appear to converge. With regard to Hegel, I show that it is precisely such conceptual convergence of all philosophical sciences that constitutes both the starting and ending points of thePhilosophy of Mind. The result is a novel meta-scientific and non-theistic conception of ‘God’ that provides the means not only to re-evaluate the systematic relation between Hegel and Aristotle but also to reconsider the character, content and aim of speculative philosophy in general. (shrink)

This article proposes that the foundations of Hegel’s contribution to social criticism are compatible with, and enriched by, his meta-theology. His social critique is grounded in his belief that normative ideas – and especially the idea of freedom – are necessarily experiential and historical. Often regarded as a recipe for an authoritarian reconciliation with the status quo, Hegel’s philosophy has been dismissed by some unsympathetic commentators from the left as inimical to the task of social criticism. Much (...) of the reason for this has been the opinion that his systematic approach to philosophy is one underpinned by either a highly unorthodox theism or, more commonly, pantheism. Even scholars who wish to defend Hegel as a social critic have tended to abandon or at least massively downplay his meta-theology. In this article, I argue that it is precisely the emphasis on his original theo-metaphysics that offers a powerful and relevant contribution to social criticism. Hegel then becomes an important contributor, from the tradition of social criticism, to the growing trend in academia and wider society of rethinking the relationship between the religious and the secular, known as post-secularism. The proposition at the centre of his system – that human history and society are necessary moments in the process of divine self-understanding – is not new. But the specifics of Hegel’s concept of God that I am proposing – and, moreover, their implications for his political thought – are new. I propose that Hegel was neither a theist nor a pantheist but, rather, a dialectical panentheist. According to panentheism, God is neither straightforwardly transcendent to nature and history nor immanently identifiable with nature and history, but rather is dynamically and dialectically immanent in the ongoing processes of self-transcendence that are nature and history. If such an interpretation of Hegel’s system is valid then the proposition that his political thought is an exercise in dialectical panentheistic theology is one that is worth making and defending because it has important things to say about his social critique. (shrink)

The article is aimed at comprehending the perception of J. Wahl’s philosophy in Russia. The central role is assigned to the notion of “unhappy consciousness” in Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit” and to the interpretation of this notion in J. Wahl’s philosophy. The analysis of Russian–language studies dealing with his philosophy allows to outline two primary strands of engagement with it: within the framework of “French Neo–Hegelianism”, and within the framework of existentialism. Th e need to renounce (...) this established characteristic of his philosophy is shown. Two arguments are stated in favour of this, conceptual and substantial. As for the former, the restriction of J. Wahl’s philosophy to the two aforementioned frameworks narrows the real horizons of his research. For the latter, the “unhappy consciousness” in J. Wahl’s philosophy besides the tragic–religious interpretation of Hegel’s ideas also contains pluralistic criticism of Hegel’s “monism” as a part of J. Wahl’s own philosophical project of “metaphysical empiricism”. It is argued that treating the entire corpus of J. Wahl’s writings will allow for a more thorough insight into the history of 20th century French philosophy, in particular “French Neo–Hegelianism” and the Franco-German debates concerning phenomenology and existentialism. (shrink)

This book has the modest and practical intention of providing students with “a readable paraphrase” of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and of Marx’s Critique of it. In this the assumption is made that the Ph.R. is difficult beyond need and that it was a reasonable desire of Marx, unfortunately unfulfilled, “to present the philosophy of Hegel in a form comprehensible to the ‘average man’. Hegel certainly had no thought that it was either possible to make speculative philosophy popular (...) or that the “average man” had any need of philosophy, having his appropriate knowledge of the speculative in the form of religion. Hegel looked back to the 18th century as a time when philosophy was popular, the interest of “enlightened” princes and burghers; it could be popular because it was an abstract reason related to a material presupposition and taking its concreter content underived from a tradition it was mostly bent on destroying. Marx is on the whole a man of the Enlightenment who has learned from Hegel to give his materialism a teleological form somewhat in the manner of the Stoics. He is sure Hegel has perversely reversed the true relation of ideas to individual human beings and that it would be a useful work to purge his philosophy of such “mystification”. Kainz’s paraphrase must be thought a similar transposition of Hegel to a more “natural” standpoint. In one way this is not to be thought objectionable since to students in, or barely emerging from, an Anglo-American empirical tradition Hegel is hardly accessible at all unless through Marxism or else Platonism. In another way the loss is very great: the immanent dialectical development of the Ph.R., in which Hegel placed the philosophical importance of the work, is obscured and rendered unintelligible. Instead one has a loose empirical succession which is easier to follow because plausible reasoning replaces what Hegel would think philosophical proof. (shrink)

While the story of Stanislav Petrov – the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who likely saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983 – is often trotted out to advocate for the view that human beings ought to be kept “in the loop” of automated weapons’ responses, I argue that the episode in fact belies this reading. By attending more closely to the features of this event – to Petrov’s professional background, to his familiarity with the warning system, and to his (...) decisions to defy his protocol – it becomes clear that Petrov was not seamlessly working “in his loop,” but reassessing it entirely. I claim that this exhibits a paradox intrinsic to all automated loops: namely, that their optimum function in fact rests on unforeseen human interventions that cannot be reliably codified ex ante, that is, that good judgment cannot simply be “programmed into” their protocols. This dependence, moreover, reveals automation’s ineluctable need for virtue ethics – not in the usual sense (whereby ethics deliberates about, say, possible damages and loss of life), but in the sense that ethical judgment, rightly understood, entails the reassessment of all of the conditions surrounding a decision, including whether a protocol should be followed at all. (shrink)

