Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

David S. Stern, David S. Stern

• Éditeur: SUNY Press
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438444468
• Sujet: Filosofía
• Sous-sujet: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Although Hegel considered his philosophy of subjective spirit to be of particular importance, it has been the focus of little present-day scholarship, particularly in English. Recent editorial work associated with the publication of a new edition of Hegel's Gesammelte Werke and the discovery and translation of a transcript of one of his lecture courses on the topic, however, have set the stage for a fresh encounter with this fascinating and wide-ranging component of his thought. Taking up questions central to the philosophy of mind and body and to the philosophy of psychology, the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit includes discussions of feelings and emotions, consciousness, habit and free will, and rationality—as well as madness, dreams, and the paranormal. Situating Hegel's philosophy on the topic in relation to the rest of his work, to his contemporaries, and to current philosophy of mind and psychology, this volume demonstrates its richness as a focus of study and paves the way for a new direction in Hegel scholarship.

Freedom as Correlation

Recognition and Self-Actualization in Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit

ROBERT R. WILLIAMS

In a recent essay, Robert Pippin asks, “What is the question for which Hegel's Theory of Recognition is the answer?” ¹ His answer to this question is that recognition is bound up with the issue of the nature and possibility of freedom and that Hegel's later writings are extensions, not repudiations, of his earlier Jena view. Pippin's claims about the systematic connection between recognition and freedom, as well as the continuity between Hegel's early and mature position are I believe correct. However, understanding the systematic connection between recognition and freedom does not, in Pippin's estimation, require understanding recognition as a theory of self-consciousness or of intersubjectivity. Instead Pippin claims that the “question for which recognition is the answer” narrows to the question, why does Hegel think that a subject cannot be free alone? In answering this question, Pippin presents an account of Hegel that is historicist and constructivist. According to Pippin, it is his radical historicism and constructivism that leads Hegel to recognition.²

The question is, how can Pippin's antisubstantialist, constructivist, left-Hegelian interpretation of recognition ground the normative aspects present in Hegel's mature account of ethical life? Pippin concedes that his reconstruction is too constructivist and relativist to do justice to the historical Hegel or to the normative issue.³ It is not clear how one moves from a formal constructivist reading of reciprocal recognition to Hegel's mature, nonformal theory of ethical life.⁴ Pippin observes,

Once Hegel's anti-dualism about Geist, and a radical anti-realism or constructivism about norms is conceded, and some version of Hegel's critique of formalism is accepted, then there is just nothing left to ‘counting as a norm’ other than being taken to be one … Without a possible Aristotelian appeal to the realization of natural capacities in order to establish when one is really acting in a practically rational way (realizing one's natural potential) … this turns out to be the only criterion left: one is an agent in being recognized as, responded to as, an agent; one can be so recognized if the justifying norms appealed to in the practice of treating each other as agents can actually function within that community as justifying.⁵

This is circular and inadequate as Pippin concedes. This circularity betokens a formal, nonteleological, and nonholistic view of mutual recognition. Pippin treats normative questions by appeal to preestablished community practices that are broader than and external to recognition. Instead of grounding community and norms, recognition presupposes these.

In his Die Logik des Absoluten, Stefan Majetschak claims that recognition is connected not so much with the nature and possibility of freedom as with self-actualization.⁶ Majetschak observes that for Hegel, the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of being-for-self (Fürsichsein) consists in “being recognized by the other, of counting absolutely for the other.”⁷ The self becomes objective, that is, actual, in the recognition of others. Thus, finding oneself in another's recognition is part of what self-actualization means. As Hegel frequently asserts, freedom means being at home with oneself in another (bei sich im anderen zu sein). Here is a straightforward answer to Pippin's question, Why does Hegel think that a human being cannot be free alone? Moreover, if mutual recognition is a condition of self-actualization, then mutual recognition cannot be void of normative significance, for a cognitively and socially isolated subject could not be free or actual in any significant sense.

Given his programmatic thesis concerning self-actualization in recognition, it comes as a disappointment that Majetschak fails to make explicit the connection between recognition, freedom, and self-actualization. I want to explore that connection. Freedom for Hegel is being at home with oneself in an other. Freedom is actual only in relation, not apart from relation.⁸ But a relational freedom is not absolute. It is a mediated autonomy. A mediated autonomy is a vulnerable, fragile autonomy. Its self-actualization can be prevented, and if it does become actual, its self-actualization is a mediated one.

