Fragments on Hegel’s Science of Logic
One has to marvel at the breathtaking ambition and stupendous folly of the Science of Logic; that Hegel, armed only with his idiosyncratic method of immanent deduction and dialectic, would dare attempt to trace the logical structure of experience from its lowest foundations in empty, indeterminate abstraction all the way to its uttermost peak; through the vast manifolds of nature and objectivity and at last unto the Godhead itself, all in one great, self-consistent, and architectonically-complete demonstration. The Science of Logic is a Tower of Babel built by one man.
The absurdity of the endeavor and the complete inadequacy of his intellectual toolkit makes itself felt on every page as his system struggles to hold itself together under its own enormous weight. It does so largely by relying on a core set of titanic, nebulous categories. In a single paragraph, I counted Hegel using the word Grund in at least four different ways (cause, reason, ground, and basis), as though the fact that one German word includes this diversity of meanings can do the work for us of binding together all of its manifold registers into a single concept.
Here, I think Hegel fully earned Schopenhauer’s scorn, who remarked in his own infinitely clearer, infinitely more reasonable, infinitely less profound treatment of Grund that Hegel can’t even keep straight the difference between reason and cause.
**
Science of Logic is not a conventional work on the formal laws of deduction and so forth. Hegel refers to such thinking as “the object of universal aversion and disgust,” (682) and observes that the “laborious study of syllogistic formulae” is as necessary for rational thought as the study of physiology and anatomy are for walking and digesting.
If the science of celestial bodies is to have the slightest value, it must concern itself not just with the laws and mechanics of heavenly motion; it must first ask whether or not the stars exist, and if so, what they are. Yet I was once told by a professor of formal logic that whether or not we can determine the truth value of propositions in principle is not of concern to logic.
In this I fully agree with Hegel: a logic that ignores fundamental issues of existence and knowledge is necessarily deranged.
**
A central concern of Science of Logic is the analysis of composites, variously approached as the relationship between a thing and its parts, individuals or particulars versus universals, quantitative determinations of objects of the same type, and so forth.
More than anything else, Hegel is interested in synthesis. Analytic cognition is easily understood; that things can be thought of in terms of their parts. It is more difficult to understand how it is that we cognize composites as unitary wholes–especially when there is a puzzling fluidity to how we effortlessly decompose and recompose parts and wholes, moving up and down an endless hierarchy of parts and their parts, with each object at every level appearing as a simple object in itself.
Hegel only notes this in passing, but I think it’s key to understanding his philosophy: the ultimate source of the dialectic lies in the a priori synthesis of the concept. With it, “Kant possessed a higher principle in which a duality in a unity could be cognized, a cognition, therefore, of what is required for truth” (SoL 594). By virtue of a priori synthesis, a concept subsumes its parts into a composite that is both the same and different as the sum of those parts.
**
If we are to believe the published student notes, Hegel made the following comment on section 213 of his 1830 Encyclopedia:
The purpose of philosophy has always been the intellectual ascertainment of the Ideal; and everything deserving the name of philosophy has constantly been based on the consciousness of an absolute unity where the understanding sees and accepts only separation. It is too late now to ask for proof that the Idea is the truth. The proof of that is contained in the whole deduction and development of thought up to this point.
Would that Hegel were so clear in his own writing. But if we take his student at their word, then the fundamental impulse motivating the Logic, which Hegel himself regarded as the self-movement of thought through the dialectic, is the impulse toward unity. And, if the idea means anything at all–and it’s not certain to me that it does–then it means unity.
The synthesis is the essence of creation, consciousness, spirit, and life. “Something is alive only insofar as it contains contradictions within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradictions within it.”
**
Hegel’s theory of absolute idealism exhibits several core ambiguities that may be unresolvable. It is my view that he crafted his system precisely to preserve these ambiguities.
How are we to take his account of concepts as truly-existing and constitutive, of ideas as the union of the subjective concept and objectivity? In what sense is Hegel’s system “idealist”?
I will consider three possible interpretations. The first “deflationary” reading would argue that the intelligibility of phenomena is rooted in the fact that the dynamics of nature are in themselves rather cognition-like. This reading is the easiest fit with modern complexity theory and systems analysis. It would hold that the absolute idea refers to the sum total of self-organizing and emergent phenomena of nature, of which human consciousness constitutes a conspicuous example, and the epistemic terms Hegel used to describe it are essentially metaphors that were ready-to-hand. This account might draw support from Hegel’s analysis of life, or from his characterization of the germ of life, which can easily be read as a literal description of DNA. It could find support from his argument that natural drives result from the self-movement propelled by the contradictions inherent in the concept of the organism.
The second “phenomenological” reading would emphasize Hegel’s insistence that reality as such is always already registered by consciousness. He amplifies Kant with his emphatic denial of the intelligibility of the Kantian thing-in-itself, and argues that conscious experience is not just the only actuality available to philosophical analysis, it is the only actuality whatsoever. Phenomena are ideal in the sense that reality always necessarily appears to consciousness.
A third “theological” reading would hold that human consciousness as such in some deep sense does enjoy a privileged ontological status and constitutive role in the universe, not just phenomenologically, but cosmogonically. Such an interpretation may be favored by those who are inclined to interpret absolute spirit in theistic terms. In this reading, the entire Science of Logic could essentially be read as a commentary on the Gospel of John or as the last great medieval logical proof of God’s existence.
I am not particularly comfortable with this reading, but it would be difficult to disprove. Consider, for example, Hegel’s repeated defense of the ontological proof of God’s existence, or passages like this:
Accordingly, logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil, and in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature and a finite mind. (50)
And:
The concept is not merely soul, but free subjective concept that is for itself and therefore possesses personality–the practical, objective concept determined in and for itself which, as person, is impenetrable atomic subjectivity–but which, none the less, is not exclusive individuality, but explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other it has its own objectivity for its object. All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavour, caprice and transitoriness; the absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth. (824)
And:
Hence logic exhibits the self-movement of the absolute Idea only as the original word, which is an outwardizing or utterance [Äusserung]….(825) [compare to John 1:1]
And:
The second negative, the negative of the negative, at which we have arrived … [is] the innermost, most objective moment of life and spirit, through which a subject, a person, a free being exists. (835-6)
Why does Hegel insist on characterizing the absolute in terms of personhood? This is, of course, the very heart of Christian dialectic. He does not mention trinitarian theology or Christology in Science of Logic, but it is obvious that his dialectical thinking was strongly influenced by them. One can trace the development of this influence in his early essay The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in its long discussions of the John gospel and the spiritual community unified in the holy spirit. (Has the relationship between the holy spirit (heilige Geist) in the New Testament and Hegel’s use of the term Geist ever been analyzed? There are obvious deep connections.)
All three possible interpretations find support in Science of Logic. To some degree, they may be three ways of saying the same thing. We can certainly ask: does the Logic reduce the belief in God to the absolute idea or does it elevate the absolute idea to the level of God? But on one level, this question is merely semantic, in the same sense that it ultimately doesn’t matter much whether one calls Spinoza a pantheist or an atheist; either substance is God or God is substance.
“Philosophy has the same content and the same end as art and religion;” Hegel wrote, “but it is the highest mode of apprehending the absolute Idea, because its mode is the highest mode, the concept.” (824) That is to say, on one level, Science of Logic is an explication of what art and religion are ultimately getting at.
**
The problem of cognizing phenomena as unities is ultimately the basis for Hegel’s theory of dialectics, which I find the most important contribution of his wide-ranging philosophical labors by far.
Dialectic was a kind of art of contradiction practiced in the ancient world. It was returned to philosophical prominence by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he analyzed four foundational philosophical problems by describing how they spawn what he called antimonies, or contradictory propositions that can both be proven to be true. For example, the age-old problem of free will versus determinism arises from the antimony that we can prove both that the everything that is must be the effect of a determinate cause, and that some actions are freely undertaken.
Kant argued that the paradoxical quality of the antimonies stems from the mistaken attempt to determine objective truths about reality using pure reason, which reaches only to the boundaries of our experience. When we reason about space and time, we can only deliberate about our own experience, and in seeking to form conclusions about the world in itself, reason oversteps its authority and cannot resolve its own claims.
Hegel praises Kant for returning the eye of philosophy to dialectic, but is critical of his use of it. In his reading, Kant purports to “solve” the contradictions generated from the antimonies by simply moving them from objective reality to subjective experience, as though contradictions in experience are more permissible than contradictions in objective reality.
But the deeper mistake, in Hegel’s view, is that Kant, like most philosophers, fundamentally misunderstands the implications of dialectical reasoning in assuming that it demonstrates contradiction in order to refute; that is, that dialectics is a form of reductio ad absurdum. What dialectics in fact demonstrates is that any concept whatsoever necessarily includes contradictory determinations. Any object conceived in terms of unity or difference necessarily gives rise to contradiction, which is intrinsic to thought.
**
In Hegel’s view, the law of identity and the law of the excluded middle are not legitimate foundations for philosophical thought, they are merely postulates of an empty formalism that is incapable of true thinking. For example, he argues the law of identity stated as “A is A” already contains a contradiction, because the first A is a subject and the second A is a predicate. (Note: to object that A in itself is neither would be another form of asserting the thing-in-itself. That is, there is no inherently-existent A that is not mediated by such determinations.)
To my considerable surprise, Hegel offered a persuasive refutation of the law of the excluded middle, which states that all things are either A or not A. For any set of contradictory pairs–say, “hot and cold”–this law can be reframed as “All things are either positive or negative A.” Having put it in those terms, in each case A itself is necessarily both and neither A or not A. That is, Temperature is neither hot nor cold.
This gives a clear view of the character of synthesis that arises from Hegel’s dialectical reasoning; analysis moves to a higher logical level and the contradictory terms are enfolded in a new, higher perspective that is both richer and more determinate than the preceding level. Confusion of terms on different logical levels generate hidden category errors, which Hegel believes are a hobgoblin of the history of philosophy and its many Gordian knots.