This work exposes the development of Hegel’s political theory from its origins in Hegel’s reading of Sir James Stewart and the composition of the early theological writings, through the Philosophy of Right. Its principle value lies in showing how careful use may be made of Hegel’s earlier writings in interpreting his mature political philosophy. Avineri describes Hegel’s early dissatisfaction with the understanding of the state as an instrument for the protection of private property, and his attempts to develop a (...) concept of ethical community. Developments of the latter notion are seen in the anti-nationalism of The German Constitution, as well as in the theories of property, class, and representation contained therein. Avineri shows the inappropriateness of ascribing to Hegel a political romanticism, regarding either Prussia or Classical Greece. And in his comments on the System der Sittlicheit [[sic]] and the Realphilosophie, he offers detailed and valuable commentary on Hegel’s early concept of labor. He demonstrates here Hegel’s sensitivity to the complex economic reality of modern society, and shows the early Hegel’s ability to describe labor, class divisions, commodity production, money, and alienation in ways remarkably akin to Marx. Here too Hegel’s notion of the state as that which overcomes the private character of production in civil society and constitutes society as an ethical community is seen. (shrink)

The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered (...) transcripts and manuscripts. Lectures from specific years are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion represent the final and in some ways the decisive element of his entire philosophical system. His conception and execution of the lectures differed significantly on each of the occasions he delivered them, in 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831. The older editions introduced insoluble problems by conflating these materials into an editorially constructed text. The present volumes establish a critical edition by separating the series of lectures and presenting them as independent units on the basis of a complete re-editing of the sources by Walter Jaeschke. The English translation has been prepared by a team consisting of Robert F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson, and J. Michael Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris. Now widely recognized as the definitive English edition, it is being reissued by Oxford in the Hegel Lectures Series. The three volumes include editorial introductions, critical annotations on the text, textual variants, and tables, bibliography, and glossary. 'The Consummate Religion' is Hegel's name for Christianity, which he also designates 'the Revelatory Religion'. Here he offers a speculative interpretation of major Christian doctrines: the Trinity, creation, humanity, estrangement and evil, Christ, the Spirit, the spiritual community, church and world. These interpretations have had a powerful and controversial impact on modern theology. (shrink)

Although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy desires to be postmetaphysical and posttheological, I argue in this paper that it remains structurally theological. Specifically, I argue that Meillassoux’s speculative thesis on the contingency of nature and its laws repeats at a formal level the medieval theological distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. The first part of this paper discusses how this distinction allowed medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus to understand and have faith in the stable (...) contingency of the present order of things in light of divine omnipotence. The second part of this paper discusses how Meillassoux repeats this distinction, intentionally or not, between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power in his attempt to think the absolute contingency of the laws of nature as an effect of hyper-Chaos. Although, unlike the medieval God, Meillassoux’s hyper-Chaos remains fundamentally without reason and devoid of any moral valence, I argue in the third section of this paper that Meillassoux sneaks in an existential faith in the present and future order of things with his appeal to hope in a speculative resurrection of the dead, a move that brings him further in line with the substance of the distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. (shrink)

This meticulous translation of a series of lectures which Heidegger delivered in 1930-1931 on the opening part of the Phenomenology of Spirit marks an important contribution to the works already available that recount his rather punctuated dialogue with Hegel. As such, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit rounds out Heidegger's somewhat murky encounter with Hegelian philosophy, his attempt to think what is unthought in the dialectical "journey" of consciousness. Unlike some of the other works already in translation, these lectures (...) reveal Heidegger's explicit desire to preserve the Phenomenology as a text in its own right and to evoke its latent power without initially seeking to build a bridge between his own inquiry into being and Hegel's speculative philosophy. (shrink)

HEGEL and Whitehead are both prominently associated with speculative philosophy, Hegel with respect to his entire mature work, and Whitehead during the latter phase of his career. An outstanding difference between the two versions of speculative philosophy will be seen to consist in the fact that Whitehead, moving from a position that all knowledge is hypothetical, busied himself with the construction of a forthrightly abstract system. Hegel, for whom "Science can become an organic system only (...) by the inherent life of the Begriff", with certain minimally necessary qualifications, is attempting to arrive at the one system that is concrete actuality. This system is conceived as an organism that undergoes growth and development. Its conception must, nonetheless, in the end be graspable in abstraction as well, on which account it is the universal individual and what for this individual is actual that Hegel intends to set forth. Indeed a principal value, if not the value, of such abstraction, however, consists in that the various stages of the growth of the system may thereby the more readily be retraversed and recapitulated by particular individuals assimilating their cutural heritage and thereby constituting themselves as individuals. (shrink)

