This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Production of Arbitrary Differences Conflictual Ontological Oppositions Negativity Différance, Difference, and Contradiction Glas Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ancient and Modern HermeneuticsDavid HalliburtonAncient and Modern Hermeneutics, by Gerald L. Bruns; xii & 318 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, $37.50.Modern hermeneutics, Bruns explains, has mainly gone in two directions. One is toward the transcendental ground-swells of Husserl, who remains committed to idealities, as exemplified in geometry. The second direction, taken by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Bruns (not to mention Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and the Pragmatists) (...) hews to the worldly rootedness of understanding; here each and all enjoy the capacity to comprehend—if not perfectly, at least perfectly well.Bruns divides his admirable opus into two large sections. Part One, on the Ancients, consists of essays on Socrates, Thucydides, the Hebrew Bible, allegory, the Jewish Midrash, and what may be broadly viewed as a correlative Islamaic text. He argues that Socrates’ ironic inclinations are not forensic ploys but manifestations of an authentic ontological disposition. (This ontological motif sounds throughout Bruns’s text.) Bruns’s Socrates has but to carry out the phusis that he himself is—in the undertow of which he cannot but be ironic even as, in being ironic, he cannot but be, like phusis, elusive and even impenetrable: “The point about Socrates is that we never know how to take him” (p. 32).Bruns handles ingeniously the problem of speeches that Thucydides “reported” but could not have heard. He argues that Thucydides provides a sort of simulacrum of the speeches. On this view, the historian does not attempt to report what the speakers actually said; instead he portrays implicitly the concrete historical situations (the modifiers are mine) in which orators orate: “the true author... would not be its original speaker nor its subsequent scribes but the situation that called for the speech to be made” (p. 58).In his challenging chapter on allegory, especially in Philo, Bruns approaches the former’s mystical commentary on the cherubim by problematizing familiar, restrictive distinctions. “In this case there can be no easy or gross distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric, the literal-minded and the wise....” To Philo “understanding is a form of recognition, of being turned toward and received into what before had been hidden or strange” (p. 102).Part Two, on the Moderns, treats of hermeneutic issues raised by Wordsworth [End Page 158] but even more paradigmatically by Luther; the tragic concept of experience; the question of tradition; radical hermeneutics; and the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. The journey ends in Bruns’s attempt to hypostatize an originary concept of freedom.To Bruns the liminal figure for modernity is Luther. It is a high hermeneutic moment that each of Luther’s students receives his own Bible with wide margins in which to copy the master’s—or conceivably his own—commentaries. Here Scripture is not merely grasped cognitively but is immediately, and, with full Deweyan and Diltheyan overtones, experienced. Luther for his part postulates that the text interprets itself. Concurring, and returning to the ontological motif noted above, Bruns proposes the one’s relation to a text “is ontological rather than simply exegetical. Luther’s distinction between law and gospel is a way of extending this ontological relation from the notion of a legal indictment to that of a spiritual one in which one’s self-understanding or self-identity is reconstituted by the text” (p. 146).Later Bruns deftly contrasts Hegel’s Umkehrung, the “movement toward enlightenment and the self-certainty of absolute consciousness” (p. 157), with Heidegger’s resolute refusal to appropriate or manipulate the world into which he, with everyone else, has been thrown. This attitude is somewhat akin to negative capability or wise passiveness—no English word or phrase gets it right—and requires a kind of letting-be, or letting-go. Bruns puts the matter about as well as one can, in short compass: “Thinking... is not reasoning or questioning but listening; its goal is not conceptual representation by Gelassenheit, or a letting go, releasement, and ‘openness to the mystery’” (p. 158).In his chapter on romantic hermeneutics, Bruns returns to Luther who, though stressing the empowerment of the individual reader, nonetheless regards the text as a vital force entering into and transforming the... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical LifeLiz DisleyRobert B. Pippin. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 308. Paper, $29.99In this work, Pippin offers an interpretation of freedom, rationality, and agency in Hegel’s work and adds substantive content to the key concept of recognition. In doing so, he offers not only a compelling elucidation of a (...) particularly opaque part of Hegel’s analysis of human action and interaction, but also demonstrates the relevance of his practical philosophy to contemporary discussions about free will, intersubjectivity, autonomy, recognition, and liberalism. Pippin provides a substantial defense of Hegel’s position in the context of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against a commonly-held view that Hegelian political philosophy must be much closer to modern communitarian theories than those of classical or modern liberalism. Pippin’s work is central to the recent resurgence of interest in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy by analytical philosophers such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell, as well as the renewed study of recognition in a practical context.Controversially, Pippin claims that Hegel has only one theory of intersubjectivity and recognition from the time of the Jena writings to the Philosophy of Right. The theory develops from an initial stage, where “the desideratum of mutual recognition is posed and explored,” to a realization that ethical life as described in the Philosophy of Right provides the necessary conditions for rational, mutual recognition (184n4). Thus, he rejects the common view in recent Continental