In this system, all concepts necessarily subsume, or, to use his term, sublimate, the constituent terms on which they depend. Conceptual thought forms general categories that both include and annul their moments or parts, which are are preserved within the new concept, but only implicitly, just as hot and cold are implicit in the concept of temperature. And any concept whatsoever includes a synthesis of this kind; that is what concepts are. The concept of the wheel includes the concepts of tire and axel, but not explicitly.
**
The nature of dialectical thinking is misunderstood when we think its contradictions disprove. Zeno’s paradox of motion, for example, did not disprove motion. Rather, it forces the recognition that our concept of motion necessarily includes contradictory determinations. We must simultaneously affirm that a moving object traverses a continuous region of space as well as the fact that at any specific instant, we must be able to cognize a flying arrow as existing at a determinate place P and at time T. The continuous and the discrete conceptions of space contradict one another, but they are both essential moments of our concept of motion, and both are sublimated by it. Insoluble philosophical paradoxes often come from attempting to isolate and reify concepts that are dialectically entangled.
**
Much of what Hegel objects to in the Kantian determination of the thing-in-itself is the limit it places on knowledge of truth. He criticizes Kant at length in the Phenomenology for depriving us of the philosophical concept of truth that we should want, if such an objection can be called a “criticism.” When it comes to truth, what we should want has no bearing on the matter.
And much of Hegel’s Logic is in fact an attempt to practice philosophy in the grand old way, to do metaphysics as it was done before Hume and Kant, in the manner of Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz, only now we are to call it transcendental logic or immanent deduction. It should therefore come as no surprise that Hegel’s system as a whole should strike us in certain key respects as monstrous and bizarre. Consider, after all, the metaphysics of Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz; only the most ardent believers in their own reasoning could confidently defend the eternal Idea, God as self-given substance, or the monad. And only Hegel could follow his own immanent deduction to his nebulous account of the Idea without the slightest reservation.
At the pinnacle of Hegel’s system, we might feel a vertigo and a longing for the uncertainty built into the heart of Kant’s first Critique. It is there to serve, after all, as a corrective to our own lack of epistemological humility, and we might reflect that such limits are necessary for thought.
**
Where Hegel tends to treat the Kantian thing-in-itself as an indefensible foundation of experience, I tend to see it as a limiting concept. Obviously the “thing-in-itself” is not really a “thing,” but what else are we supposed to call it?
**
Many of the core ideas of systems theory and the science of self-organization are clearly anticipated by Science of Logic, sometimes in surprisingly-detailed and specific accounts. These include:
Emergence: What systems theorists call emergence is a central focus of this work. In Hegelian terms, each object can be cognized as a whole which sublates its various moments; Hegel’s term, borrowed from Schiller, for parts that are both subsumed and annulled into larger, supraordinate objects which possess qualities and dynamics that are not entirely reducible to the sum of the parts.
Complementarity: A core feature of general system theory is the view that descriptive models necessarily divide phenomena into the synchronic (atemporal) laws that govern their dynamics and the diachronic unfolding of the material objects of description in time according to those rules. Per systems theory, this distinction is made on the level of description and modeling, and the attempt to treat synchronic and diachronic elements of a system as though they are discrete in themselves leads to conceptual paradoxes and modeling errors. This understanding is entirely included in the Hegelian dialectic.
“It from bit”: Hegelian idealism is ultimately an attempt to provide a philosophical model for what the physicist John Wheeler would later characterize as the information-theoretic origins of reality. In his understanding of the concept and the idea, the dynamics of nature are profoundly mind-like, such that they have an ideal character in themselves, and not merely insofar as they are objects of human awareness.
It is not easy to account for this deep resemblance. Other than the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, I am not aware of any major systems theorist who has read Hegel, even among those who are more philosophically-inclined. Stuart Kauffman does not include a single reference to Hegel in At Home in the Universe, while J. Scott Kelso and David Engstrøm mischaracterize his philosophy in The Complementary Nature. It is possible that Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varlea were aware of Hegel, but he is not mentioned by the authors in Autopoiesis and Cognition, despite the fact that Hegel’s movement from life to cognition in the final section of Science of Logic resembles their core argument in key respects.
To some degree, I think the similarity is attributable to the general structure of the dialectic, which has been independently discovered and characterized several times in the history of science and philosophy. To a certain extent, the dialectic characterizes a set of related concepts that imply one another, when considered deliberately and systematically.
**
Of all of Hegel’s bad tendencies–and he possessed a large number of them–his architectonic impulse is probably the worst, and the most destructive to his thought.
First and foremost, we should doubt that our own understanding is adequate to the task of giving a systematic account of all that we know. This is the meaning of Nietzsche’s word: “The will to a system lacks integrity.”
The bulk of what readers find incomprehensible in Hegel is his attempt to demonstrate the necessity and completeness of his system, and to move through dialectical maneuvers from being to becoming, from quality to quantity, and so on up the chain to the absolute idea. The prose in which he describes this logical maneuvering comprises a unique kind of jargon-saturated calculus that is replete with massive ambiguities, but which he presents as though it forms the very heart of his system’s scientific character. It looks like this:
This yields the following more precise definition of the Idea. First, it is the simple truth, the identity of the concept and objectivity as a universal in which the opposition and substance of the particular is dissolved into its self-identical negativity and is equality with itself. Secondly, it is the relation of the explicitly subjectivity of the simple concept and its objectivity which is distinguished therefrom; the former is essentially the drive to sublate this separation, and the latter is the indifferent positedness, the subsistence that is in and for itself null.
Discourse of this kind is not just “difficult,” it is not merely technical language of a kind that must be mastered in any high-level discussion, such as we might find in the work of Heidegger or Derrida, for Wittgenstein or Frege. Rather, it poses deep philosophical problems in itself in ways that should be evident to the critical reader of the Logic. One can follow along with many of these discussions, as far as it goes, but when Hegel writes in this manner for pages on end, as he frequently does, it becomes impossible to decode what the intended referents of his statements are, and the whole rational character of his argument breaks down. The proof of this is the well-established fact that no two expert interpreters of Hegel are likely to fully agree on the meaning of a single page of his works.
Hegel follows his abstractions into analyses of the abstractions themselves, spawning second- or even third-order discussions, and the result of all this is that it produces artifacts that have no meaningful conceptual referent in themselves, but are merely artifacts of his calculus. Especially in the second major division of the Logic, treating the Doctrine of Essence, many of his core concepts cannot be understood other than as essentially reified dynamics of elements of his system. They lack what we would call construct validity in the sciences, referring to no observable or describable phenomenon, and only understandable in their own terms.
**
The synthesis is creation, consciousness, and life. It is the mechanism of sublimation. The root of the dialectic is in the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, which, Hegel tells us, allows us to cognize contradictory terms in a single concept.
“Something is alive only insofar as it contains contradictions within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradictions within it.” This is essentially what Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela describe as autopoiesis. Elements interact such that the sum total takes on its own autonomy, takes on qualities that are not reducible to the sum of the parts, which have become moments that are preserved within the new whole.
Hegel describes the transition from a mere assemblage of parts construed mechanistically to an actual individual with its own determination in the following terms:
The empty manifoldness of the object is now gathered first into objective singularity, into the simple self-determining middle point. Secondly, in so far as the object retains as an immediate totality its indifference to determinateness, the latter too is present in it as unessential or as an outside-one-another of many objects. As against this immediate totality, the prior or the essential determinateness constitutes the real middle term between the many interacting objects; it unites them in and for themselves and is their objective universality. (from di Giovanni’s translation, 641)
For Hegel, concepts are an instance of what Carl Jung calls “uniting signs.” This is why numinous characteristics leak out of the unconscious in his discussion of concepts, as in his following characterization of universals:
The universal is therefore free power; it is itself and grasps its other within its embrace, but without doing violence to it; on the contrary, the universal is, in its other, in peaceful communion with itself. It is called free power, but it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness [freie Liebe und schrankenlose Seligkeit], for it bears itself towards its other as towards its own self; in it, it has returned to itself. (603)
Also:
Life, ego, spirit, absolute concept, are not merely universals in the sense of higher genera, but are concretes whose determinatenesses, too, are not species or lower genera, but genera which, in their reality, are absolutely self-contained and self-fulfilled. (605)
At the same time he stresses the creative power of the concept. Following Kant’s theory of the unity of the apperception, Hegel argues that the unity or totality imbued by the concept is itself the unity of the subject, which takes the form of each concept in the act of cognition. Each act of unification or sublation is therefore an act of self-unity.
**
Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka philosophy should be carefully considered as an attractive alternative to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Nagarjuna established the dialectic through providing a catalog of reasonings illustrating the contradictions that adhere to a variety of common categories, and his follower Chandrakirti abstracted from this collection to produce two general patterns of analysis capable of demonstrating dialectical contradictions in any given object. In the first analysis, Chadrakirti demonstrates that a thing cannot be viewed as either the same as or different from its parts; in the second, he demonstrates that a thing cannot be considered either the same as or different from its causes and conditions.
Their approach bears close similarity to the skeptical and Eleatic analyses that Hegel admired, and there are probably historical connections at work here. Pyrrho, the founder of classical skeptical philosophy, was said to have been a great admirer of the yogic philosophers of India.
In comparison with Phenomenology of Spirit, this approach loses the deep historical consciousness that is so important to understanding the unfolding of spirit in time. But this loss of historical analysis is hardly felt in Science of Logic, which generally analyzes the logical structure of categories synchronically, and is not much concerned with philosophical tenets in history.
**
The critical reader may discern that despite its self-presentation, the Science of Logic does not persuasively establish a system. The content is far too heterogeneous in nature to be seriously viewed as a consistent set of deductions. This becomes increasingly clear in the later chapters, However the book may appear in the table of contents, the “philosophical encyclopedia” frame he would later use is more appropriate here, and the reader will create needless and substantial interpretive difficulties for themselves if they try to understand this work as some kind of unified whole or totalizing statement.