No student of Hegel would deny that the meaning of Christ as a religious symbol concerned the Master as a philosopher. In fact the division of Hegelians into a “right,” “center” and “left” was first made by David Friedrich Strauss in terms of the different positions taken about what Hegel’s philosophy implied concerning the historical referent of the Christ symbol. James Yerkes not only attempts to resolve this same issue which proved so fateful to the early Hegelians, but he also (...) sets out to demonstrate what many of them contended, that is, that Hegel’s entire philosophical system can be properly interpreted only in light of his religious convictions about Christ. Yerkes claims that a Christian theological question about “the universal religious significance of the historic Christ event” is at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy, and, furthermore, that Hegel intended his speculative re-enactment of the Begriff of Christianity in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion to provide theologians with a language capable of conveying that universal significance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 485 consent to suffer or die? Consent, contractual obligations, and free acts of commitment certainly have a place in a complete ethical theory. But do they have the only place? If Wolff has consigned certain of Kant's central theses to the deep, he also has managed to salvage and restore others. In The Right and the Good, for instance, Ross argues that it is logically absurd to (...) suppose that we ought to act from a sense of duty. But Wolff argues convincinglythat "what Kant actually says is that our acts have moral worth only insofar as they are done from a certain motive (namely, respect for the law). Their rightness is quite independent of their motive. We have, according to Kant, an obligation to do what is right. We do not have an obligation to perform morally meritorious acts" (p. 81). Wolff also manages to shed light on Kant's analysis of rational agency and the nature of will. He enables us to see more clearly than Kant himself does that "will" does not name a faculty but rather has a home in such phrases as "to have a will" which, in turn, "simply means to be capable of being moved by reason rather than by natural causes.... To be free is simply to be moved by reason" (p. 216). Despite its flaws as a commentary, The Autonomy of Reason contributes significantly to our understanding of Kant and the problems he addresses. Wolff's critique is especially valuable because it attempts to relate Kant's ethics to his metaphysics and epistemology in more than a superficial manner. If it does not always succeed, it never ceases to be provocative, imaginative, and well-argued. The Autonomy of Reason offers us a flesh opportunity not only to grapple with the central problems of Kantian ethics but to face the central issues of contemporary ethics as well. HANS OBERDIEK Swarthmore College Philosophic als System bei Fichte Schelling und Hegel. By Adolf Schurr. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann, 1974, Pp. 192. DM 58) Fichte and Schelling often seem to have existed merely to serve as a bridge between the genius of Kant and Hegel. Whether or not they deserve better can here be left unanswered, but in any case Schurr's study has supported this common conception. It begins with a "Kantian" Fichte, passes through a confused Schelling, and ends with a young and confident Hegel. The particular topic developed by Schurr is the attempts made by Fichte and Schelling to forge a unitary system from the brilliant yet fundamentally unresolved conceptions of the Kantian legacy. The study was initiallyprepared as Schurr's Habilitationschrift at Regensburg University, and it evidences all of the virtues and vices of these advanced forms of doctoral dissertations: it is orderly and firmly documented, virtues that when pressed pass into the vices of a deadening style and an uninspired recital of textual references. Perhaps the best single term encompassing these virtues and vices is "conscientiousness." The study should arouse neither speculative enthusiasm nor scholarly disdain, being principally a direct and uncomplicated exposition of some central principles found in the philosophy of Fichte, the thought of young Schelling, and a single text of Hegel. It covers the brief historical period from Fichte's review of Schulze's Aenesidemus in 1794 to the appearance of Hegel's 1801 study Differenz des Fichteschen und Sehellingsehen Systems der Philosophic. The work, then, is naturally divided into three chapters of uneven length. Were the reader to rely upon pagination alone to determine importance, Fichte leads by far, and Hegel is the least, being granted only nineteen pages. Insofar as each philosopher is confined to his chapter, the length allowed seems more than usually significant. In this regard, as the final chapter on Hegel can hardly be said to touch directly upon Hegel's own conception of a system, the title of Schurr's work could be misleading to anyone more closely interested in Hegel. 486 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The work lacks both a general introduction and a conclusion, not only as separate sections but in any form whatsoever. Certainly the reader is prepared, for whatever unspoken necessity, to surrender such amenities... (shrink)