Hegel scholarship, asserted by critics including Jürgen Habermas, Michael Theunissen, and Axel Honneth, that Hegel fails to develop adequately the theory of intersubjectivity initially present in his earlier writings and subsumes intersubjectivity into a “grand metaphysical process” of the Absolute Subject’s self-manifestation (184).Pippin defends Hegel from this common charge on the basis of his “very unusual” concept of freedom (185). The key claim here is that Hegel does not set recognition or indeed other-relation as a precondition for any kind of self-relation, but rather, “A true individual [End Page 112] is a free subject and recognition relations function in a complex way as conditions for that possibility” (186). This seems like a promising method of demonstrating that Hegel’s intersubjectivity does not, after all, dissolve in the face of a monological divine conception of reality. The difficulty with the approach, as Pippin concedes, is that it involves making a series of radical, strange, and controversial claims. These claims, in general, focus on the temporal priority of freedom, recognition, and rationality: deeds can count as “mine” in Pippin’s special sense only if they are undertaken rationally, but this state of rationality depends on being in a social state of recognizing and being recognized (190). However, it is neither radical nor strange to make a clear distinction between human interdependence in terms of our particular social psychology and in terms of “an ideal of normative mutuality inherent in any attempt to act” (211).Pippin appreciates that defenders of Hegel’s concept of recognition do not want to say that I cannot be a free subject by myself, but at the same time want to leave the door open for there to be some kind of possibility of ascertaining moral harm in cases of failure to recognize. For Pippin, free actions, and actions committed out of free will, are those committed by agents in a particular social context, namely being situated within norm-governed relations of reciprocal recognition to others. Such an approach fulfills neither of these criteria, since it means I cannot be free by myself but also that, in the case of my being placed in a situation where I am not within these relations of reciprocal recognition to others, there is no obvious originator of moral harm caused by this recognition (218). Pippin accepts that there is no clear answer to this difficulty, but his account of the genesis of norms and social rationality does save Hegel’s account from the objection by Theunissen, Habermas, Honneth et al. mentioned above. Like Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Pippin sees the answer to charges of introducing a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by John RussonRobert BermanJohn Russon. The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 199. Cloth, $60.00To intoduce his account of the human body, Russon places two epigraphs at the front of his book, one from Diogenes Laertius, the other from Artaud. The first tells of Zeno, (...) seeking the oracle’s counsel about how best to live and advised to “mix his flesh with corpses.” What sounds like a recommendation to practice necrophilia, Zeno cleverly interprets to mean that he ought to spend his life reading old books. The second likens culture to a new bodily organ, radicalizing Merleau-Ponty’s view that the blind man’s cane is an extension of his body. Diogenes’ anecdote and the surrealist’s aphorism extend the conception of the human body beyond its ordinary boundary. Literally, Artaud’s culture is no bodily organ, nor is Zeno’s hermeneutically active mind a body which, flouting the law, mixes with the corpus of ancient authors, and experiences, at one Phaedrus-like remove, forbidden pleasures of dialectics.If Russon is a Zenonic reader and Hegel an ancient, then his book enacts the oracle’s advice correctly spun. However, it is clear, despite its title, that this is not Russon’s only aim. At the outset Russon distinguishes his project from that of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (PS); whereas Hegel presents the experience of consciousness, Russon’s project is to develop a “phenomenology of the body” or “science of the embodiment of consciousness” (3), whose central concepts are the “three logical determinations of … phusis, hexis, and logos” (8). Despite this contrast, Russon claims to follow the method he takes Hegel to have adopted in PS, intending “by rigorous argument to comprehend … the human body” (3), to “display the self-development of the internal dynamism of the concept of the body” (4). Yet, while initially insisting on the difference between his and Hegel’s projects, he actually holds that PS is “implicitly” such a phenomenology of the body; hence, he wants to extract from it “the philosophy of the body that is there implied” (3) and to show how it rationally comprehends human embodiment. If making the implicit explicit describes the work of interpretation, then his book is as much an essay in Hegel interpretation as it is a self-standing phenomenology of the body. Russon mixes his interpretive with his Hegelian systematic aim, but these are distinct, and he grants the latter priority. If one rejects his interpretive claim about Hegel’s project, Russon’s systematic claims about the body should remain unaffected, and assessable in their own right, even if not implicit in PS. What are these claims?Russon’s central gambit is to understand the human body in terms of embodiment, and embodiment in turn via the activities of the self-conscious self. Since he argues that these activities essentially involve recognition, thus are inherently social, the “whole [End Page 636] functioning world of social, cultural life will have to be recognized as the body of the properly human self,” while the natural body “of mere human life” is “not yet the body of the human proper” (9). Accordingly, Russon organizes his systematic claims about the human body into three parts: A. treats propaedeutically the “Hegelian concept of self-conscious selfhood” (8), B. handles the body as social institution; and C. deals with the culminating “absolution of the body” in which the self knows itself in its embodiment as self-conscious self.Russon’s project prompts questions about his Hegel interpretation and his conception of the human body. PS is skeptical, but preparatory: its immanent critique of interrelated knowledge claims serves to expose and undermine the principle of the opposition of consciousness which they assume; acceptance of that principle, Hegel argues, is the chief obstacle blocking the way to systematic philosophical knowledge, precisely because it leaves philosophy defenseless against skeptical challenges to the very possibility of such knowledge. This construal of PS conflicts with Russon’s interpretive claim that it is implicitly a science of the... (shrink)