**
A note on A. V. Miller’s translation:
Miller’s translation is very useful in parsing the often-difficult German syntax into something resembling readable English, but it has severe downsides. This edition lacks a glossary and includes very few parenthetical comments or footnotes to indicate German originals, which is a shame, because his translation equivalents are often misleading. His use of “Notion” for Begriff is well-known, but more disturbing is his inconsistent handling of technical terms. For the first half of the book he renders Dasein as “determinate being,” and then explicably shifts to using “existence” in the second half, no longer distinguishing it from Existenz, and without so much as a footnote. In Hegel’s final discussion of dialectic (832 ff.), Miller renders “Gegenstand” as “subject matter” instead of “object,” which is quite wrong in ways that have important philosophical ramifications. It is objects that are determined by concepts and which cannot exist without them, not merely the content of our discussion or analysis.
Miller uses “superior” for höher when Hegel clearly meant “higher” in the sense of “more abstract.” His translation of Trieb as “urge” instead of “drive” is a bit odd, but not so odd as his rendering of erfüllt as “pregnant” instead of “fulfilled” or “completed”. Etymological relationships between technical terms (which abound in this book) frequently pass unnoted.
For what it’s worth, my cursory review of the new Cambridge Di Giovanni translation suggests that it is not much better, though it does at least include more of the standard scholarly apparatus. This came as a surprise to me, as the Pinker translation of Phenomenology of Spirit in the same series marks a major improvement over Miller’s edition in accuracy and clarity. Whichever translation you use, if you understand even a little German, it is worth taking care and verifying important passages or terms. My copy is filled with crossed-out words and margin notes.
In the quotations I provide in this review, I change all references to Begriffe to “concepts” and similarly make various corrections when they seem important.
Georg Trakl’s “The Beautiful Town”
The Austrian poet Georg Trakl was a major talent who died of at the age of 27, broken by his experiences as a medical officer in World War I. He left a small body of distinctive work that deeply influenced many German-speaking poets, including Paul Celan. No translation can preserve both his uncanny imagery and his moving lyricism; I’ve focused on the former at the expense of the latter.
Old sunlit squares fall silent.
Deeply spun in blue and gold,
Gentle nuns rush dreamily
Beneath the humid, silent trees.
From brown, brightly-lit chapels
Gaze pristine images of death,
Great princes’ ornamented shields.
Crowns shimmer in the chapels.
Horses leap from the fountain.
Flower-claws threaten from trees.
Whirled by dreams, the boys play
Quietly evenings at the fountain.
Girls are standing at the gates
Looking shyly in on colorful life.
Their moist lips quake
And they wait at the gates.
Bell sounds flicker tremulously,
Marching beats echo and awaken.
Strangers listen on the steps.
Organ sounds high in the blue.
Bright instruments sing.
Through the garden’s lattice of leaves
Whirrs the laughter of beautiful women.
Softly young mothers sing.
Clandestine breath at flowering windows,
Perfume of incense, tar, and lilac.
Flickering silver weary lids
Through the flowers at the windows.
Schopenhauer’s ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’
Arthur Schopenhauer originally wrote On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason [Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde] as his doctoral dissertation, and later leveraged the work as the assumed context for his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, which he described as a continuation of Fourfold Root.
The principle of sufficient reason essentially states that all things that are must have a reason, and the goal of Schopenhauer’s study is to properly explicate this core principle, which he regards as not only the basis for any possible explanation, but also the root condition for the intelligibility of the world as such, for “understanding” a thing means that we know the necessary conditions by which it came about or the reasons it must be true.
Now, note that these are two different things – the material cause of an external object of knowledge, and a logical reason for believing a thing must be so. Schopenhauer argues that despite the absolute centrality of the concept of necessity for explanation in philosophy, no one had yet provided an account of the principle that clearly differentiates its various modes. For the word “reason” [Grund] is ambiguous in German just as it is in English; it can mean both material cause and reason, where the first is an ontological concept, and the second is an epistemological concept.
Schopenhauer finds in a brief historical survey that key philosophers such as Aristotle have recognized this distinction, but none have provided an account of the principle that both a) differentiates and explains its different modalities, and b) recognizes the underlying unity of all the various expressions of this principle.
As the title suggests, Schopenhauer argues that the principle of sufficient reason has four different modes that correspond to four different kinds of objects of knowledge. With respect to external, material objects, it describes law of causality; with respect to concepts, it describes the laws of logical proof; with respect to mathematical and geometrical objects, it describes reasoning in terms of numbers and space; and with respect to living beings, it describes the motivations that bring about acts of will.
There is an underlying unity to all of these modalities that explains the similiarity between them, and which warrants our saying there is one principle with four aspects rather than four different principles. This link is key for understanding the intelligibility of the universe; we are able to provide accurate and logical accounts of the world precisely because the laws governing reason are simply a different modality of the same principle that governs the causal unfolding of material objects, only while the former is an object of what Kant called the Understanding [das Verstand], the latter is an object of sense perception mediated by the sense organs.
This is another key point: Schopenhauer argues that the same relationship of necessity may be perceived by different faculties, and may therefore be believed to be different, while they are in fact the same. For example, he argues that willing the arm to move and the actual movement of the arm are not two different events, but the same event regarded by two different faculties, one external and one internal. Notice how this elegantly dispels the problem of how the putatively-immaterial mind can cause physical events to occur; a problem that plagued Descartes and his followers.
This internal/external distinction follows from the subject/object distinction that Schopenhauer posits as a necessary condition for any possible account of understanding. That is, he argues that what it means to “understand” at all is for a subject to provide an account of an object. Although the status of the subject/object relationship may turn out to be complicated, it is an immediate given by the very nature of the problematic.
This approach to the history of philosophy is absolutely brilliant. A careful account of the principle of sufficient reason goes directly to the heart of most major problems of modern philosophy, and Schopenhauer’s writing is powerful and admirably clear. His account is heavily indebted to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, although he refines Kant’s account in several key ways, which generally have to do with simplifying his overly-architectonic approach to retain the core arguments while jettisoning some of its over-elaboration. In my opinion, this is one of the best aspects of the book, which reasonably argues, for example, there are not twelve categories of the pure intuition, as Kant argued, but one, causality. (He also reclassifies it as a category of the understanding.) The result of his refinement is to produce a version of Kant’s first Critique that is much more useful and plausible.
He also (correctly, I believe) excoriates Kant and his followers for creating spurious mechanisms for attempting to preserve precisely the same kinds of metaphysical arguments the first Critique decisively proved to be untenable, especially his categorical imperative.
Schopenhauer is notoriously caustic in his critique of post-Kantian idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel, whom he loathed and resented, and whom he attacks repeatedly in an off-putting and plainly ad hominem way. It’s surprising to see him level accusations of being charlatans and frauds in his Habilitationsschrift, and it’s sometimes amusing, but mostly tiresome. When Nietzsche puts down an opponent, it’s always in the service of some telling point or insight, whereas for Schopenhauer, it obviously comes down to petty personal grudges.
Schopenhauer sees himself as an advocate for clear thinking, clear writing, and common sense in a world driven mad by Hegelians and Post-Hegelians, who, in his view, base their entire enterprise a simple misunderstanding: they confuse epistemological accounts with ontological accounts. As with Descartes’ famous “proof” of God’s existence, they try to make rational explanations into a material causes by sleight of hand.
In my view, Schopenhauer’s account is useful and accurate in much the same way that Newtonian physics is useful and accurate. It works very well for most of the kinds of simple phenomena we deal with on a day-to-day basis at the scale of the individual. And this can be seen in the examples he uses; when he talks about material causes, he talks about lighting a fire, and when he speaks of psychological motives, he speaks of willing your arm to move. He then seems to believe that more complicated cases necessarily follow the same underlying logic.
This is all, of course, question-begging, and it must be remembered that Hegel’s entire philosophy was motivated by an attempt to give accounts for much more complicated kinds of phenomena, such as movements in art and history, which cannot be explained by this kind of simple, mechanical logic. While I understand the attraction of keeping a clear head when talking about causality, that’s much easier to do when you’re talking about one pool ball causing another to move than when you’re talking about, say, the formation of a hurricane. And when we’re talking about psychological motivations, it’s one thing to explain raising an arm, and another to explain the global resurgence of right-wing populism in the 21st century.
Schopenhauer’s constructs sometimes mask the explanatory difficulties of this kind, such as when he defines a “cause” as the totality of conditions preceding and effect that, in aggregate, produce that effect. Whoa there, horsey – the sum totality of necessary conditions? That’s an awful lot to cover with a single word, one which implies a kind of formal simplicity. And it makes our account into something of a tautology, to say that a cause is everything that has to happen, however manifold and complex, for something else to happen.
Something similar is going on with his argument that a subject/object distinction is a condition for understanding. I would only grant that something that appears to us in our ordinary transactional usage like a subject/object distinction is necessary for understanding, but this is again essentially a tautology. The nature of the actual relationship then has to be thematized. What kind of subject are we talking about? Is the subject like a watcher in a tower, looking out from our consciousness into an external world? Or is it more like a whirlpool in a stream, that is both the same as and different from the water it observes?
These are precisely the kinds of questions that Hegel starts out from, and you cannot simply reject him for providing a complex and counter-intuitive account for phenomena that cannot be otherwise explained.
Some of Schopenhauer’s assertions we simply know to be wrong, such as when he argues that we cannot conceive of an effect without a cause. There are in fact phenomena, such as the spontaneous formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in empty space, that his model of causality can in no way account for. This is not a problem in itself, but it does highlight the fact that Schopenhauer’s account is largely constructed with heuristics, seemingly-simple constructs that invisibly perform difficult explanatory work.
Take a construct like “the Understanding.” Schopenhauer does an admirable job in declaring it to essentially be a name for unknown processes in the brain, and illustrates it with examples that are extraordinarily modern-sounding, such as his appeals to developmental psychology in a way that Piaget would fully endorse. Still, I think Schopenhauer was not sufficiently self-reflective, or sufficiently humble, to recognize the provisional and pragmatic character of basically all of his core constructs.