This survey of the history of Protestant thought in the nineteenth century is founded upon two major methodological principles. The first is the hard-nosed avoidance of the national history approach. In spite of the continuity in certain nations of specific theological traditions there is another sense in which the varying efforts of Protest theology struggled to answer the same questions. Welch chose to ignore, as far as possible, national boundaries and concentrate on what can usefully be called the "Victorian (...) era" historically or in theological parlance the period "between Schleiermacher and Ritschl." By ignoring national boundaries and linguistic divisions Welch is able to discuss Feuerbach, Emerson, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, and the Arnolds in one chapter. This brings us to the second methodological point: Welch has included a number of figures in his survey who are not academic theologians but rather literary men or philosophers, as Coleridge, Emerson, Hegel, the Arnolds, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, etc. What might be a surprise here is the inclusion of the literary types. This work, when complete will compare favorably on the period covered with E. Hirsch’s Geschichte der Neuern [[sic]] Evangelischen Theologie, in Zusammenhang mit der Algemeinen [[sic]] Bewegnungen [[sic]] des Europaischen [[sic]] Denkens. The present book can be supplemented by the author’s God and Incarnation in Midnineteenth [[sic]] Century German Theology in "A Library of Protestant Thought" which contains vital readings of Thomasius, Dorner, and Biedermann. Three points, briefly, in criticism. The treatment of Hegel’s notion of spirit in relation to religion is not quite right. Also, the treatment of Kierkegaard as a right-wing Hegelian is quite surprising after Löwith’s placing of him in the left-wing group in From Hegel to Nietzsche, pp. 110-115. Then too, one questions whether Kierkegaard should be dubbed a "theological conservative".—R. L. P. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Avicenna’s Metaphysics in ContextTaneli KukkonenRobert Wisnovsky. Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 305. Cloth, $65.00.The challenges facing the contemporary writer on Arabic philosophy are many, but none more daunting than that of striking a satisfying balance between faithfully reproducing what is there in the text (alongside a lineage of likely sources, perhaps), and actively engaging the materials philosophically. From (...) among the current crop of scholars, the more cautious will argue that as long as we lack critical editions of even basic works, and as long as ambiguities remain concerning who was reading what, where, and when, any ambitious statements regarding the substance of Arabic thought, its development, and (especially) what its distinctive contributions might be, must remain hopelessly premature. The counterargument goes that by refusing the philosophically impatient the licence to speculate, at least, about the relevance of the materials at hand—however rough and ready—one will end up stifling just those endeavours the philologist hopes to promote. For without the promise of philosophical rewards, what incentive remains for the thankless and endless task of textual refinement and identification of sources? Strides made in late ancient and Latin medieval scholarship seem to indicate that philosophical curiosity serves to feed historical acuity, rather than hinder it. Yet with the study of Arabic philosophy the perceived opposition between philosophy and philology has led to a precious few works escaping charges of being found lacking either in textual or philosophical sophistication, or indeed both.To this select company one may now add Robert Wisnovsky's aptly titled Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context. The author pursues a particularly deft course of action: honing in on themes for whose evaluation sufficient materials are available, then infusing his exposition at every turn with philosophical insight and a scholar's eye for detail, Wisnovsky demonstrates by example what a resourceful scholar can accomplish in this day and age. Wisnovsky takes it as his task to situate the very doctrines Abû 'Alî Ibn Sînâ (980-1037) is most famous for—the essence-existence distinction, the distinction between contingent and necessary existence, and the created and embodied yet ultimately separable perfection of the human soul—in a continuous line of discussion stretching from Alexander of Aphrodisias to the kalâm theologians of Avicenna's own age.The resulting narrative threads together a dizzying array of thinkers and discussions, showing just how fertile the scholarship ranging from late antiquity to Arabic thought was, both considered in its original setting and in terms of the contemporary scholarly imagination. Among other things, Wisnovsky's book constitutes the fullest study to date of the [End Page 112] evolution of the concepts of final and efficient causality in the increasingly Neoplatonising interpretations of Aristotle. The cosmological and metaphysical motifs behind these developments are rightly pointed out by Wisnovsky, and their impact on Avicenna's metaphysics of the soul and his views on process and return receive thorough attention.In the midst of all this, sight may be lost of Avicenna's original achievement, and it has to be said that Wisnovsky does not play this aspect up by much. But this, the reader suspects, is part of the point. In order to appreciate a thinker's intellectual prowess it is not necessary to insist that he or she be conjuring up concepts out of thin air. A great mind may instead be a synthetic one, one that is able to negotiate between various conceptual schemes and commitments, and this is the picture Wisnovsky paints of Avicenna. Avicenna's deep engagement with the Peripatetic tradition is evident to any scholar, yet it is often difficult to determine exactly whose opinions he references, as contending viewpoints are typically introduced by enigmatic preambles such as "if it is said... " or, "some contend." Wisnovsky's attention to how terminological shifts reflect philosophical ones succeeds in demonstrating Avicenna's reliance in general not only on ancient sources, but on al-Fârâbi and the kalâm as well. His subtle analysis of the development of key Avicennian doctrines simultaneously serves to lend credence to the picture that is currently emerging concerning the... (shrink)

This article challenges Honneth's reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2001/2010). Focusing on Hegel's method, I argue that this text hardly offers support for the theory of mutual recognition that Honneth purports to derive from it. After critically considering Honneth's interpretation of Hegel's account of the family and civil society, I argue that Hegel's text does not warrant Honneth's tacit identification of mutual recognition with (...) symmetrical instances of mutual recognition, let alone his subsequent projection of symmetrical forms of mutual recognition onto the various spheres of the Philosophy of Right as a whole. I conclude by indicating an alternative way in which Hegel's text might be used to understand contemporary society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right allows us to provide an array of exciting interpretations of his work. In one interpretation, exemplified by the reactions of Johann Friedrich Herbart (discussed here by Frederick Beiser) and of Karl Marx (discussed here by Jacob Roundtree), Hegel’s holism is a product of a romantic or mystical metaphysics that prioritizes the invisible reality of the Idea over visible realities. In another interpretation (advanced here by Roundtree himself and (...) by Darren Nah, Alan Patten, and Paul Rosenberg), Hegel’s holism is instrumental to preserving individual freedoms or interests by embedding them in a larger cultural or institutional context. A third interpretation, not necessarily incompatible with the second (and exemplified here by contributions from Frederick Neuhouser, Angelica Nuzzo, and Terry Pinkard), treats the Hegelian whole as rational intrinsically, not merely because it is instrumental to other ends. (shrink)