Hegel's doctrines of absolute negativity and 'the Concept' are among his most original contributions to philosophy and they constitute the systematic core of dialectical thought. Brady Bowman explores the interrelations between these doctrines, their implications for Hegel's critical understanding of classical logic and ontology, natural science and mathematics as forms of 'finite cognition', and their role in developing a positive, 'speculative' account of consciousness and its place in nature. As a means to this end, Bowman (...) also re-examines Hegel's relations to Kant and pre-Kantian rationalism, and to key post-Kantian figures such as Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling. His book draws from the breadth of Hegel's writings to affirm a robustly metaphysical reading of the Hegelian project, and will be of great interest to students of Hegel and of German Idealism more generally. (shrink)

Although the concept of ‘true infinity’ is undoubtedly central to Hegel's philosophy, the Anglophone rehabilitation of Hegel as a post-Kantian critical philosopher has avoided any sustained interpretive confrontation with the concept. In this paper, I provide a revisionary reconstruction of Hegelian true infinity by engaging with Martin Hägglund's argument in This Life (2019) for the centrality of finitude to Hegel's philosophy. For Hägglund, Hegel's philosophy effects a ‘secular reconciliation’ with finitude by demonstrating that our mortality is not (...) a negative condition to be overcome; rather, mortality is constitutive of rational social agency or ‘spiritual life’. While Hägglund's interpretive emphasis on finitude prima facie occludes a consideration of the concept of true infinity, I show that Hägglund's understanding of spiritual life in terms of the dynamic of self-maintenance implicitly articulates a revisionary understanding of true infinity as instantiated in and through the activity of finite living rational beings. More specifically, I show that Hägglund's understanding of finitude as constitutive of spiritual life is grounded in three closely interrelated Hegelian meta-concepts, all of which Hegel derives in the second chapter of the Logic (‘Existence’): (a) the distinction between abstract and determinate negation; (b) the form of individuality as constituted through determinate negation; and (c) true infinity as the form of individuality understood in explicitly processual terms. I thus ground a deflationary interpretation of true infinity in Hegel's logical account of determinate individuality, and at the same time, contribute to This Life's ongoing critical reception by articulating its Hegelian logical infrastructure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 350-353 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, by Eva T. H. Brann; xviii & 249 pp. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, $35.00. This, the third of Eva Brann's trilogy on imagination, time, and naysaying respectively, is described by one of her colleagues as (...) her "cradle-to-grave book" (p. xvi). The word "naysaying" plays felicitously on the sound of the English word "nay" and the cognate Indo-European root "ne," which gives Brann a convenient starting-point for discerning what various forms of naysaying have in common. Note that this is saying rather than thinking, being, or doing, although the relations among these acts are a recurring concern in her discussion. Unlike some "postmoderns," Brann does not regard language as a self-contained arena with no reference outside of itself. Rather, for her, language is a convenient medium for thinking about what is extralinguistic, whether in the mind or elsewhere.Nor does she think that a word must necessarily have some underlying unity beneath its various meanings. In fact, heeding Wittgenstein's warning, she admits that "it is a pathologically bad craving to want a word to have one ultimate meaning, worse to look for one meaning over many words, and worst to assume that such a meaning may apply to a something beyond the realm of language." Nevertheless, she suggests, "this craving to look for one truth behind many appearances may be simply irradicable, being nothing less than the philosophical impulse" (p. xiv).Where does her "philosophical impulse" focus, on texts or on things? She explicitly tells us that texts are indispensable (at least for her) to get very far with the things themselves (p. 2). And so, in the course of her investigation, she attends to Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Bergson, Frege, Meinong, Russell, Whitehead, Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, among others. Nonetheless, she begins by noticing a sort of willful denial that is pre-linguistic and "speechless" (the contrariness of an infant), and she ends with the nothingness that is void of all language and everything else. These two topics, expressed by the words "No" (Chapter One) and "Nothing" (Chapter Six) respectively, "frame" her inquiry (p. 42). Along the way she always has an eye to what lies behind or beyond language, in the world or in the mind, with a chapter each for "Not," "Nonexistence," "Nonbeing," and "Negativity." She [End Page 350] says that Chapter Four, concerning "Nonbeing," is the center and philosophic focus of her study. Brann's chapters thus represent the six big divisions for organizing her observations. Indeed, for Brann, the plurality of naysayings "seems to fall naturally" into her sixfold division (p. xiv).Thoughtfully pondering this structure takes the reader a long way toward understanding the work (in both senses of "work": the thought itself and the text which records that thought). The chapter divisions progress from the willful, through the logical, the imaginative, the philosophic, and the