The Relevance of Hegel's Concept of Philosophy

From Classical German Philosophy to Contemporary Metaphilosophy

Luca Illetterati, Giovanna Miolli, Luca Illetterati, Giovanna Miolli

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350162617
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Moderne Philosophie

In a systematic treatment of Hegel's concept of philosophy and all of the different aspects related to it, this collection explores how Hegel and his understanding of his discipline can be put into dialogue with current metaphilosophical inquiries and shed light on the philosophical examination of the nature of philosophy itself. Taking into account specific aspects of Hegel's elaboration on philosophy such the scientificity of philosophy as a self-grounding rational process and his explanation of the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy, an international line-up of contributors consider:
- Hegel's concept of philosophy in general from skepticism, idealism, history and difference, to time, politics and religion
- The relation of Hegel's concept of philosophy to other philosophical traditions and philosophers including Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Jacobi
- Hegel's concept of philosophy with reference to philosophy's relation to other forms of rationality and disciplines
- The relation of Hegel's concept of philosophy to specific issues in present metaphilosophical debates. Reflecting the renewed and widespread interest in Hegel seen in Analytic philosophy and Continental thought, this volume advances study of Hegel's conceptual tools and provides new readings of traditional philosophical problems.

1

Why Hegel’s Metaphilosophy Matters: An Introduction

Luca Illetterati and Giovanna Miolli

This volume is devoted to exploring Hegel’s concept of philosophy, its relevance to current philosophical discussions and its possibility of productively interacting with other philosophical traditions. On this journey, comparisons with contemporary metaphilosophical thought are inevitable. Examining the nature of philosophy forms an essential part of philosophical theorizing today in an ongoing effort to understand (and reinvent) what this discipline is or should be.

For some decades now, we have witnessed a growing interest in Hegel’s speculation and its critical, creative potential to inspire new philosophical positions. This renewed attention to Hegel’s thought has usually been directed at specific parts of his philosophical production. Many scholars, for instance, have concentrated on the Phenomenology of Spirit, drawing on its potential to offer crucial insights into core issues of contemporary philosophical debate, such as self-consciousness, recognition and the sociality of reason, as well as its historicity and its characteristically inferential structure. Others have focused on distinct parts of Hegel’s system, especially on the philosophy of right and the conception of normativity as well as on the philosophy of art, primarily elaborating on the idea of the so-called end of art. Recently, Hegel’s logic has also attracted significantly greater interest, both in terms of its potential proximity to paraconsistent logics and its relation to metaphysics.

This focus on specific themes of Hegelian thought from a perspective that is not merely historical-reconstructive but deliberately places Hegel in a strong relationship with today’s philosophical discussions implicitly presupposes a rediscovery of his distinctive way of understanding philosophical thinking and practice. However, a focused, extended treatment of Hegel’s metaphilosophy – namely, of his conception of what philosophy is,¹ how it develops and how it relates to other disciplines and forms of human production – remains to be done.²

One reason for this absence might be the systematic structure of Hegel’s philosophy itself. In the (not so recent but still provocative) article ‘What Is Hegel’s Legacy and What Should We Do with It?’ (1999), Rolf-Peter Horstmann illustrated an aporetic situation that he thought characterized present-day Hegelian studies. According to Horstmann, the contemporary interpreter of Hegel must deal with an illusory dilemma: either ‘save’ the parts of Hegel’s speculation considered useful and topical, thus renouncing the systematic whole, or opt for the latter, which risks facing some of Hegel’s aspects, principles and convictions that could create serious embarrassment for contemporary readers.³

In the course of Horstmann’s argument, this dilemma soon becomes a dead end. On the one hand, isolating certain aspects of Hegelian elaboration – mostly his sociopolitical thought but also parts of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the introductory reflections to the actual treatises – proves to be fundamentally incorrect, as these aspects are rooted in the very whole that has been discarded. They are what they are, and they show themselves according to the characteristics that Hegel attributes to them precisely because of the speculative totality that supports them, which is articulated according to specific ontological, methodological and epistemological directives. Extrapolating these parts because they are considered useful for the purposes of contemporary reflection is ill-advised, as it ignores (deliberately or not) that their meaning arises from the context in which Hegel inserted them. The underlying assumption of such a discourse is that one cannot consider one part of Hegelian speculation without thereby considering the entire system that has generated it. On the other hand, Horstmann argued that to embrace Hegel’s philosophy as a whole and thus accept the ontological, methodological and epistemological claims that form its backbone is, for a contemporary philosopher, simply inadmissible.⁴ It seems that wherever one wants to go, therefore, the way is precluded, particularly in attempts to update Hegelian philosophy.