There’s a lot more in this book that I haven’t even touched. In its short length, it says a great deal, and when Schopenhauer is right, he is really, really right. He is a brilliant thinker and critic, and though I think he’s completely wrong about Hegel, I think he’s completely right about Kant, and also has a point in arguing German philosophy would have been better off if it had stuck closely to Kant’s first Critique instead of going down the road of absolute idealism and Romanticism. I also think he was right in arguing that the road philosophy did take was largely an attempt to preserve much of the traditional religious teachings, but I also don’t think that’s altogether a bad thing. If there is philosophical value to be found in the Kena Upanishad, which he enthusiastically quotes, it’s not necessarily of a different character than that of the Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius.
As an aside, I would draw attention to the extreme similarity between Schopenhauer’s idealism and the Madhyamaka philosophy of India and Tibet. Schopenhauer is of course famous for his interest in Vedanata and also discusses Buddhism at some length in this work, but it is still very striking that his philosophy closely resembles Prasangika-Madhyamaka both in spirit and in many of its more obscure details. I have written before about the similarities between Tsong Khapa and Kant, but this was a whole new level.
I was struck, for example, by passages which could have been used as a gloss for the meaning of the concept of conventionally-valid imputation, which is one of the most subtle and difficult topics in all of Madhyamaka. This is a fact that should be of interest to the comparativist, because there is no possibility whatsoever that Schopenhauer would have seen advanced Madhyamaka texts – his views seem to have unfolded from the logic of the argument itself.
From section 19, my translation:
But realism overlooks the fact that the so-called being of these real things is absolutely nothing other than their being represented, – or, if one insists that only that which is immediately present in the subject’s consciousness can be represented, kat’ entelecheian [according to actuality], then a possibility of being represented, kata dynamin [according to possibility]; – one overlooks that an object viewed independently of its relationship to a subject is no longer an object [emphasis added], and that if you take [this relationship] away or attempt to abstract [the object] out [of it], then you immediately negate all objective existence.
That is to say, an object is only an object of a subject. This is not to say that there is no difference between external objects and hallucinations, but to say that our very concept of what it means for a thing to exist is that it exists in relationship to the subject, and we cannot conceive of any mode of existence in which the object is not an object for us. That would be to know the thing-in-itself immediately.
The Oak Trees, Hölderlin
My translation of Hölderlin’s poem “The Oak Trees,” first published in 1797 in Friedrich Schiller’s journal Horen.
I come to you from the gardens, children of the mountain!
From the gardens where nature lives, patient and domestic,
Tending and tended again, along with the diligent folk.
But you, majestic ones, stand like a race of titans
In the tamed world, belonging only to yourselves and to the skies
That fed and raised you, and to the earth that bore you.
None of you yet have been to the schools of men,
And you push yourselves out from the powerful root, gaily and free,
Up and away from each another, gripping the empty space
Like the eagle its prey, with forceful arms, your sunny crowns
Set cheerfully and great against the clouds.
Each of you is a world, like the stars of the sky,
Each of you a god, you live in free league with each other.
If I could only bear a life of service, I would have never envied
These woods, would have gladly cleaved to society.
If only my heart, which takes no leave of love, bound me
To society no more, how gladly I would live among you!
Kimsooja: Past and Present
(Un)folding Bottari at the Humboldt Form, Berlin
In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Arthur Danto argued that the past is not fixed, as new implications constantly unfold that echo back and affect our core understanding of prior events.
This reciprocal dialog of past and present affects any artist who works within a tradition. Acting as bearers and preservers of living cultural forms, they inevitably add their own inflection to the symbols and techniques with which they work. In this context, I think, for example, of the many outstanding indigenous artists working today in the Pacific Northwest of North America-artists whose work is rooted in ancient forms, but is nevertheless remarkably vital. To name just a few examples, I think of Bill Reid and Robert Davidson (Haida), Andy Everson (Comox/Kwakwaka’wakw), and Shaun Peterson (Coast Salish), who have all done thrilling work.
Anyone with passing familiarity with the Ethnological Museum at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin knows that its directors take the relationship of the past to the historical present very seriously. In keeping with the self-reflective philosophy that characterizes their curation and presentation, the museum invited the contemporary Korean artist Kimsooja to present her work side-by-side with far older pieces from the museum’s collection.
When I checked out the small exhibit, the first piece that greeted me was Deductive Object, a plaster cast of the artist’s arms forming a gesture resembling a hand holding a sewing needle. The index finger brought gently round to the thumb also evokes the jnana or vitarka mudras of yoga, stylized gestures respectively associated with wisdom and with teaching in Buddhist iconography.
In a literal sense, Deductive Object embodies the artist’s embodiment of tradition, by echoing the traditional associations of mudras and by adding new elements. The creation of negative space by the hands evokes the play of positive and negative that characterizes other works by Kimsooja, and perhaps bringing to mind the words of the Heart Sutra, which taught that form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
As can be seen from this one example, the fourteen pieces of Kimsooja’s works currently on display encompass a large conceptual space. The Bottari of the exhibit title refers to the Korean art of cloth folding, and the exhibit features several such folded bundles, which have a pleasing kind of organic integrity.
As a counterpoint to these images of fullness, Kimsooja collaborated with the German Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur in Meissen, Saxony. As a variation on the theme of Bottari, the artist created porcelain forms reminiscent of traditional Korean moon jars, with tiny openings in the surface evoking an immensity of absence within.
“The tactile physicality of the moon jar,” the artist explains in an interview with the Humboldt Forum, “makes it the other, and the wrapped invisible dark void as the unknown black hole, revealing a larger question about the material and immaterial, existence and transience, even cosmic questions similar to Bottari.”
Several of these negative-defining, gracefully-curving moon jars are displayed on a mirrored surface, perhaps evoking the bright mirror of consciousness immortalized by the Platform Sutra, or islands on a sea of consciousness.
I thought of the Korean-born philosopher Byang-Chul Han, who wrote of the play of absence in Asian aesthetics as a counterpoint to the present-centered sensibility of the European west:
Already the absent glance works emptyingly [wirkt entleerend]. Flowing transitions beget sites of absence and emptiness. Presence is closed and excluding. In contrast, absence renders space more porous. It thereby expands it. A space gives space for another space. A space opens itself for further spaces. It does not come to an ultimate closure. The space of emptiness, the de-interiorized space consists of transitions and interstices.
Abwesen, Byung-Chul Han, Merve Verlag Berlin, 2007, pg. 42, my translation
Kimsooja – (Un)folding Bottari can be seen at the Humboldt Forum until February 19, 2024. The excellent museum is free of charge.
Paul Celan’s Poetics
Du liegst im großen Gelausche,
umbuscht, umflockt.
So begins a late poem by Paul Celan, and as I sometimes do when reading German poetry, I think of how I would translate it. As a rough starting point, something like “You lie in the big listening place / surrounded by bushes, surrounded by flakes.”
“Umbuscht” and “umflockt” are clear in their meaning, but are more literally something like “embushed, emflaked.” And what on Earth do you do with “Gelausche”? A nominalized form of the verb “lauschen,” to listen, or, more plausibly in this case, to eavesdrop. Pierre Joris gives “You lie amid a great listening,” which feels deeply inadequate to me, as so many of his renderings do. “Amid” is too dressed up for the spare, declamatory language, and listening hardly says it. Not that I have a better suggestion.
Then begin the real problems of interpreting this poem. If you consult a commentary, you will learn that this poem was written in winter when Celan was staying at a hotel overlooking a large park in central Berlin, and you immediately understand what is occurring here. Without that information, you’re left with a puzzling image.
This is typical for Celan’s oeuvre; his work is often dauntingly opaque in the absence of commentary. This biographical detail of staying in a Berlin hotel cannot be understood without knowing the circumstances in which this poem was written, which poses the question of how much work an author is entitled to ask the reader to do. This is a question that will confront any reader of Celan, each of whom will no doubt have their own answer.
His poems are profoundly intertextual, and many of the elemental images to which he returns again and again accumulate meaning through repetition. Tree, water, voice, snow, light, decay, mouths, eating, drinking, many species of plants; these motifs form a repertoire of references that gradually deepen through familiarity with his body of work as a whole.
Another question about the two lines we’re considering, and the most pressing: knowing, as we do, that the poem refers to Celan’s own life, who is “you”? The reader? Does the poet assume distance from himself? Or is a deeper philosophical point is being made? As a reader, a set of images and meanings takes place in my mind; Paul Celan’s “I” becomes a “you,” from his perspective, because I, as the reader, am reconstructing or co-constructing it. Or, if I identify with the poet’s voice as I read, then perhaps Celan is addressing the “Paul Celan” that I construct. The voice of the poet in my head is not, after all, the poet himself.
However we take this word, the “I” and the “you” of the author and the reader becomes entangled, just as the poem is already entangled in the events of Celan’s life, with the words of his other poems, and with other poems by other writers.
As readers of Celan’s poem, this is the kind of work that we have to do. At times it’s exhilarating, at times it’s vexing, but there is really nothing like it.
I think this entanglement of “I” and “you” is a significant part of his draw, and one of the reason Celan has spawned an enormous secondary literature. Many twentieth century poets are “difficult,” but the character of that difficulty differs substantially. When I read a canto by Ezra Pound and find Chinese ideograms, it feels arbitrary and solipsistic to me. I will either decode their meaning or I won’t, but the process does not lead me to anything beyond the meaning that the poet arbitrarily withheld, out of what I take to be disdain for his audience. So I close the book.
The problems presented by a Celan poem, on the other hand, are illuminating. My first response to reading a poem that requires familiarity with the 15th-century French poet François Villon may be a minor annoyance, but it leads me into remembering Villon, whom I like, and into meditating on the relationship between Villon and Celan, and how their work sheds light on the work of the other.
The first line of the poem I quoted is a dialogical “Du,” and I would like to think that Celan recognized in its usage that his poems require his readers to co-create their meaning to an unusual degree, writing alongside Celan as they read. This is true of all texts, but Celan explodes and transforms this aspect of meaning to the degree that it becomes central to his art.