dialectical, to end, as we noted, in the absolute Nothing, the "antagonist of Being." For instance, the distinction between the first two--the willful and the logical--is the distinction between the personal (denial) and the impersonal (negation). In considering willful denial, Brann understands the will to be a "willingness, inclination, readiness"--usually "determinate," "focused and active" (p. 7). Likewise, negation also has a personal origin: "Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the opposition and polarities that belong to beings (of which the first... is surely that of thinking itself to its object, be it ideal or real)" (p. 29f.). Thus, although logical negation seems to originate in the personal subject there is something quite detachable and impersonal about logical formulations, so that Heraclitus "bids people hear his truth 'not listening to me but to the logos,' the cosmic collecting and distinguishing power" (p. 128). So the logos that begins for us as "reason manifested in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:19. HUME AND BARKER ON THE LOGIC OF DESIGN I find myself in complete agreement with what I take to be the main thesis of Stephen Barker's paper. It is certainly a mistake to concentrate our attention on the negative critique which Hume directed at the modes of argument of his rationalist predecessors and contemporaries and directed even more at the mode of certain conviction with which they (...) presented conclusions arrived at by arguments that did not have a logically compelling force. Hume was very much concerned with the problem of just what kind of force an argument that was not logically compelling could have; and he was even more concerned (perhaps) with the problem of how the logical structure of non-compelling argument could best be exhibited so that the logic of the argument would not be confused with its force. He made significant contributions to both of these problems; and I think he knew what he was doing well enough not to deserve the charge of inconsistency which Barker seems inclined to bring against him. There are some questions which he did not address, for the very good reason that they could only arise, or at least they could only be formulated clearly, as a result of the clarification of our ideas and our situation that Hume himself achieved. His distinction between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact" may be overly simplistic. But in all its simplicity this distinction is powerful enough to enable Hume to deal quite shortly with any claim that it is inconsistent to want to achieve this goal of knowing and saying what is true, just because we have shown that we have no logical guarantee that we shall achieve it. Christian orthodoxy has always maintained that we are all of us equally "sinners"; but no orthodox Christian moralist has ever maintained the Stoic paradox that all sins are equal. It is precisely because we know that we cannot achieve Stoic wisdom that we cannot possibly be tempted to 20. accept that paradox. Hume's achievement was to show that (in spite of the serpent's false promise) our situation with respect to knowledge has always been just as parlous as our situation with respect to action. But even in these unhappy circumstances it is not inconsistent to strive for whatever measure of truth we can achieve; and to strive at the same time for absolute logical clarity about the limits of our insight and about the comparative merits of all proposed approaches to the goal. But I must not devote my time to an issue that Barker wisely asks us to keep an open mind about. I want to discuss the form and substance of the arguments with which Barker supports the thesis that I do agree with, rather than take up an aside of his that I happen not to agree with. So then, first, let us consider the fault that he finds in the "fifth way" of Thomas. He says that it "begs the question". It "obscures the nexus of controversy" because the first premiss of the syllogism makes a crucial assumption that needs to be proved. Now I deny that the "fifth way" obscures the nexus of controversy in that way. Thomas (and all of his competent hearers) knew perfectly well that his first premiss had not been universally accepted. He was stating the view of Aristotle about the generally purposive character of nature, and he knew that it had been doubted. But he did not think that a rational believer could hesitate about the choice between Aristotle's position and that of the atheist defenders of chance. Anyone who did hesitate was a fool, and arguments could not touch him. That some men were fools, and could "say in their heart, 'There is no God'", was part of the "problem of evil" which we must consign trustfully to the inscrutable wisdom of God (save in so far as Scripture reveals to us the origin of and reason for our fallen condition). In Hume's world, Aristotle's conception of the orderliness of Nature had been supplanted by Newton's. Newton accepted the atomist view that "natural bodies... (shrink)

Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom are rightly seen as representatives of a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, their interpretations diverge due to different definitions and uses of conceptions of discursive practice. We focus on three ways in which such definitions and uses bear on their interpretations. First, while Lumsden has recently criticized Pinkard and Brandom for ‘discursive bias’ in their accounts of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we note that Pinkard distinguishes between various (...) modes of reason-giving, and we argue that a further qualification of interdependencies between these modes may support his interpretation against such criticism. Second, Pinkard and Pippin have recently criticized Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping practice, and Pippin in particular has argued that the latter rests on an individualistic reductionism about content foreign to Hegel. However, we find that the real issue is that the modes of methodological abstraction and idealization assumed for Brandom’s conception of discursive practice leave out of account the historical alteration as well as the institutional embodiment of normative authority as emphasized by Pippin and Pinkard. Third, while Pippin and Pinkard both make Hegel’s notion of modern ethical life bear on a conception of practical rationality, their uses of a conception of discursive practice in such an undertaking betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents. (shrink)