The challenge of this volume is to take on the radical character of Hegel’s conception of philosophy – together with its implication for all the aspects related to it (theoretical, historical, ethical, political and connected to art, religion and the sciences) – and explore how it ‘reacts’ to contemporary interrogation and vice versa. Beyond simply making Hegel topical, we mobilize aspects of his ‘philosophy of philosophy’ that may stimulate contemporary thought while also revealing its assumptions that go unquestioned. In this sense, the attempt to account for the relevance of Hegel’s conception of philosophy also entails a critical dimension, capable of bringing to light the limits and idiosyncrasies of how philosophy is understood today.

To this end, this volume offers a wide-ranging account of Hegel’s metaphilosophy from various angles, relating this material to other philosophical traditions and to present metaphilosophical debates. Hegel’s reflections on the nature, scope, articulation, object and method of philosophy can fruitfully interact with contemporary metaphilosophical debates. Specifically, it can significantly contribute to much-discussed topics, such as the scientificity of philosophy and its relation to the natural, experimental sciences; the relation between philosophy and the history of philosophy; and the relation between the theoretical and practical dimensions of philosophy. Before expanding upon Hegel’s contributions to present issues in metaphilosophical debates, however, a brief insight into the nature of metaphilosophy may be useful.

Metaphilosophy and the fate of philosophy

‘Metaphilosophy’ is a recent word for an ancient theoretical practice. At least from Plato’s speculation onwards, philosophy has questioned its own ‘nature’, making it somewhat redundant today to emphasize this aspect (though it could be informative of philosophy when compared with other disciplines).⁵ Contrariwise, the need to isolate a specific name for philosophy’s investigation of itself and to clearly circumscribe the scope of this self-reflective activity is new and symptomatic of the extraordinary fragmentation of twentieth-century philosophical discourse, what Michael Friedman has called ‘a parting of the ways’ (2000). This fragmentation revealed what Arthur C. Danto beautifully portrayed in his essay ‘Philosophizing Literature’ (which is itself of a metaphilosophical kind): ‘Philosophy in the twentieth century may be exactly defined by the kind of problem it has become for itself’ (1986: 167). As a result, the emergence of a ‘larger self-detached perspective’ (Rescher 2014: xi) investigating the nature of philosophy led to the establishment of metaphilosophy as a new, recognizable philosophical branch.

Metaphilosophical inquiry addresses many much-debated issues related to philosophy’s aims, tasks, mission, objects, methods, languages, styles, approaches, limits and prospects. Other topics include the relation of philosophy to other disciplines in general – particularly the natural sciences – as well as its relevance to society and individuals. All these topics are investigated in the attempt to give philosophy ‘a self-image that does it justice’ (Williamson 2007: ix).

However, before even considering the scope of this discipline, one must confront the problematic status of metaphilosophy. As a self-detached analysis, it seems to stand beyond (or above) philosophy. Just as metaphysics has been traditionally understood as a discipline that transcends or exceeds what physics can tell us, the idea of metaphilosophical inquiry might encourage imagining a level of investigation transcending philosophy. Indeed, the question is tricky. Many issues in metaphilosophical debates are somewhat amphibious. Questions about whether philosophy is useful for society, whether it is useful in general or even whether it is a proper science can also be answered with predominantly sociological, classificatory or political tools, thus becoming judgements about philosophy conducted from an external perspective. The risk of interpreting metaphilosophy as an activity outside philosophy leads Timothy Williamson to prefer the expression ‘the philosophy of philosophy’ to emphasize that investigating the nature of philosophy is nothing different from philosophy itself: nothing outside or above it (Williamson 2007: ix). Today, the idea that metaphilosophy is ‘the project of examining philosophy itself from a philosophical point of view’ (Rescher 2014: xi) is well established; however, this was not so obvious at its origins, when the metaphilosophical enterprise primarily represented an effort to ground and justify philosophy.

Indeed, one might wonder why a certain kind of reflection that previously did not need to be explicitly named later emerged with the status of an autonomous philosophical discipline. It is both ironic and profoundly serious, having to do with the (scientific) legitimacy of philosophy, the rethinking of its mission and the demand for a methodological revolution combined with a reconsideration of philosophy’s objects of investigation.

Twentieth-century attempts to reconstruct or even replace philosophy responded to the need for a justification of the philosophical enterprise in its own domain and in terms of societal and scientific legitimation, especially in its confrontation with science and more empirical disciplines. The conceptual terrain for philosophers’ radical questioning of their own discipline was already mature in the first decades of the century. Take works such as Edmund Husserl’s Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (1911) or, on the other side of the ocean, John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920, republished in 1948 with the revised title Reconstruction of Philosophy).