This paper aims to make better sense of Hegel’s Philosophy of Objective Spirit and defend it against the charge of political conservatism and optimism. I will argue for the left Hegelian position in the theological-philosophical respect, thereby leaving the left-right divide in the social-political respect largely open. I will explain that Hegel’s commitment to the inherent rationality of the state and the course of human history as the progress of freedom does not imply blind optimism, since his thesis is not (...) to be taken as a factual description. Hegel’s point is rather a conceptual one: to comprehend the human world means to comprehend it as a holistically rational entity and process, which is the essential nature of comprehending in the context of the humanities. I will further clarify Hegel’s point by introducing relevant ideas from contemporary philosophy of mind and language, comparing it in particular with Davidson’s principle of charity. (shrink)

The period between 1830 and 1848 is not only a period of political upheavals, not only the beginning of the so called Industrial Revolution in Germany, but also an extraordinary philosophical era characterized by Hegel’s scholars. The so called Vormärzphilosophie was dominated by two different schools of Hegelianism. There was one faction which saw in the continuation of Hegel’s speculative system philosophy the intellectual fundament of a modern constitutional state. On the other side stood those “philosophers of the (...) future” like the brothers Ludwig and Friedrich Feuerbach or Karl Marx who worked on a complete break with Hegel’s system of science because of its theological roots. Going back to the idea of an absolute spirit meant from this perspective going back to a non-enlightened school of thinking. The philosophy of future was a philosophy with a strong practical accent as Marx had put into words in his 11th thesis on Feuerbach. First step of this practical program was the secularization, which was first of all an educational program, since the church educated the teachers, wrote the school books and prevented any enlightenment of the people. In the consequence people were not only treated as bad sinners, but also as eternal subject with no right of political participation. So the break with Hegel and the Hegelian theory of a Christian state opened the door to a united and democratic Germany. The way to democracy and unity was long. It took – seen from 1848 – 100 years to give Germany a lasting constitution and 140 years to unite. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be (...) considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

Hegel criticizes Kant's categorical imperative and what he takes to be Kant's social contract theory of political obligation, but these criticisms miss the mark, for Kant is not really a consent theorist, nor is his categorical imperative empty. The most distinct break Hegel makes with Kant's philosophy of right is rather his rejection of a theory of natural rights, a theory central to Kant's Metaphysics of Morals. While Hegel offers a theory of natural right in some sense, he (...) does not think individuals have natural rights. (shrink)

The present collection of essays is devoted to the Christian philosophy of the most prolific and most speculatively ambitious of the Cambridge Origenists, Henry More. Not only did More revere Origen, whom he extolled as a "holy sage" and "that miracle of the Christian world", but he also developed a philosophical system which hinged upon the Origenian notions of universal divine goodness and libertarian human freedom. Throughout his life, More subscribed to the ancient theology of the pre-existence of souls (...) and took issue with the early modern philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Baruch de Spinoza. His vision of God's goodness, experienced in his early school years at Eton, became the cornerstone of an Origenist rationalism which envisaged an extended world animated by divine thought and inhabited by self-moving rational agents. More's philosophy is the crowning attainment of the early modern rediscovery of Origen as well as a neglected major rationalist system in its own right which went on to exert decisive influence upon all subsequent western metaphysics. The essays collected in the first part provide a detailed introduction to More's voluminous writings. After a comprehensive general overview of his metaphysical and ethical system, the essays expound More's historical context and his philosophical development from his early poetry in the 1640s to his mature philosophical and theological prose works of the 50s, 60s and 70s. In addition, the reception of More and Origen in the later Cambridge Origenists and in Isaac Newton is outlined. The second part contains several excerpts from More's influential Latin works first translated into English by the editor. (shrink)

This book is a critique of the impact that systematic ideological distortions have on social life. This critique is developed through a study of the "relationship between philosophical thought and religious dogma in general", since religious dogma is an obvious instance of authoritarian ideology. Moreover, Shanks is especially concerned with the recovery of the Christian tradition, which he argues has been "superficially deformed by such ideology".