I think this, and not the relative obscurity, is the deepest and most important reason why Celan’s poems invite criticism and commentary. Even when my knowledge of German was rudimentary, my first impulse reading a Celan poem was to translate it, and this aspect of my response has only grown, the more German I learned. When reading his poem “Stimmen” I felt moved to write a commentary in verse, and I do not generally write verse, but my experience of reading it made this gesture somehow seem necessary.
Stepping into some of his poems is like stepping into what appears to be a puddle, only to discover that it is forty fathoms deep. These poems are overdetermined; small and spare as they are, there is more meaning in them than a reader can readily exhaust. The question they pose is: how deep do you want to go?
Celan is clearly one of the greatest German-speaking poets of the twentieth century. Were it not the century of Rilke, he would have had a less ambiguous case for the top slot. Even so, Rilke, I would say, is the end of the old dispensation, while Celan stands at the threshold of the new.
Suhrkamp’s complete edition of his original poetry (translations are not included) is a stepping-stone into a larger world, a world of light and ash, crystal and stone, lead and earth, and the voices of the dead. It has been excellently assembled and provides a valuable commentary that gives readers a jumping-off point for understanding how each poem functions and when it was written. But more than commentary, these poems ask for our attention and care, first and foremost, and to read through his body of work, which comes increasingly into focus over time. For myself, I found that detailed commentary for particularly significant or obscure work was also helpful, and I would refer any reader trying to come to terms with Celan to his Büchner prize acceptance speech, which should be read without delay.
Hölderlin
Hölderlin is a poet of the lost, and at times, the reader reaches into the same darkness for the same answers. And if the poet doesn’t provide any, well, I don’t have them either.
As with so many of the Romantics, it is tempting to read his life as embodying his poetic vocation, but I think we would do so at our peril. For the reader of good intellectual conscience, it is simply embarrassing to read overheated nineteenth-century claims that his mental collapse tells us that he was “too fine of feeling for the world”. Let us stick with what we know.
In Hölderlin’s case this is made all the more difficult by the increasing obscurity of his poetic matter as he moved toward the breakdown that would leave him a ward of caretakers for the second half of his life. One cannot help but be deeply touched imagining him gazing out of his solitary tower toward the river for these many years.
There is almost too much that can be said about this towering figure and his short career. He was hardly the first German to take the literature and mythology of the ancient Greeks as his primary concern, but he was, I think, the first to take it seriously in its own terms as a religious idiom, and to find himself under the spell of the Greek divinities, especially Dionysus (or Bacchus, as Hölderlin himself always referred to him).
And he was certainly one of the first to see ancient Greek culture as a meeting place of opposed, powerful energies striving toward disorder and release as much as toward harmony and balance – this reading surely caught the attention of the young Nietzsche, who read and admired the poet. And perhaps we should take it as cautionary that these two great writers both took Dionysus for their patron, and both ended their lives in complete psychological disorder.
So there is that to be said for Hölderlin, and on top of it we have his close friendship with Hegel and Schelling, his classmates at a protestant seminary. The thorough research of Manfred Frank has given us an extensive record of their work together in collectively formulating post-Kantian early Romantic idealism. What reader of Hölderlin could fail to be fascinated by this?
But to return to the demands of critical appraisal, I will admit that if any trace of Hölderlin’s intense philosophical exploration are to be found in his poems, they are invisible to me, except perhaps insofar as he struggled to find a new language for his new mythology, and this new language is often exceedingly obscure.
Despite being a poet who took Pindar and Sophocles as models, Hölderlin nevertheless sounds uniquely modern to my ears, as far ahead of his Zeitgeist as Büchner was to his. I was reminded of this recently reading Robert Musil’s novel Die Verwirrungen des Zögling Törleß, which, I think, owes a great debt to Hölderlin’s image of the night of the Gods for its modernist characterization of a breakdown of values.
In addition to Hölderlin the classicist, Hölderlin the philosopher, and Hölderlin the modernist, there is Hölderlin the craftsman, who is perhaps my favorite Hölderlin of all. This is the wordsmith who could periodically convey poetic images of enormous force when he wasn’t too busy groping in the darkness, the Hölderlin of “Die Eichbäume”:
Keiner von euch ist noch in die Schule der Menschen gegangen,
Und ihr drängt euch fröhlich und frei, aus der kräftigen Wurzel,
Unter einander herauf und ergreift, wie der Adler die Beute,
Mit gewaltigem Arme den Raum, und gegen die Wolken
Ist euch heiter und groß die sonnige Krone gerichtet.
Eine Welt ist jeder von euch, wie die Sterne des Himmels
Lebt ihr, jeder ein Gott, in freiem Bunde zusammen.
Or “Heidelberg”:
Wie der Vogel des Walds über die Gipfel fliegt,
Schwingt sich über den Strom, wo er vorbei dir glänzt,
Leicht und kräftig die Brücke,
Die von Wagen und Menschen tönt.
Or “Der Gang aufs Land”:
Aber schön ist der Ort, wenn in Feiertagen des Frühlings
Aufgegangen das Tal, wenn mit dem Neckar herab
Weiden grünend und Wald und all die grünenden Bäume
Zahllos, blühend weiß, wallen in wiegender Luft,
Aber mit Wölkchen bedeckt an Bergen herunter der Weinstock
Dämmert und wächst und erwarmt unter dem sonnigen Duft.
We even see this gift for dazzling concrete imagery in the first verse of “Brot und Wein”, which was initially published as a standalone poem:
Rings um ruhet die Stadt; still wird die erleuchtete Gasse,
Und, mit Fackeln geschmückt, rauschen die Wagen hinweg.
Satt gehn heim von Freuden des Tags zu ruhen die Menschen,
Und Gewinn und Verlust wäget ein sinniges Haupt
Wohlzufrieden zu Haus; leer steht von Trauben und Blumen,
Und von Werken der Hand ruht der geschäftige Markt.
This is perhaps the pivot-point of his development, and following that elegy his spiritual concerns would increasingly eclipse his interest in concrete expression. But great work was still to come, and while I wouldn’t particularly defend Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, I agree with his very high assessment of poems like “Der Ister”. Some of it is shear magic:
Man nennet aber diesen den Ister.
Schön wohnt er. Es brennet der Säulen Laub,
Und reget sich.
Or take his conception of the river, which reflects the light of the sun and the moon, as reconciling these opposing energies within itself:
Ein Zeichen braucht es,
Nichts anderes, schlecht und recht, damit es Sonn
Und Mond trag im Gemüt, untrennbar,
Und fortgeh, Tag und Nacht auch, und
Die Himmlischen warm sich fühlen aneinander.
Hölderlin is one of those towering figures I cannot get away from, as all roads lead back to them. Fortunately for me, I wouldn’t want to, and his beautiful and haunting poems will be my companions for the rest of my life.
A Critique of Untargeted Climate Disruption
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” – Nietzsche
A new front of climate activism has opened up in recent years with frequent, high-profile disruptions by activists seeking to bring attention to the cause. In the last few weeks alone, activists have thrown soup on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery, thrown potatoes on a Monet in Potsdam, squirted an unidentified liquid onto a Toulouse-Lautrec painting in Berlin, climbed the largest complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex in Europe, and, as I was writing this piece, blocked the A100 in Berlin, preventing an emergency vehicle from reaching a woman bicyclist who had been run over by a cement truck.
Of course, that the climate crisis demands urgent attention is not in dispute. We are not doing enough, and the resulting loss of life and destruction to the ecosystem could be catastrophic. The UN no longer believes that there is a credible pathway to limit our global temperature increase to 1.5° C as stipulated by the Paris Agreement, and our current trajectory of 2-3 degrees may mean disaster.
That being said, these actions deserve engagement on both a moral and practical level, and here I have to say the response within conservation and climatology circles has been disappointing and inadequate, and totally incommensurate with the increasingly-radical nature of these actions. There may be a case to be made for such activism, but to my knowledge, that case has not been made, and the issue has largely remained unexamined.
I follow a large number of activists and conservation groups, and I haven’t seen a single serious critical analysis of these actions. I believe this represents a serious failure, and an abnegation of the responsibility of the climate community to monitor the legitimate parameters of its own engagement.
Every single moral defense I have seen of these actions has been an obvious equivocation, without exception. Typical arguments include: “If you think what they have done is bad, how much worse is it to despoil the ecosystem for profit?” “Do you believe that a couple of paintings are worth more than preserving all life on Earth?” “Nothing else was working, so they had to do something.”
Two wrongs make a right? We are justified in risking irreparable harm to our cultural heritage as long as we hold our cause to be just and urgent? Better to do the wrong thing than to do nothing? These arguments can’t be taken seriously, and offer not so much of a defense as a statement of the speaker’s refusal to engage critically with the activists.
I am reluctant to bring yet more attention to these antics, but given the paucity of serious discussion about the implications of such action, I would like to offer a provisional critique of this approach, focusing especially on demonstrative attacks against art. And because the discussion so far has been entirely inchoate, I’d like to ground my criticism in basic theories of political activism, of art, and of conservation.
But first I want to take a quick detour to consider the objection that these actions shouldn’t be judged to harshly because they are merely performative and do not cause real harm.
“They’re not actually hurting anything”
The substance of my critique does not actually depend on any explicit or implied threat of destruction , but it’s nevertheless worth noting that this defense is neither persuasive nor particularly comforting. Thus far, activists have depended on the ability of panes of glass to defend artworks against whatever stew they throw, and the likelihood of accidental damage grows with every incident.
But the greater threat is that as soon as this news cycle cools and these actions no longer elicit the intended shock, activists will escalate and do actual damage. Do we think this is unlikely? In response to widespread criticism of the road blockade that delayed emergency vehicles from reaching an accident victim, one activist Tweeted “Shit, but don’t be intimidated. This is climate struggle, not climate cuddle, and shit happens.”