The article expresses skepticism on the alleged affinity between Hegel’s theory of conceptuality and conceptual pragmatism. Despite the intriguing philosophical impetus underlying the latter, the author formulates doubts about its compatibility with logical and metaphysical principles of absolute idealism. The criticism is articulated in four theses: (1) pragmatism’s concerns with (ultimately empirical) concept-acquisition and concept-application are largely alien to Hegel’s logical-metaphysical theory of conceptuality; (2) the interchangeability of ‘word’ and ‘concept’ in the pragmatist discussion is incompatible with Hegel’s (...) notion of thinking; (3) the distinction of Vertsandesbestimmung and Vernunftbegriff, while ignored in practice in the pragmatist approach, is pivotal to Hegel’s understanding of the nature of conceptuality; (4) finally, pragmatism’s use of the recognition-thesis from the Phenomenology of Spirit ignores the noncontractarian, non-negotiative function of the same in Hegel’s work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.4 (2002) 387-394 [Access article in PDF] Psychosis Good and Bad:Values-Based Practice and the Distinction Between Pathological and Nonpathological Forms of Psychotic Experience Mike C. Jackson and K. W. M. Fulford IN TWO PAPERS in this issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, Marek Marzanski and Mark Bratton (2002) and Caroline Brett (2002) develop important critiques, from the perspectives respectively of Christian theology (...) and Eastern philosophy, of our 1997 analysis of the distinction between pathological and nonpathological forms of psychotic experience (Jackson and Fulford 1997).In this response, we briefly summarize the main points from our 1997 analysis; we consider, separately, the important although very different challenges to that analysis from the perspectives of our two critics; and we briefly indicate the main lines of recent developments in policy, practice, and research in mental health as they relate to this important area of human experience. The Jackson and Fulford (1997) Analysis In our 1997 paper, we presented three case studies from a larger series (Jackson 1991, 1997, 2001) selected with the express aim of bringing into focus the conceptual difficulties that arise at the borderline between psychotic illness and what we called benign spiritual experience. On the basis of these case studies we argued thatspiritual experiences, which are essentially benign, can involve explicitly psychotic phenomenology; traditional psychiatric diagnostic methods, which focus on the form and content of beliefs and experiences, are not capable of distinguishing between pathological and nonpathological forms of such psychotic experiences; [End Page 387]evaluation of such experiences (and claims about "illness" and health more generally) necessarily involves value judgments as well as judgments about matters of fact (specifically, the "facts" of traditional descriptive psychopathology); and more specifically, the distinction between pathological and nonpathological phenomena concerns the way in which they are embedded in the structure of the values and beliefs by which the actions of the subjects concerned are defined: "In the case of pathological psychotic phenomena," we argued, "there is a radical failure of action.... In the case of spiritual psychotic phenomena, action is radically enhanced" (Jackson and Fulford 1997, 55).We then proposed a cognitive problem-solving model of psychotic experiences. This model suggests that such experiences can be a normal and adaptive psychological response to existential crises, such as loss of meaning or purpose in life, coming to terms with death or bereavement, and so on (Batson and Ventis 1982; Jackson, 1991, 1997, 2001). The model is consistent with a subsequent position paper published by the British Psychological Society arguing the case for a psychological formulation of psychotic experiences and cognitive-behavioural methods in their management (2000).In the case of nonpathological psychotic experience, the psychotic elements of the experience promote a paradigm shift in the individual's underlying assumptions, which effectively resolves their impasse and allows them to move forward. This is normally a self-limiting process, in that when the individual is able to utilize their insight, it acts to resolve the stress which triggered it. In pathological psychosis, this process fails for various possible reasons, which were not explored in any depth in that paper (but see Jackson 2001 for a more detailed discussion). The Challenge From Marzanski and Bratton Marek Marzanski and Mark Bratton reexamine the questions raised by our cases from a Christian theological perspective (Marzanski and Bratton 2002). They suggest a theologically based definition of spiritual experience according to which the criteria for "genuine" experience concerns its context within the development of the individual's religious faith. In Bratton and Marzanski's account, these criteria are based on a Christian value system.They present three cases of their own, which, in contrast to the three cases in our 1997 paper, vividly illustrate how phenomena that may be valued negatively from a medical perspective (i.e., as defined by us in terms of their consequences for action), may, at one and the same time, be valued positively from a religious perspective (i.e., in terms of their consequences for the... (shrink)

The article examines the role of Hegel's theory of finite cognition in Marx's critique of classical political economy. I argue that Hegel's distinction of finite cognition between analytic and synthetic in the Science of Logic constitutes the methodological framework through which Marx delineates the different stages of the development of political economy. Focusing on the Grundrisse, I reveal the Hegelian influence behind Marx's statements on previous political economists’ methods. Thus, Marx's immanent critique of the classical political (...) economy is construed as undertaken from the level of the systematic dialectical method of Capital, and is modelled on Hegel's immanent critique of analytic and synthetic cognition from the perspective of absolute cognition. In this context, and focusing on Marx's critique of Ricardo's method, I argue that the latter's limitations are associated with the deficiencies of synthetic cognition as presented by Hegel. Therefore, the article sheds light on an important yet underexplored topic of the Hegel-Marx relationship. By indicating the centrality of Hegel's theory of finite cognition in Marx's methodological underpinnings, the article provides a new perspective on Hegel-Marx scholarship. (shrink)