The beginnings of Hegel’s interest in “logic” as a branch of philosophy are somewhat obscure. In a lecture of 1830 Schelling claimed that Hegel first began to attend to the subject only because “his friends at the University” suggested that it was a good topic for his lectures because it was being neglected. Schelling’s object by then was evidently to suggest that Hegel’s “logic” had always been a superficial pretense. But Hegel was alive to contradict him. So I think his (...) statement of the facts must be right as far as it goes. I do not therefore believe that Hegel came to Jena with any “logical” manuscripts. In my view, it was Schelling himself—especially in his System of Transcendental Idealism —who sparked Hegel’s interest in the subject. (shrink)

Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" offers an innovative and important account of normativity, yet the theory set forth there rests on philosophical foundations that have remained largely obscure. In "Hegel's Theory of Normativity," Kevin Thompson proposes an interpretation of the foundations that underlie Hegel's theory: its method of justification, its concept of freedom, and its account of right. Thompson shows how the systematic character of Hegel's project together with the metaphysical commitments that follow (...) from its method are essential to secure this theory against the challenges of skepticism and to understand its distinctive contribution to questions regarding normative justification, practical agency, social ontology, and the nature of critique--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 19-37 [Access article in PDF] Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue Michael Gass The Stoics were unique among the major schools in the ancient world for maintaining that both virtue and happiness consist solely of "living in agreement with nature" (homologoumenos tei phusei zen). We know from a variety of texts that both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if (...) not also Zeno, characterized such conduct both in essentialist terms, as a matter of living purposively in a manner natural for the human species, and in cosmological terms, as a matter of living in agreement with the purposes of nature as a whole, this being regarded as identical to Zeus. This is not to suggest, however, that cosmo-theological speculation figured prominently in the ethical systems of the early Stoics. Judging from extant summaries and discussions of Stoic ethical doctrines, those doctrines were justified in a dialectical fashion, not by appeal to facts about the purposive order of nature but simply from an analysis of ethical concepts patterned after similar analyses by earlier philosophers (most notably, Aristotle). It is this kind of learning that Chrysippus apparently had in mind when he maintained that ethics should be studied prior to undertaking a systematic investigation of nature: [T]here are three kinds of philosopher's theorems, logical, ethical and physical.... [W]hat should be ranked first of these are the logical, next the ethical, third the physical; and what should come last in the physical theorems is theology. 1On the other hand, as we learn from the testimony of Plutarch (and also from other indirect textual evidence examined recently by Jacques Brunschwig), 2 [End Page 19] Chrysippus also believed that physics in general and theology in particular yield a quite distinct, demonstrative knowledge of the matters first studied in ethics. A. A. Long and others have suggested that such knowledge was regarded by the Stoics as encompassing not just information about the ways in which virtuous living is encouraged by, and fits into, the wider aims of nature at large but also a deeper understanding of the very essence of virtue. 3 Specifically, virtue is revealed to consist in a conscious and deliberate harmonization of one's actions with the purposes of the divine architect. Thus, under this interpretation of their ethical intentions, the Stoics thought of the initial, analytical approach to ethics as necessarily incomplete even in its treatment of strictly ethical topics; the systematic study of nature was thought to impart additional wisdom regarding ethical matters.In her recent study of ancient ethical theories, Julia Annas seeks to counter this view of the place of cosmo-theological speculation in early Stoicism by arguing that such a religious characterization of virtue is incompatible with the eudaimonism to which all schools of ancient philosophy, including Stoicism, were committed. 4 She concedes that first Cleanthes and then much later the Roman Stoics did regard virtue in religious terms, but in her assessment this represents a radical departure from mainstream Stoic thinking on this subject (which is identified mostly with the views of Chrysippus and his disciples, all of whom were clearly and consistently committed to the eudaimonistic model of ethical inquiry). Annas argues that whereas the Stoic sage was traditionally depicted as a person whose commitment to morally appropriate conduct stems from his own rational reflection on his own needs and interests, a person who identified completely with the aims of the divine architect in his purposive activity would be someone who surrendered his right to decide for himself what his needs and interests are, and who therefore could even be required to act in violation of what he might judge by himself to be crucial to his happiness.In what follows I demonstrate that this argument, often advanced in the literature as a reductio ad absurdum of divine command theories of morality, falls wide of the mark in the present case due to the fact that those Stoics who characterized virtue in religious terms did so apparently because they regarded a complete identification with... (shrink)

“Questioning explanation.” With this method, Doz proposes a “personal” reading of Hegel’s logic. Thus, one should not expect to discover in Doz’ book a close commentary of the Jena Logic or the Encyclopedia Logic, but an explanation dedicated to showing how Hegel’s project is an attempt to complete the history of metaphysics. Hegel’s metaphysics takes the form of a “speculative philosophy” or a “science of logic,” the task of which is to expose the necessary forms of (...) thought. As the science of pure thought or pure science, it is rooted in Aristotelian ontology: Aristotle’s enterprise, later identified as metaphysics, consists in grounding philosophy as a double science: the science of being as being and the science of the unmoved and supersensible essence-substances. Such a double science marks the birth of what Heidegger—to whom Doz acknowledges a “debt”—calls onto-theology. It is Doz’ main claim that the Hegelian logic is the completion of metaphysics as onto-theology. While taking into consideration the specificity of Hegel’s project—viz., to elevate metaphysics to the status of pure thinking, in other words to elevate being to the concept—Doz’ reading is after the “unthought” that governs such a project, an unthought which is precisely to be looked for in Hegel’s metaphysical heritage. Hence the second part of the title, which operates like a guiding thread into the unthought: “The Traditional Problems of Ontology”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Hegel’s political cosmology allows us to set his dialectic-speculative theory of the political world in contrast both to ideal theories and to historicist-positivist theories. Against these positions, Hegel upholds his “realism of the idea”: the claim that a rational world is neither a pre-given whole nor an unattainable ideal, but the dynamic, immanent orientation of reason that continually constructs and animates the world. Hegel’s view of the world thus provides him with a way of reconceiving the (...) relationship between philosophy and actuality. In this view, philosophy is not immune from, or external to, the world it theorizes, but is produced and checked by that world, which it, in turn, produces. (shrink)