There is a further danger that the repetition of such acts establishes the strategy as a general tactic for any political cause that one wants to publicize. As it is, the frequency of these tactics has accelerated significantly since the Van Gogh incident captured global headlines. We could eventually find museums a battleground for activists clamoring for or against the right to choose, for or against racial or economic inequality, or to bring attention to this war or that humanitarian disaster. And every time we object, we will have to be prepared to answer the question “What’s more important, a couple of paintings, or racial justice?”
How does one answer such a question? How do we tease apart for a hostile audience the several layers of misunderstanding embodied by the question itself? How do we explain that the question only exists because this false choice has been arbitrarily forced upon us, by them? Or explain that many things have value, and the world is complex?
The political logic that absolutizes one’s own particular issue directly undermines our ability to have a free and open society, which depends on certain norms to regulate behavior. Open societies are always open to countless avenues of attack by their very nature, and we rely on things like people not knocking down street lights to sell their copper wire, and if we can’t, well, then we won’t have any street lights.
What is at issue is not “just” “a few paintings,” it is our consensus that certain types of political speech or advocacy are off limits, and that includes holding our open institutions hostage by implied threats.
Finally, there remains a deep question of what exactly its means to say that “no damage has been done.” As Judith Butler points out in her recent illuminating book on nonviolence, the notion of what constitutes “violence” is itself strongly contested. Is it “violent” to destroy a work of art? To threaten a work of art? To destroy a Confederate statue? To force the cancellation of a speech by phoning in a phony bomb threat? Do economically-discriminatory policies rise to the level of “violence”? Censorship? These questions are nontrivial, and they can be applied en masse to the problematize the concept of “damage.”
Simply giving people a pass without considering some of these issues appears to my eyes to be little more than intellectual laziness. Why have I seen no defense of museums among activists? Do they not have the right to operate without being made into battlegrounds for disruptive political actions that have nothing to do with them? Do we care nothing about museums, but museum administrators, donors, ushers, guards, and visitors?
I submit that people, certain institutions, and works of art have their own autonomy that must be respected, and that we have a moral obligation to regard them, as Kant urged, not merely a means to our ends, but as ends in themselves. That means their rights cannot be arbitrarily and unilaterally abridged – this is the basis of our entire concept of rights, and under certain conditions, this concept may be extended to cultural treasures. The International Criminal Court, for example, convicted Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi for destroying religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu during an occupation by Al-Qaeda, and many have argued that Russia’s intentional assault on cultural artifacts in Ukraine constitutes a war crime. This is a reflection of how we see and value works of art, and it is not wrong.
Activism
The strategic thinking underlying these attacks on art is so poorly conceived that you could literally construct a working theory of political activism by simply taking the negation of all the key principles.
Let me suggest a few general principles for activism that I think are persuasive enough on their face to border on axiomatic. I think the relevance of these principles to our topic should be obvious.
1. Activism should be strategic and should work to advance concrete, achievable goals.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is a great example of this. In the 1960s, it successfully fought against segregation and disenfranchisement in the southern United States by carefully organizing and executing a long-term campaign of strategically-related actions that targeted concrete objectives. These actions collectively raised public awareness and put enormous political pressure on state and local governments to change course.
By contrast, the actions by groups such as Last Generation and Just Stop Oil have no stated objective other than to garner publicity and to provoke. The actions are disturbing by design, but how are we supposed to respond? What are their demands? How do we demonstrate to Just Stop Oil that we’ve learned our lesson and are taking climate seriously, so they will stop throwing soup on paintings?
The EU recently passed a ban on the sale of internal combustion engine cars by 2035. But that did not stop Last Generation from blocking the A100 and disrupting emergency vehicles in life-saving work. Why did it not stop them? What more do they wish to achieve? Their nominal goal is to raise awareness of excessive use of car communing, and action has been taken. Was it the wrong action? Not enough? What kind of progress do they demand, on what timeline?
2. Actions should persuade, enroll, and enlist.
Climate change is an issue that affects all of us, and it needs to be a bipartisan, mainstream issue, as much as that is possible. Barricading roads and vandalizing art galleries clearly risks marginalizing the issue by leading a lot of folks on the fence to associate it with disturbing fringe political movements. The actions are intended to disturb.
P. T. Barnum is supposed to have said “There is no such thing as bad publicity.” This may be true for circus magnates, it is not true for political activists trying to drive broad consensus on complex political issues. A clear example of this fact is Greenpeace’s humiliating public apology after their activists trampled on ancient artwork left by the Nazca culture, which rightly caused international outrage. I doubt Greenpeace has done anything in the last 25 years that has garnered an equal amount of publicity, and it was incredibly negative.
Thus far, at least, the actions do not appear to be popular, even among the groups’ own supporters. The New York Times recently reported, for example, that Just Stop Oil, the soup-throwing group, took a poll of its supporters for what actions they should focus on in the future, and targeting art came in second to last.
3. There are two legitimate sites for disruptive actions: the public square, and the site of injustice. Collateral damage against innocent bystanders should be avoided for moral and strategic reasons.
The attack on the Toulouse-Lautrec painting and the shut-down of the A100 have one thing in common – they both took place within a few miles of a municipal coal-fueled power plant. Why not protest the power plant? Why not protest outside a PR firm working for a fossil fuel company? Why not protest outside the FDP office or the CDU office, where party leaders dismiss climate concerns and oppose sensible reform and policies?
The autonomy of art: a painting has rights
We looked briefly above at the fact that works of art enjoy a recognized legal status in the international community. They are afforded a special role in societies because of what they mean to people.
Before you start appropriating artwork into your didactic stage show of political theater, you have a moral obligation to at least consider the meaning of art. And this digression is worthwhile, because it is relevant to the question at hand, and to the related question of what conservation is fundamentally about.
One could easily spend a lifetime trying to answer the question “what is art?” and I won’t try to do that now. Instead, I will sketch a quick theory of how it functions, based mostly on a few milestones in the philosophy of art from the twentieth century.
Before asking what art is, let’s consider how it functions. I’m going to follow Joseph Campbell in this, who liked to explain the effect of art by relating an Chinese Buddhist koan or story called “The Flower Sermon.”
One day, the story goes, the Buddha’s disciples gathered for a teaching. The Buddha took his teaching seat and said no word, but held up a single flower. The assembly was puzzled, but at last his student Mahakashyapa smiled. “You alone have understood the essence of my teachings,” Buddha told him.
How are we to take this? The students were looking for a doctrine, for something they could understand, but what Buddha offered them was the thing itself, an image of life itself, and they were not to understand it, but to respond to it. You do not understand a flower, you enjoy it.
Art functions in a similar way, which helps to understand why it is notoriously difficult to explain. You cannot explain a Van Gogh painting, you can only respond to it, as an image of life.
The literary critic Walter Benjamin said something similar in a celebrated essay on Goethe which includes an important discussion of “criticism.” Benjamin sees proper criticism as itself a kind of art, one which does not explain, but which illuminates the life of the work. He opposes this conception of criticism to what he calls “commentary,” which is a factual or didactic explanation of art, like the footnotes in a Shakespeare play.
What then is criticism? He explains:
If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has not been experienced.
The work of art is not the thing but the experience occasioned by the thing – a living experience shared by the artist and the audience. The actual painting or what have you is the occasion for the experience of art, like the log is the material base for the living flame. And the work of an art, in Benjamin’s terms, is an enigma that cannot be reduced to a simple, factual explanation. As a great many artists have insisted, if you try to explain a work of art, you kill it.
We could not find a more perfect example of this idea of art than Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Painted in Arles in the south of France in 1888, the painting is one of a series of natural studies he made with dizzying speed during this period, and they explode with life. Consider his famous “Starry Night,” a veritable “buzzing, booming confusion” which challenges the viewer to see the world as a living system of connected beings, each with its own vitality and purpose.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote two important essays differentiating what he, like Benjamin, took to be two different modes of experiencing the world, the technological and the artistic.
In his “The Question Concerning Technology,” he makes much of the fact that in German, as in English, the word griffen (grasp) means both “to take hold of” and “to understand.” In Heidegger’s view, most of the time our interaction with the world is a kind of mechanical process of interpreting the things we come across in terms of their use. We see a hammer, and we perceive it not as a thing with its own essence and character, but as “something for hammering,” and the actual being of the hammer remains distant.
He opposes this to the mode of experiencing art, which he examines in his essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” In this work, he says that the mode of perception of art is one in which we “let beings be.” Through art we recognize things as they are in themselves without the overlay of our utilitarian goals. A key example he provides is Van Gogh’s paintings of peasant shoes. These are commonplace objects, but the way that Van Gogh relays them to the viewer imbues them with a kind of numinous intensity, and this intensity we perceive is, at least in a limited way, the light of their being, or their intrinsic being. We see them as they are instead of putting them on and forgetting about them.
The life of conservation
This brings us back to Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” which, like the Buddha’s flower, offers a luminous image of life itself, asking us and allowing us to see the flowers not as things for us, but things with their own purpose, their own complexity and depth. They are not for us to use and discard like trash.
Having come full circle, I think you can probably understand why I believe throwing soup on these flowers as a political gesture is a rejection of everything that great art offers that borders on obscene.
And by trampling on the autonomy of art, the activist uncritically replicates the very stance toward life that has brought our climate to the brink of disaster – the attitude that the things of the world are here for us, and to serve our ends. It is Heidegger’s “technological” modality.”
Conservation is ultimately rooted in the human heart. We don’t just do the math and decide that destroying the Great Barrier Reef would be too expensive because of the lost tourist revenue. The beating heart of conservation – its enigmatic life – lies in understanding that the coral reefs and everything in them have the right to their own autonomy and their own destiny, and that this is an end in itself. Because we live in the world, sometimes our needs need to come first, but to ignore the intrinsic worth of life is ultimately to undermine the conditions of our own survival, as we have learned to our sorrow.
The political logic that would pave over the life of things and just appropriate them is abhorrent to me, and I despise the facile, totalizing attitude that reduces the world to a collection of tools to be deployed in service of one’s agenda. It is the opposite of respect and reverence for life.