The article expresses skepticism on the alleged affinity between Hegel’s theory of conceptuality and conceptual pragmatism. Despite the intriguing philosophical impetus underlying the latter, the author formulates doubts about its compatibility with logical and metaphysical principles of absolute idealism. The criticism is articulated in four theses: pragmatism’s concerns with concept-acquisition and concept-application are largely alien to Hegel’s logical-metaphysical theory of conceptuality; the interchangeability of ‘word’ and ‘concept’ in the pragmatist discussion is incompatible with Hegel’s notion of thinking; the (...) distinction of Vertsandesbestimmung and Vernunftbegriff, while ignored in practice in the pragmatist approach, is pivotal to Hegel’s understanding of the nature of conceptuality; finally, pragmatism’s use of the recognition-thesis from the Phenomenology of Spirit ignores the noncontractarian, non-negotiative function of the same in Hegel’s work. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Nothing and Negativity from a Logical Point of View Hegel's Conceptions of Nothing and Negativity Heidegger's Criticism Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Non-Cartesian Psychotherapeutic Framework: Radical Pragmatism as an AlternativeLouis S. Berger (bio)AbstractPostmodern criticism has identified important impoverishments that necessarily follow from the use of Cartesian frameworks. This criticism is reviewed and its implications for psychotherapy are explored in a psychoanalytic context. The ubiquitous presence of Cartesianism (equivalently, representationism) in psychoanalytic frameworks—even in some that are considered postmodern—is demonstrated and criticized. The postmodern convergence on praxis as a (...) desirable alternative to Cartesianism is reported, and its relevance for psychoanalysis is considered. The severe conceptual difficulties entailed in formulating such an alternative are discussed, as are those difficulties that would be encountered were psychoanalysis to attempt the shift from explanatory mental science to praxis. The principal psychoanalytic problematics explored are: the paradoxical relationships between theory and therapeutic technique; the therapeutic action; and validation of clinical practices. Initial, nontraditional suggestions for addressing these problems are offered.Keywordspsychoanalysis, therapeutic action, representation, state space, praxis, hermeneutics, Descartes, Heidegger, Wittgenstein“But the inability to bring one’s subject under conceptual control, fixing it propositionally, is not the end of thinking; on the contrary, it were better to say that the breakdown of concepts and the failure of words is an opening that takes us out of the realm where representation and calculation are all that matter to thinking.... [T]his is what happens in the Socratic dialogue where the negativity in which one ends up at a loss for words is at the same time that which sets thinking free.”Bruns 1989, 9“To evolve theory as though our methods and processes of study were essentially the same, or could be the same, as those of other sciences, or could be disregarded when it comes to theory, implies a view of reality that is no longer tenable, least of all in that ambiguous area which we call psychic reality. Nevertheless, all of us are still more or less captives of an erroneous understanding of objectivity and objective reality....”Loewald 1970, 45 [End Page 169]CartesianismCartesianism still underlies and dominates much of today’s thought. It is the label for a network of interrelated ideas and themes:the ontological duality of mind and body; the subjective individualism implicit in the ultimate appeal to direct personal verification; the method of universal doubt which was supposed to lead us to indubitable truths; the doctrine that language and signs are an external disguise for thought; the doctrine that vagueness is unreal and that the philosophic endeavor is one of knowing clearly and distinctly a completely determinate reality; and most fundamentally, the doctrine that we can break out of the miasma of our language or system of signs and have direct intuitive knowledge of objects. (Bernstein 1971, 5–6)[The Cartesian assumptions] constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows: there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.(Hesse 1980, vii)Hesse goes on to say that “almost every assumption underlying this account has been subjected to damaging criticism,” a view echoed by others: “Most contemporary philosophers have been in revolt against the Cartesian framework” (Bernstein 1971, 5); “A rejection of the Cartesian view is a central theme for both of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Sass 1992, 444n 77); and “The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture since Hegel” (Rorty 1982, 3).These criticisms arise... (shrink)

The article discusses the category of interest, which is an explanatory category of social phenomena in materialist ontology, particularly the Marxist variety. The considerations are guided by Hegel’s conviction that every category taken in abstraction loses its exploratory value, so instead of asking for such an ultimate basis for explanation, one should investigate what else should be assumed for something – interest – to really mean something. Following this advice, the text carries out a conceptual analysis of the categories of (...) life, teleology and identity and their mutual relationship based on Hegelian philosophy. Overcoming the ambiguity of Hegel’s argument makes it possible to uncover the dialectically negative identity of spirit that is society and nature, which, transferred to the dimension of social relations, makes it possible to talk about the internal connection of interest with its negation, which is disinterestedness. It turns out that interest can only mean something if it is related to disinterestedness, which, again, on the grounds of social relations and especially class conflict, proves to be the interest of the possibility of being disinterested. In the final part of the article, the result of these considerations is referred to Hegelian social philosophy, where it turns out to be reflected in the relation between the two main categories of ‘ethical life’ and ‘moral life’ usually devalued by interpreters. At the same time, the relation between these categories corresponds to the relation between the universal model of the bourgeoisie with their economic interests and the disinterested representatives of the general estate. (shrink)