The normative significance of mutual recognition—what is at stake—becomes clear principally in the negations and distortions of recognition that undermine, prevent, or harm the self in its mediated actualization. Misrecognition not only prevents the I from becoming a We, it also prevents the achievement of proper independence within relationship and full participation in ethical life.⁹ This, rather than the practices of any specific community, constitutes the normative significance of recognition. Recognition is a condition of self-actualization in this sense: it establishes the fundamental intersubjective pattern of self-actualization immanent in the normative institutions ethical life; these institutions are both extensions and conditions of mediated free self-actualization.

In what follows we will focus principally on Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit in 1822–25 and 1827. These lectures have only recently become available, and they are not widely known or appreciated. They constitute the oral elaboration Hegel himself deemed necessary for understanding the compressed paragraph outline of his Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit.

First we will clarify the meaning of the term “self-actualization” by examining Hegel's appropriation and transformation of Aristotle from an 1825 introduction. Next we will examine some texts from Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit 1825 and 1827 that clarify mediated self-actualization through recognition. Mediated self-actualization is an alternative to criticisms that Hegel collapses the other into self-relation and favors unity and identity over difference. Mediated self-actualization also constitutes a reply to criticisms that Hegel reduces the self-relation to the interiorization of preestablished community practices. We shall examine how Hegel understands the self as a correlation of relations, that is, how he understands the self-relation as conditioning possible relations to other, and how relation to other conditions and shapes the self-relation. We shall explore this correlational self-hood as it develops into Spirit as a totality, and as providing the concept of ethical life. Finally we turn to an examination of misrecognition, tragic self-contradiction, which constitutes a “tragic proof” of the vulnerability of mediated freedom and of the normative character of the recognitive solidarities and institutions of freedom constitutive of ethical life.

Hegel's Transformation of Aristotle

Like Aristotle, Hegel presents a teleological, self-actualization account of freedom; unlike Aristotle, Hegel's account of self-actualization includes recognition by other. Aristotle's well-known view of self-actualization as the realization of a natural potential does not define, much less exhaust, Hegel's concept of freedom, because Aristotle has no account of the other, otherness, or negation.¹⁰ Hegel's understanding of the end or telos of human activity is not the Aristotelian eudaimonia and good life, but rather a freedom that is fully actual not in abstract isolated individuals but in community membership and participation.¹¹

Hegel understands the human being roughly in Aristotelian terms as self-actualizing, but not as following an end prescribed by nature. Rather, human being must liberate itself from nature and natural determination. A suggestive text is found in Hegel's introduction to his 1822–25 Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, which I shall quote at length.

Although the Greek has as his portion that which is human, that is, the free spirit, this free spirit has not yet appreciated its infinity. What would be poured forth over the Greek world and what the Greek might gain knowledge of, is not the absolute, holy spirit. Rather it is man as free within nature, as retaining in nature the organ of his consciousness as remaining restricted within nature, however, and while undoubtedly progressing into pure thought only in philosophy, not in religion, being unable to free himself from the abstraction, an entanglement corresponding to immediacy in thought, and not able to come to the concept of spirit itself …

At the same time the task [of knowing spirit] presents itself to us in a manner which is different in many respects, for it is precisely through the raising of our consciousness to the consciousness of infinite spirit—a raising which began in religion—that our general standpoint is a higher one. It is through this standpoint that the absolute spirit has confronted the spirit which used to be understood as the human spirit, and through this comparison the latter has been reduced to a finitude, i.e., to a limited natural spirit. On the other hand, it is through that very relation which comes into effect with that comparison, that the human being has gained a wholly free foundation in himself, and established for himself a different relation to nature, namely, a relation of independence.¹²

Hegel regards Greek spirit as limited in its consciousness of freedom, or as spirit in its immediacy.¹³ The infinity of spirit was not yet appreciated; here freedom meant realizing ends prescribed and predetermined by nature. Spirit comes to a deeper, more profound sense of itself in Judaeo-Christian religion, which draws a distinction between God and world. In light of this distinction, the earlier Greek view of freedom is relativized, reduced to a freedom within nature.