And finally, I hate that this approach to promoting conservation is stupid and ugly. Its methods are coercive and brutal, and its goals are incoherent. These actions could not be more perfectly engineered to provoke ten thousand Tweets but little nuanced discussion, to get people shouting but not listening. And I hate the fact that so many in conservationist circles have tacitly or explicitly endorsed these actions without giving any real thought to any of this.
“A Brief History of Inequality” by Thomas Piketty
In A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty reviews the distribution of wealth over the last few centuries and draws practical lessons that we can use to shape an agenda for moving toward a more just and equitable world.
Piketty called his Capital in the Twenty-First Century “as much a work of history as of economics,” and this shorter volume is also deeply informed by historical research. This focus helps explain the author’s surprising popularity – unlike many economists who trade in esoteric equations, he keeps both feet firmly on the ground.
One danger of ignoring history, he argues, lies in taking our particular forms of economic and political life as timeless and unchangeable. This can lead to the feeling that we’re trapped in a situation of spiraling inequality from which there is no escape. But in his survey of the last few centuries, he shows just how much progress has already been made.
This is not to deny there is more work to do – far from it. As shown in his Capital, current levels of wealth and income inequality are bad and are getting worse, largely because the historical returns from investment always outpace the growth of an economy. This sets up a feedback loop where the people who have money to invest earn more money more quickly than those who don’t. In the absence of counter-balancing forces like effective progressive taxation and inheritance taxes, wealth tends to accumulate into larger and larger fortunes.
This may be a natural tendency of growth, but we have more options for dealing with problems like this than we may think, and this is where Piketty kicks into high gear.
The nature of property ownership is not delivered from on high as a kind of natural law, even if that’s how it’s sometimes characterized in legal codes. For example, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is the basis for the French legal understanding of property, states:
The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.
The French definition naturalizes its conception of property, declaring ownership to be a universal right that is beyond the reach of political deliberation. Following this definition, French legislatures and courts have tended to favor a strong, expansive reading of property rights, which has limited the reach of redistributive policies.
But not all societies see it this way. For example, Article 14 of the German constitution declares:
Property and the right of inheritance shall be guaranteed. Their content and limits shall be defined by the laws. Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.
This formulation explicitly sets a context and limits for property ownership – it is not an intrinsic, inalienable right, but is legitimate only insofar as it serves the public good. This has shaped the German conception of ownership, sometimes in profound ways. For example, it forms the constitutional basis for laws requiring medium- and large-sized companies to set up a Betriebsrat, or worker’s council, which shares governance rights with shareholders. Imagine how Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter would have been dealt with in a world where that company had such a council that looked after the interest of the company and the workers, and not just the shareholders.
As a matter of history, it is plainly true that “property” is not absolute. Ideas of ownership do not exist in the abstract, but consist in the historically-determined and changing frameworks of laws, norms, and power relationships without which the term has no meaning. How could we otherwise account for the fact that soon after the the Declaration was written and then for many decades, women did not have the right to inheritance or to open a bank account in France?
He doesn’t use the term, but I believe his thinking here is informed by the Marxist critical concept of reification, which refers to the distortions that occur when we view social relations or manufactured objects as though they have no history. It generally serves the interest of the status quo to naturalize certain fundamental conceptions – that is, to treat them as timeless truths, like the law of gravity. That is, of course, why people whose interests are served by the status quo tend to describe property rights as sacrosanct. But a study of history opens up a range of actual possibilities for reshaping these principles when it’s in the greatest common good to do so.
When Piketty looks at the last few centuries of inequality, a lot of the news he finds is good. This is why he called this book a history of “equality.” As he said in a recent New York Times interview, “I’ve always viewed my work and conclusion as relatively optimistic. And I was a bit sad to see that some people had a different reading.”
I think relatively optimistic is a good way to put it – you could perhaps say, based on his findings, that the global story of equality has gone from “terrible” to “pretty bad.” If we go back to the period beginning with the earliest useful financial records that we have, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we find that the vast majority of people all over the world owned almost nothing. In Europe during this time, for example, the majority of the population did nearly all of the productive work, had no real political power, and paid most of the taxes.
But progress has been made. Today, a far greater share of the world’s wealth is owned by a middle class, though the bottom half of the world’s property owners still collectively own virtually nothing, and wealth is still largely owned based on gender and national origin. But the key lesson of the past is that real change is possible. Sometimes even policies that were considered impossible for a long time can be achieved, like the progressive federal income tax in the United States.
A useful illustration that Piketty examines is Sweden, which showed extremely high political and economic inequality for all of the nineteenth century. But in the early twentieth century, the situation reversed, and Sweden built a successful welfare state. It in fact became one of the most egalitarian countries in Europe for the next century, and a number of related positive outcomes followed. If you had lived in Europe in 1900, you might well have believed that inequality in Sweden was simply a historical fact that would probably never change. But things did change, and they can change now.
Piketty is under no illusions that a policy will save us. The major changes that have brought real progress have rarely come about by the smooth operation of the system. Progress is largely associated with the major shocks that create windows of opportunity. Some of the key shocks in our recent past have included the Great Depression and the World Wars. Ultimately, the role of the kind of policies he proposes is to inform public debate and to help shape the strategy of political actors. This is the focus of the second half of his book.
The two primary problems he wants us to take on are economic inequality and sustainable development, both products of our newly-global economy. Under the current regime, both problems are extremely difficult to get a handle on, because our economic tools are not set up to address them.
With respect to inequality, the chief culprit Piketty focus on in this book is the lack of monitoring and controls on money moving across borders, which has dramatically increased since the triumph of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 90s. Similarly, our ability to handle climate change effectively is limited by the fact that our economic systems are not set up to capture or reflect the social and economic costs of climate damage in any meaningful way. For example, climate-polluting industries like steel and cement manufacturing, which create more greenhouse gases per year than any other sector, themselves pay no direct costs for any adaptation or mitigation efforts that societies make.
Dealing with these issues will take novel solutions which may very well require that we fundamentally rethink our current economic framework, but we have good reason to do so. Unlocking our borders to capital flight has led to a situation in which many developed countries are wealthy but their governments are poor. Many of the largest fortunes evade representative taxation by shady dodges such as incorporating offshore. Companies like Apple or Facebook are able to benefit profoundly from the technical and human infrastructure of the United States, such as its major investments in education, while giving little or nothing back by way of taxes, preferring the favorable tax rates of havens like Ireland.
At the same time, individual fortunes are amassed and cached overseas in offshore accounts, allowing the wealthiest individuals and families to put enormous fortunes beyond the reach of taxation. As he discussed in his Capital, the economist Gabriel Zucman conservatively estimated that 10% of the global GDP is currently stashed away in such havens – this amount is greater than the total official foreign debt of all wealthy countries.
In order to address such abuses, countries must be able to to effectively monitor and control money flowing out of its borders. This would allow for measures like the exit tax recently proposed by Bernie Sanders, which would assess a tax on assets moved out of the country.
In Capital, Piketty suggested creating an international framework for implementing a nominal global tax on wealth, which would require that we set up a standardized international accounting scheme to monitor such flows. A step like this would go a long way toward cutting down on flagrant abuse.
In this book, he develops a similar idea, but from a national, rather than an international, perspective. He recommends that each country insist on its sovereign rights to manage money as it comes and goes, and to create their own systems for dealing with the problem.
PIketty suggests a number of additional strategies for dealing with these issues, but his goal is not to provide a manifesto, but to consider a variety of options and to offer them up to feed the conversation. It is ultimately a matter for for democratic deliberation to determine which options to try. He broadly characterizes his framework as democratic socialism, with a strong redistributive welfare system, but without the state ownership and controls found in communist countries, which led directly to terrible authoritarian abuses.
There is a lot more in this book than I can meaningfully cover in a short review, but this at least suggests some of the major arguments. I found it extremely useful and persuasive, and, like his other works, very well written.
If you’ve been thinking about reading Piketty but were daunted by the subject matter or length of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, this might be a better way to check out his thinking. It is written with the layperson in mind in articulate, accessible prose. And if you’re daunted by the scope of challenges facing the world, it is refreshing to get a sense of how far we’ve already come, and to take stock of what we’ve already managed to do.
As a final personal note, I’ll say that the challenges posed by inequality and sustainability are severe, but they’re the right problems for our historical moment, because ultimately they are problems about how we exist together, for the first time, as a global community. In a very real way, these problems amount to how we are going to treat each other and the world we live in. There is an opportunity here for us to collectively create an unprecedented framework for co-existence with an emphasis on fairness and stewardship. And if that sounds impossible, well, the progressive income tax was once thought impossible, too.
Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”
Before I begin on Hegel, I want to note that Terry Pinkard’s recent translation of this work is a vast improvement over the previous standard translation by A. V. Miller. It is better, more readable, closer to the original, and more consistent, and should be heavily preferred. I do not agree with every choice Pinkard makes – for example, rendering “die Sache selbst” as “the crux of the matter,” his dubious rendering of “Bildung” as “cultural formation,” or his somewhat distracting rendering of “überhaupt” as “full stop” – but when his translation makes a contestable choice, he nearly always calls it out in footnotes, and includes a valuable translation glossary.
Now on to Hegel.
I have tried to read this book many times before, and have always been blocked by Hegel’s prose, which is atrocious, at times because of the nature of the subject matter, but most often because of his penchant for impenetrable jargon, and most especially, because he very rarely tells you what he’s doing, or what he’s even talking about. For example, when he tells you that the spirit has projected itself back into indeterminacy driven by its newly-adopted ironic stance, it is left entirely to you to figure out that he’s talking about the society of manners that prevailed at the Valois court of France, and never once uses the words “Valois” or “France.” And that is how the book is written.
It is wearisome, and it is my belief that this book is literally incomprehensible without the assistance of commentary – either that, or spend 10 years on it. I myself relied heavily on four commentaries, by Terry Pinkard, J. M. Bernstein, Walter Kaufmann, and Charles Taylor, and availed myself of many additional articles, essays, and references, and I believe that is about what is minimally necessary to have a sense of it. I would warn against using a single commentary, because the more sources you use, the more you understand the various ways that Hegel has been understood, and especially the degree to which every key term and idea in this book has been contested.