To readers of the Science of Logic, “mode” signifies the externality of the absolute, and its proper place within the text is at the level of the determinations of reflection, within the Doctrine of Essence. Let us take a look at the third section of the Doctrine of Essence: “Actuality”. In its broadest meaning, this signifies “reflected absoluteness,” that is to say, the unity of essence and existence; therefore, it is not a purely immediate existence, but “the immediate unity (...) of form between inner and outer.” Through this definition, a new kind of logical process is made possible - that of the actual totality’s self-manifestation. In the opening chapter of this section, headed “The Absolute,” the determination of the absolute is carried through from its initial unity to truly absolute identity by means of the complex play of reflection. Hegel’s treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of this paper; but if, at the initial stage of its dialectical cycle, reflection is external to the absolute - instead of being the proper determination of it - then it can at least be observed that in the third subdivision of the chapter what is under consideration is the negative return of the absolute into itself, and that this return is accomplished in such a way that “mode” is both the externality of the absolute and its reflection into itself: its being into itself and for itself. As one of the recent commentators on the Science of Logic has pointed out: “Le mode est ‘1’apparance comme apparance’: avec lui se profile un type d’extériorité qui ne sera plus en dette à l’egard d’une interiorité … la manifestation de l’absolu n’est pas une sortie de soi, mais plutôt sa constitution dans l’exteriorité des modes, puis des modalités de l’effectivité.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)Suzanne Guerlac (bio)If there is a single term poststructuralism could not live without—at least within the intellectual circles associated with the review Tel quel—it is “transgression,” inherited from Bataille. “God-meaning,” Philippe Sollers writes in an early essay, “... is a figure of linguistic interdiction whereas writing—which is metaphoricity itself (Derrida)—transgresses... the hierarchic order of discourse and of the world associated with it” [“La science (...) de Lautréamont” 808, my emphasis]. In their Dictionnaire des sciences du langage Ducrot and Todorov declare grandly that text “has always functioned as a transgressive field with respect to the system according to which we organize our perception, our grammar, our metaphysics and even our science” [443–44, my emphasis]. They describe the advent of poststructuralism as a “Copernican revolution,” and it became customary to characterize the before and after of this break by referring to Bataille’s distinction between “restrained” and “general” economies.An influential essay by Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (1963), might be considered the opening move in what would become Tel quel’s appropriation of Bataille. Foucault’s essay examines Bataille’s L’érotisme (1955), a study that theorized transgression in a complex elaboration which articulated philosophical discourse (Hegel/Kojève) with a “sociological” discourse of the sacred (Caillois). Foucault’s reading of the text removes the transgression of eroticism from both these discursive horizons and moves it toward late Heidegger (an ontology of the limit) and Nietzsche. If one of Bataille’s most radical gestures was to insert the ethnographic distinction sacred/profane into philosophical discussion, Foucault’s analysis reinscribes transgression within the intertextual field of philosophy, radicalized, of course, through the inclusion of the “marginal” figure, Nietzsche, and the philosopher who announced the end of philosophy, Heidegger. Foucault’s rewriting of Bataille may read philosophy against itself, may even propose the transgression of philosophy; nevertheless, it is structured by the vicissitudes of philosophical discourse. Bataille on the other hand had confronted philosophy with something radically other—tout autre.In “Préface à la transgression,” Foucault defined transgression as “a gesture concerning the limit.” He presented it as a flash of lightning, an image that not only figures transgression but also emblematizes the move into what will become the philosophical register of poststructuralism. It traces a line, a line that figures the Heideggerian ontology of limitation, the coming into being (or appearance) of beings on the horizon of Being; it suggests the limit of the ontological difference between Being and beings.Anticipating Derrida through Heidegger, Foucault analyzed transgression as an event of difference, alluding to Blanchot’s “principe de contestation” and to a Nietzschean notion of affirmation. “Might not the instantaneous play of the limit and transgression be today the essential test of a thinking of ‘origin’ which Nietzsche bequeathed to us... a thinking that would be absolutely, and in the same movement, a Critique and an Ontology, a thinking that would think finitude and being?” [Foucault 759]. Transgression becomes identified with a “philosophy of eroticism” (which plays on Sade’s “philosophie dans le boudoir”), a gesture that transvalues philosophy from the realm of cognitive or rational activity to “an experience of finitude and of being, of the limit and of transgression.” The [End Page 6] “philosophy” of eroticism is thus a “test/ordeal [épreuve} of the limit,” one that “no dialectical movement, no analysis of fundamental laws [constitutions] and of their transcendental foundation [leur sol]” can help us think. Foucault then asks a rhetorical question that could be said to structure much of the discourse of theory in the next decade: “Would it be an exaggeration, to say,” he asks, “... that it would be necessary to find a language for the transgressive that would be what dialectic has been for contradiction?” [759].In this way Foucault established transgression as an alternative to the machine of dialectical contradiction. Attuned to the recent discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of relations between the subject and language (the subject is no longer considered master of his or her language but structured by it), Foucault announced that “the gesture of transgression replaces the movement of contradiction by plunging the... (shrink)