Even though the elements were already in place for the emergence of metaphilosophy and the term itself had already seen occasional use in different languages,⁶ it gained visibility and started to be used in a technical sense in the late 1960s in Anglophone analytic settings. In those years, Richard Rorty was holding a seminar at Princeton examining many of the ideas that would later appear in The Linguistic Turn (1967). His seminar inspired a young scholar, Terrell Ward Bynum, to launch the journal Metaphilosophy in 1970, which aimed to create a venue for scholarly dialogue ‘about the nature of philosophy, or how the different schools or branches of philosophy relate to each other, or how philosophy relates to other disciplines’ (Bynum 2011: 186).

The appearance of explicit metaphilosophy and its connection with both the emergence and criticism of linguistic philosophy highlight a certain structural characteristic of metaphilosophical reflection: its focus on methodological and foundational issues. The ‘view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use’ (Rorty 1992: 3) points the finger at philosophy’s methodology and the status of its objects. In the twentieth century, such problems arose with increased urgency, as the very future of philosophy was at stake. The ultimate question was whether philosophy would continue to exist or would have to give way to another kind of theoretical activity, a Wittgensteinian need for a reconstruction or even a revolution of philosophy that would act ‘against philosophy as a pseudo-science’ (Rorty 1992: 23) in the knowledge that, once this purge was carried out, something like philosophy might no longer exist.

At the same time, the methodological problem was (and is) also linked to foundational concerns. The ‘idea that philosophical problems can be dissolved by detecting the “logic of our language”’ (Rorty 1992: 373) manifested in the search for something prior to and more fundamental than philosophy that was able to advance it or make it superfluous. The linguistic project reflected the problematic outcomes of the debates on these foundational issues that characterized early twentieth-century philosophy and that produced various attempts to place the burden of a foundational role for philosophy on the shoulders of either logic or semantics.

In the 1992 re-edition of The Linguistic Turn, Rorty included two additional essays (meaningfully and gravely entitled ‘Ten Years After’ and ‘Twenty-Five Years After’) in which he expressed his verdict on the failure of the linguistic project, which, according to him, did not succeed in fulfilling its goal to convert philosophy into a strict science (see Rorty 1992: 33). This failure was primarily a methodological bankruptcy, with consequences for the very possibility of defining philosophy and its objects. Such an outcome and the historicist trajectory Rorty had embraced drove him to resist the idea ‘that philosophy is a special field of inquiry distinguished by a special method’ (1992: 374) and by problems distinctively philosophical, ‘as naming a natural kind’ (1992: 371). ‘Questions about “the method of philosophy” or about “the nature of philosophical problems”’ had simply proved to be ‘unprofitable’ (Rorty 1992: 374).

Ultimately, the rise of metaphilosophy is closely related to the need for a revolution in philosophical methods and brings to the foreground issues about the foundation of philosophy, its right to exist and its legitimation on a scientific level.

More recently, despite Rorty’s warning, contemporary (meta)philosophers have not seemed inclined to give up questions about the method and objects of philosophy.⁷ The thorny issue of philosophy’s scientificity still requires much ink and thought, and philosophy’s relation to other branches of knowledge (especially the natural sciences) is a crucial topic today in understanding the limits of philosophy – its capacity to determine and ground itself or its need to rely on other disciplines as crutches. Since the 1960s, much has changed in terms of the details and contents of proposed metaphilosophical theories, but the main questions still persist. Two topics in particular never seem to be exhausted: the question of method and philosophy’s (problematic) scientificity.

Philosophy’s scientificity and the question of method

Philosophy seems to be structurally marked by a frustrating condition. As Husserl put it in Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, on the one hand, philosophy has repeatedly claimed for itself the status of a rigorous science, but on the other, it has never been able to fulfil this expectation. This is not an unprecedented thought in the history of philosophy, which is ‘punctuated by revolts against the practices of previous philosophers and by attempts to transform philosophy into science – a discipline in which universally recognized decision-procedures are available for testing philosophical theses’ (Rorty 1992: 1).

The relationship between the methods of the empirical, experimental sciences and philosophical procedures is one of the most challenging problems philosophy has faced since the ea...

Índice

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Why Hegel’s Metaphilosophy Matters: An Introduction
• Part 1: Hegel’s Metaphilosophy
• Part 2: Hegel’s Metaphilosophy and its Aesthetic, Religious and Historical-Political Dimensions
• Part 3: Hegel’s Metaphilosophy in Context
• Part 4: Hegel’s Metaphilosophy and Contemporary Thought
• Index
• Imprint