I would add that before beginning I had read Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Kant’s three Critiques, Goethe and Schiller, Fichte and Schelling, Heidegger and Derrida. If, armed with that background, I was incapable of understanding Hegel without considerable assistance, it raises real questions about who exactly he thought he was writing for.
The narrator of Proust’s Remembrance observed that people tend to think that geniuses are like everybody else, only with some additional power or faculty grafted on to their otherwise-normal person, sort of like they have a third arm or eye. In fact, he reflects, people are generally misshapen or even deranged by genius in ways that make them intolerable to other people. I thought of this several times reading Hegel, wondering if it is possible he could have found a better language for his ideas, while remaining who he was.
I dwell on this aspect of the book for two reasons. First, it is a fact of the book that will continually confront any reader who dares to attempt to plumb its depths, and they must be prepared. Second, it is unfortunately part of the book’s negative legacy. Hegel helped inaugurate certain obscure tendencies of style in Germany and France that have haunted philosophy to this day.
So why read it at all, then? For myself, the answer is, I found after long years of trying to avoid it that Hegel remains at the center of many corners of the Great Conversation that I want to be in on, and it increasingly occurred to me as a great hole in my education. And I was not wrong – now that I have read it, I have recognized just how colossal his influence is, and it has turned up in places where I didn’t expect to find it. For example, it seems to me that Nietzsche owes a great debt to Hegel in his historical treatment of philosophy, and readers of Nietzsche may be surprised to find the phrase “God is dead” in the Phenomenology. And Jürgen Habermas, whom I have long thought of as largely a Kantian-type cosmopolitan, I now see as equally influenced by Hegel’s work in his theory of communicative action.
And so I set out to cross the sunless sea of this book, armed with commentaries, about which a word is essential.
As far as I can make out, Hegel interpretation in the last 40 years in the English-speaking world has been primarily divided into two camps, based largely, I would argue, on how they understand the idea of “spirit.” The older camp is dominated by Charles Taylor, and its primary commitment is the belief that the spirit is something “real”, a kind of self-positing collective consciousness that knows itself by virtue of individuals, who are its instruments or means of knowing. Essentially, spirit is a kind of semi-secularized stand-in for deity in a neo-pantheistic or neo-romantic interpretation of culture and the world.
The second camp is often referred to as Neo-Kantian in the literature, though I’m not sure which figures would actually claim that term. It seems to include Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin, Paul Redding, and J. M. Bernstein, the latter of whom has referred to his own reading of Hegel as “deflationary.” This approach regards spirit not as a kind of super-being, but more like the totality of what human beings do with respect to the intersubjective character of their lives and experience, and particularly how they collectively deliberate about the basis of their own consciousness, intersubjectivity, and sense of meaning through art, philosophy, and religion.
I was surprised to come down rather strongly on the Neo-Kantian side of this issue, although I was initially skeptical. Certainly one advantage that the Neo-Kantians have is that their commentary is much clearer and more useful than that of the Taylor camp. I found Taylor’s classic study of Hegel, for example, to not be very useful or well-written, though one thing I did really admire was Taylor’s insistence on the importance of Herder for situating Hegel’s thought. I think this is quite correct, and that a serious reappraisal of Herder’s value and influence is past-due.
Based on my own careful reading of Phenomenology, I believe spirit is in fact something like a faculty – specifically, the faculty that enables and requires human cognition to function intersubjectively. As to the question of its ontological status, in my view, spirit is analogous to a language, which, on one level, it is nothing more than the sum total of practices and capabilities of its actual speakers, but we nonetheless have a strong concept of language as if it had its own autonomous being. It would be hard to conceive of language without that conceit – we want to say, for example, that German verb tenses are easier to learn than English verb tenses, as if German is a “thing,” even if we don’t believe that German is somehow floating around “out there”.
Indeed, as J. M. Bernstein correctly insists, one of the whole points of Hegel’s thought is that we have to jettison any concept of the transcendent, which Hegel continually refers to as a contentless “other-worldly beyond,” and identifies as one of the most destructive bad ideas that has haunted the history of philosophy. Hegel wants to drive us out of the cloud-cuckoo land of the thing-in-itself and back into historical actuality, because the very idea of the transcendent keeps us locked in what he calls the “inverted world,” in which we insanely insist that what is least real is in fact what is most real, and vice versa.
What does this mean? A key example may be found in Kant, who argues that the unknowable thing-in-itself ultimately serves as the basis for all experience. He thereby keeps us forever locked out of any satisfying possibility of getting at the truth, or of knowing the world as it is, because the thing-in-itself is forever unavailable. That is to say, what is most real, or the concrete actuality of our lived experience, is for Kant what is least real, and the most contentless of all possible concepts, the thing-in-itself, is what is actual.
This is the general structure that inevitably falls out of subject-object dualism, and the first half of Hegel’s book is largely focused on criticizing the structure of that dualism, which casts us back again and again into the inverted world and keeps us locked out of the possibility of truth. Hegel defines this problem as the situation of modern philosophy, ever since Descartes argued that epistemology is first philosophy, and that the foundation of philosophy is to understand how we reconstruct a mental image of the world and determine if those reconstructions are correct.
Hegel has two ways of dealing with this problem, and his solution constitutes one of his main contributions to philosophy. The first is to jettison the idea of the self as fundamentally a knower of objects out there in the world, and to replace it with an idea of human beings as actors, who live in a world that is given to them, and who know it not through consciousness of an external world, but through self-consciousness of their own lives. The second is to jettison the idea of subjective atomism and to argue – quite persuasively, I think – that human experience is fundamentally intersubjective; specifically, that all forms of experience are always already permeated by concepts, and that concepts are fundamentally intersubjective in their character.
In my reading, it is this intersubjective faculty that Hegel refers to as spirit, and this book, as we well know, is the phenomenology of spirit. Hegel uses the term “phenomenology” in a rather different way than later phenomenologists like Bergson and Husserl – he uses it to refer to the understanding of knowing as self-consciousness.
This conceptual analysis of self-consciousness is part of Hegel’s program for making philosophy “scientific,” by which he means that spirit will give a full account of itself to itself using concepts. It will turn out in his fascinating chapter on religion that Hegel believes spirit has always attempted to work out an understanding of itself through religion, using images and representations, and that this is in fact what religion is. Religion, however, cannot recognize that this is what it is actually doing. It serves the spirit as a procedure for collectively deliberating about itself – that is, on the very ways that we collectively define our own ultimate sources of authority and value and then take them as binding – but it thinks it is actually discovering a truly-existent transcendent basis for its value and existence, which it calls God or the gods, or what have you.
It is only by preserving the concept that spirit can reflect on the ways in which ultimate values are collectively posited without losing hold of what it is actually doing and becoming confused, and taking the representations for the thing itself, thereby getting lost in the inverted world. Hegel argues, and I agree, that this requires conceptual analysis, and that this very process itself has only recently become possible for human beings. Prior to, say, the 18th century, it was possible to deliberate in sophisticated ways on the nature of the ultimate, but it is only after the Enlightenment that we have been able to deliberate on these matters self-reflectively, instead of doing so from within the closed framework of a particular value system.
The two tasks of Hegel’s book, then, are to explicate the way that spirit comes to know itself, and to trace the evolution of its various historical forms or moments – to consider the various historically-bound shapes of spirit’s self-understanding – in order to see how it is that we have now arrived at the point where we are at last able to do this work self-reflectively for the first time, not only grasping the spirit, but grasping it through concepts, philosophically – or, in Hegel’s language, scientifically – so that the richness of its manifold content can be preserved and known, and not dissolved into some kind of generalalized fuzzy idea of an absolute that contains everything but explains nothing.
Viewed from one perspective, what Hegel is doing is philosophically anticipating what was about to happen in the nineteenth century, and providing an account of it in advance. I think even he would have been surprised by the degree to which the European tradition’s understanding of itself would, in the next 200 years, be taken over by psychology, anthropology, modern historiography, economics, sociology, and so forth – by all of the conceptual disciplines which have taken up the problems historically dealt with by narrative history and religion.
As to its uniqueness – if you believe, as I do, that Hegel is right in saying that Kant towers over Descartes, but nonetheless could be considered a kind of modification of Descartes, Hegel replaces the entire core structure of the problematic in a fundamental way, and in so doing gives us conceptual tools to bring to light various social, historical, and existential phenomena that would be extremely difficult to explicate using a prior framework. When Hegel begins his chapter on spirit half way through the book, we suddenly see the payoff – how easy it is for him to talk about phenomena like social movements, politics, world views, religion, and the history of ideas, which you could address from a strictly Kantian framework only with great difficulty. I think this can be seen by a careful reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where he begins pushing in that direction, and you can feel the whole fabric of his approach straining with the difficulty of managing to provide an account for complex phenomena.
I have seen countless versions of what I would call a perennial philosophy, which says we’re all islands of structured consciousness on a sea of the inchoate absolute. Hegel decidedly does not provide yet another version of that account, because consciousness, for him, is intersubjective, and because the impossibility of fully grasping the ultimate is not because it is transcendent, but because it unfolds historically, over time, and it must be comprehended in its totality of forms, as the sum of its history. This argument is, to my knowledge, wholly new, and an astonishingly creative approach.
This is the shortest account I can give of what Hegel is up to in this book, and I think it suggests something of its novelty. It has been called a Bildungsroman of consciousness-as-such, and not without good reason – it does in fact comprise an attempt to retrace the evolution of consciousness from within, as it were, and to apply a consistent phenomenological frame for explicating its various moments in terms of the larger project.
As much as I loathe Hegel’s style, this is a towering work of creative and philosophical genius, and one of the very greatest works of philosophy I have ever seen. His project and execution are staggeringly original, and terrifically exciting, and he gives an account that is wholly new and extremely productive. It has already deeply shaped my thinking, and I expect it will be one of my primary intellectual reference points for the rest of my life.
Mesocosm 