In “Violence and Metaphysics” Jacques Derrida suggests that “the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be…to consider false-infinity…irreducible.” Inversely, refuting the charge of logocentrism associated with Hegelian true infinity ( wahrhafte Unendlichkeit ) would involve showing that Hegel’s speculative logic does not establish the infinity of being exempt from the negativity of the finite. This paper takes up Derrida’s challenge, and argues that true infinity is crucial to (...) Hegel’s understanding of ideality as a question of normative authority, which does not fall prey to logocentrism. Through an exposition of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite in Hegel’s Science of Logic , I argue that true infinity is not an ontological category that eliminates division, but rather refers to the metalogical standpoint involved in a philosophical account of determinacy. Although fully achieved at the end of the Logic , the metalogical standpoint that Hegel elaborates in the Seinslogik under the banner of the true infinite already clarifies that determinacy is a product of normative authority that is itself precarious. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology by Robert B. BrandomJacob L. GoodsonA Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. By Robert B. Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 856 pp. $50.00 hardcover.What a feat: an interpretation of G. F. W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that is longer than the Phenomenology of Spirit itself! With 757 pages of text, and reportedly a work (...) that took Robert B. Brandom over 40 years to write, A Spirit of Trust accomplishes much and offers an interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology that mixes epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind.Hegel scholars will be discontent with Brandom’s heavily analytic interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Analytic philosophers will be discontent with attributing to Hegel arguments and insights often attributed to Frege (this happens so often one reviewer says of Brandom’s book that he should call Hegel Fregel—a mix of Frege and Hegel). Scholars of American Philosophy might be the most excited by reading Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust because he goes out of his way to put Hegel in conversation with Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and others who are part of the American philosophical tradition.Such excitement, however, might eventually be tempered when one realizes that Brandom is no defender of philosophical naturalism in A Spirit of Trust. Indeed, waiting until page 499, Brandom claims that the remainder of the book (another 250 pages) involves telling the story of how Hegel connects alienation with reductive naturalism. Brandom’s story involves developing a “nonreductive account of how we should understand the place of norms in the natural world” (499). Once we understand norms in a way that avoids or eschews naturalism, then we overcome the problem of alienation. Whereas Karl Marx blames alienation on capitalism, Brandom blames alienation on naturalism.In addition to the adjective “reductive,” Brandom offers three other adjectives for naturalism: “disenchanted” (see 263), “normative” (see 558), and “scientific” [End Page 97] (see 661–65). According to Brandom, the dominance of scientific naturalism is one of the reasons his interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology is required right now. Brandom thinks scientific naturalism has a stronghold on contemporary philosophy, and Hegel’s Phenomenology offers a corrective to this mistake in contemporary philosophy. Let us take each of these naturalisms in turn.1. Disenchanted Naturalism. Situating Hegel’s Phenomenology in relation to the problems Hegel wanted to address in his own day, Brandom claims: “Another strand of the early modern tradition that Hegel takes up and develops is the disenchanting naturalism about norms”—which is “most evident in the British sentimentalists... who give explanatory pride of place to practical attitudes of normative assessment, of reflective approval or disapproval by a distinctive moral faculty, which they see as... rooted in a characteristic sentiment, typically... benevolence” (263). Brandom admits that Kant also repairs the tradition of British sentimentalism, but one of the themes of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust involves how Kant’s emphasis on autonomy itself gets repaired by Hegel’s focus on recognition. Hence Kant’s repair of disenchanted naturalism remains necessary but insufficient. On Brandom’s interpretation, Hegel’s theory of recognition properly repairs both disenchanted naturalism and Kant’s theory of autonomy.2. Normative Naturalism. Staying with Hegel’s repair of Kant’s philosophy, Brandom finds a version of naturalism in Kant’s thinking as well. This version is normative naturalism, which attempts to “integrate reasons and causes” (558). Brandom claims, “This project, broadly construed, is to provide a response to Kant’s Third Antimony—the challenge to integrate reasons and causes. A significant proportion of Hegel’s claim... should be seen as deriving from his response to this issue of normative naturalism. So the stakes are very high” (558). Brandom’s rhetoric here reflects one of the annoyances of the book: every problem driving Hegel’s Phenomenology is the most important problem driving Hegel’s Phenomenology. The stakes are always high, and Brandom does not signal to the reader any way to rank the problems Hegel addresses in Phenomenology.According to Brandom, Hegel repairs Kant’s normative naturalism by separating reasons... (shrink)