According to Hegel, the raising of consciousness to spirit's proper infinity begins in religion; in religion absolute spirit confronts the human spirit. In comparison with infinite spirit, human spirit becomes mortal finitude. In the same relation that limits it to mortal finitude, spirit also discovers a foundation within itself by virtue of which it can become independent of nature.¹⁴ Freedom is now understood as liberation of spirit from its immersion in nature and natural ends. Spirit's infinity consists in its capacity to be self-grounding and self-determining. The life and death struggle for recognition is the beginning of the liberation of spirit from subordination to nature. In the life and death struggle, self and other place their natural existence at risk. This struggle shows that human spirit is not restricted to realizing ends prescribed by nature. The human being has a natural origin, but in this condition it is not yet what it ought to be. The human being must transcend nature and complete itself through freedom, namely recognition, and this is part of what self-actualization means.

Hegel's text continues:

The spirit which we are considering here is thus placed as a middle between the two extremes, nature and God—between a point of departure and a final purpose and goal. The question what is spirit, contains two questions, namely, whence does spirit come and whither is it going! … Where does it come from? It comes from nature. Whither is it going? It tends towards its freedom. What spirit is is just this movement of liberating itself from nature. This [movement] is its very substance, so that it is not permissible to speak of it as a fixed subject which does this or brings about that … [T]he activity of spirit is its substantiality, its being is actuosity [Actuosität].¹⁵

The human spirit is a middle between nature on the one hand and God on the other. Precisely because the human being has to liberate itself in order to become itself, the human being has no fixed or given nature, but is restless activity.¹⁶ Nevertheless, it has a goal or vocation. While it is self-determining, the human being is not absolutely self-creating; rather, it is both dependent in relation to God and independent in relation to the world and others. The latter independence vis à vis the world is grounded in the former relation of dependence on God: “Generally speaking, the highest independence of man is to know himself as totally determined by the absolute Idea; this is the consciousness and attitude that Spinoza calls amor intellectualis Dei.”¹⁷ This dependence does not suppress, but rather grounds, freedom and summons the human being to its task and vocation. The human being completes itself in freedom by creating a realm of substantial, actualized freedom, a cultural world of spirit produced from within spirit itself as a second nature.¹⁸

Recognition as Negation of Negation: Counting for Something

The starting point of Hegel's analysis of recognition is the collision between self and other, the zero point of their mediation. The account of recognition begins at a preethical level of indeterminacy and mutual externality in which each regards the other merely as a finite obstacle to be eliminated. The process of recognition proceeds through the life and death struggle, the halfway house of master and slave, and is consummated in mutual recognition. Each phase or Stufe of the process of recognition has ethical significance, ranging from the preethical violence of the life and death struggle of the state of nature, to relations of domination—mastery and servitude—founded on coercion, to the mutual realization of freedom as a social infinite in mutual recognition. Mutual recognition is the consummation of the process, because only in it do “I find myself in another person; for this other I count for something, who in turn counts for me.”¹⁹

Hegel begins with an account of the doubling of self-consciousness. This doubling (Verdoppelung) is both an intrasubjective doubling within consciousness and an intersubjective doubling ...

Table des matières

• Title Page
• References and Abbreviations
• Editor's Introduction
• Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation: The Systematic Beginning of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit
• Hegel’s Naturalism or Soul and Body in the Encyclopedia
• How the Dreaming Soul Became the Feeling Soul, between the 1827 and 1830 Editions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: Empirical Psychology and the Late Enlightenment
• The Dark Side of Subjective Spirit: Hegel on Mesmerism, Madness, and Ganglia
• Hegel on the Emotions: Coordinating Form and Content
• Awakening to Madness and Habituation to Death in Hegel’s “Anthropology”
• Awakening from Madness: The Relationship between Spirit and Nature in Light of Hegel’s Account of Madness
• Between Nature and Spirit: Hegel’s Account of Habit
• The “Struggle for Recognition” and the Thematization of Intersubjectivity
• Freedom as Correlation: Recognition and Self-Actualization in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit
• Hegel’s Linguistic Thought in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: Between Kant and the “Metacritics”
• The Psychology of Will and the Deduction of Right: Rethinking Hegel’s Theory of Practical Intelligence
• The Relation of Mind to Nature: Two Paradigms
• Contributors