To scholars of Western intellectual history Hegel is one of the most important of all political thinkers, but politicians and other "down-to-earth" persons see his speculative philosophy as far removed from their immediate concerns. Put off by his difficult terminology, many participants in practical politics may also believe that Hegel's idealism unduly legitimates the status quo. By examining his justification of legal punishment, this book introduces a Hegel quite different from these preconceptions: an acute critic of social practices. (...) Mark Tunick draws on recently published but still untranslated lectures of Hegel's philosophy of right to take us to the core of Hegel's political thought. Hegel opposes radical criticism like that later offered by Marx, but, argues Tunick, he employs "immanent" criticism instead. For instance, Hegel claims that punishment is the criminal's right and makes the criminal free. From this standpoint, he defends specific features of the practice of punishment that accord with this retributive ideal and criticizes other features that contradict it. In a lucid account of what Hegel means by right and freedom, Tunick addresses Hegel specialists and those interested in criminal law, the interpretation of legal institutions and social practices, and justification from an immanent standpoint. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This article examines the formation of consciousness among women at the beginning stages of the women's movement. The author analyzes the complexity of pathways to feminism across the political spectrum, comparing women who were active on the Left in Students for a Democratic Society with women active in the leading conservative organization of the 1960s, Young Americans for Freedom. She finds an unexpected division among women in both groups between those who identify discrimination by their male peers and those (...) who do not. The author argues there are three stages in the formation of feminist consciousness: identification of inequality or mistreatment, discovering a language or framing by which to interpret these experiences, and the social construction of a collective identity. Factors for each of these three stages that help or hinder the formation of feminist consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 597-600 [Access article in PDF] Andrew Haas. Hegel and the Problem of Multiplicity. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxii + 355. Paper, $29.95. Jon Stewart. The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 556. Cloth, $69.95. In his study, (...) The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation, Jon Stewart not only analyzes Hegel's Phenomenology in chapter-by-chapter fashion but he also provides a compelling argument as to why even individual sections of the book can only be interpreted in the context of the unity of the work as a whole. [End Page 597]Stewart views the Phenomenology as a continuation of Kant's project in the first Critique, claiming that Kant did not go far enough in uncovering and justifying the necessary conditions of understanding. Thus, Stewart sees the Phenomenology as a transcendental argument. Like Kant, Hegel is concerned with truth and objectivity but in each subsequent chapter of the Phenomenology, according to Stewart, Hegel takes the reader through a different determination of objectivity.Perhaps most important is Stewart's view of Hegel's notion of "Absolute Knowing," the last section of the Phenomenology. Eschewing theological or metaphysical interpretations or interpretations according to which history comes to an end or some type of divine knowledge is attained, Stewart impressively argues that, for Hegel, absolute knowing means that self-consciousness has finally arrived at the point at which all of the conditions for cognition have been unpacked and that self-consciousness sees these conditions in their necessary systematic and developmental unity. As such, "Absolute Knowing" is merely backward looking; self-consciousness comes to realize all of the forms that knowledge has taken in the past and how this past relates to the way in which self-consciousness cognizes at present. Thus, the Phenomenology, on Stewart's view, is a ladder from common sense to science; it completes a deduction of the categories of thought—universality, particularity, and individuality—that are present in all forms of human thinking in all time periods.At the beginning of this work, Stewart summarizes Hegel's life and works, as well as discusses the Kantian background of Hegel's project as a whole. The subsequent chapters of his book parallel the major divisions in the Phenomenology. Each chapter and each of the various subsections within the chapters—again always paralleling Hegel's work—begins with a brief overview of what Stewart sees as the goal toward which Hegel is progressing in the particular section of the Phenomenology. He then provides an account of the "Notion" or paradigm of truth that Hegel presently criticizes. Accordingly, the author addresses the dialectic by which the particular Notion is sublated or overcome. It is in this section that Stewart explicitly sets out whenever possible the In-Itself, the For-Itself, and the In-Itself-For-Itself moments of the dialectic. Stewart always makes an explicit attempt at discussing what is at issue in the dialectical moment, say, either an irreconcilable split between immediacy and mediacy or between universal and particular. Finally, he ends each chapter or subsequent section with a review of what Hegel has done and how this, then, leads into the next section of the work.In the course of this study, Stewart admirably argues for why the Phenomenology should not be regarded as a "patchwork," by convincingly demonstrating the intricate unity of Hegel's Phenomenology. He shows how Hegel always returns to a similar structure—using, in fact, the very same categories—even in some of the parts of the book that scholars or certain schools of interpretation have tended to dismiss. In the chapter of his book that addresses the first formal chapter of the Phenomenology, "Consciousness," Stewart argues that each of the three subdivisions in the chapter focuses on, respectively, 1) being, 2) the one and the many, and... (shrink)

This paper explores abuse received by a Chilean right-wing female politician in tweets produced with the #CamilaPeluche hashtag, which aimed to shame her sexually. The data considers the period of 22 days since the creation and spread of the hashtag, which took place 5 days into the 2019 uprising in Chile. This paper follows a corpus-based critical discourse analysis that examines the most frequently used adjectives, that is, predication strategies, that characterise the politician, as well as their legitimating function (...) through the identification of van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies. Results showed that what started as gendered aggression evolved towards a focus on social class and political stance due to the politician’s characteristics and those of the sociohistorical context where the aggressions originated. Furthermore, it was found that the politician’s anti-democratic values were used to justify abuse against her, presenting it as reasonable. (shrink)