InLess Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek presents the results of his long meditation on the meaning and ultimate implications of Hegelian philosophy. In this review-article, I will first examine the stages of Žižek’s transformation of Hegelianism, and then analyse the main themes brought up inLess than Nothing. The development of a ‘polemological’ interpretation of the Hegelian concepts of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘absolute’ leads Žižek to emphasise the role of negativity and antagonism in the (...) process of constitution of reality and subject as part of reality itself. This implies a reinterpretation of dialectical materialism: reality is not something that simply precedes the subject, but which contains just multiplicities of multiplicities, and thus the Void itself. Žižek’s assertion that the ultimate reality is the Void itself then renders unavoidable the critique of Hegelian Marxism based on the centrality of the category of alienation. The last part of the review-article surveys, instead, how Žižek’s re-reading of Hegel affects his relation with Marx and also examines the role played by ‘contradiction’ in his theoretical proposal. (shrink)

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

The history of philosophy risks a self-opacity whereby we overestimate or underestimate our proximity to prior modes of thinking. This risk is relevant to assessing Hegel’s appropriation by McDowell and Priest. McDowell enlists Hegel for a quietist answer to the problem with assuming that concepts and reality belong to different orders, viz., how concepts are answerable to the world. If we accept Hegel’s absolute idealist view that the conceptual is boundless, this problem allegedly dissolves. Priest enlists Hegel for a (...) dialetheist answer to the problem with assuming that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive, viz., how certain sentences are both true and false. If we accept Hegel’s dialectical view that certain contradictions are necessary, this problem allegedly dissolves. For both McDowell and Priest, we find a true friend in Hegel. I argue that McDowell’s and Priest’s appropriations of Hegel overestimate Hegel’s affinity with quietism and dialetheism. McDowell reads Hegel as a quietist who silences metaphysical claims and the skeptical questions they raise against commonsense, but neglects Hegel’s adaptation of ancient skepticism against commonsense. Priest reads Hegel as a dialetheist who subordinates formal logic to dialectical logic by affirming the truth of certain contradictions, but neglects Hegel’s commitment to resolving contradictions for the sake of truth qua whole. I diagnose their misreadings in terms of what Hegel regards as the three moments of logic and argue that while McDowell jumps to its third moment, Priest stalls at its second moment. According to Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, logic has three “moments”: the abstractive moment of the understanding, which “stops short” at fixed categories; the negative moment of dialectic, which discovers the “genuine nature” of the categories, viz., that each “passes over, of itself, into its opposite”; and the positive moment of speculation, which grasps the “unity” of categories through the “dissolution” of their inner opposition. Hegel warns that if these moments are “kept separate from each other […] they are not considered in their truth”. I suggest that quietist and dialetheist readings of Hegel fail to consider truthfully the unified moments of his logic. In his quietist critique of metaphysics, McDowell enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of concept and reality. But McDowell helps himself directly to the third moment of logic, where the unity of the categories, and hence the boundlessness of the conceptual, would be fully articulated. Since he arrives at the third moment prematurely, ignoring its prior moments, he obscures its truth (§1). In his dialetheist critique of formal logic, Priest enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of truth and falsity. But Priest restricts himself gratuitously to the second moment of logic, where contradictions within the categories are not yet resolved. Since he stalls at the second moment, severed from its final moment, he obscures its truth (§2). I argue we can extricate Hegel from quietist and dialetheist misreadings only if we grasp the truth of the three moments of logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 77-99 [Access article in PDF] Malebranche's Distinction Between General and Particular Volitions Andrew Pessin "God needs no instruments to act," Malebranche writes in Search; "it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will." (...) 1 God acts by willing; so much is clear. But Malebranche goes further, especially in his Treatise, by asserting that (i) only in miracles and the initial creation does God act by "particular volitions," while (ii) God ordinarily acts in nature via laws or "general volitions." This distinction between general and particular volitions is central to Malebranche's theories of divine activity, theodicy, and occasionalism. Nevertheless, I will argue, it has been almost universally misunderstood.The two standard interpretations of Malebranche's expressions "general volition" and "particular volition" are these: (GC) A "general volition" for Malebranche is one whose content is general; a "particular volition" is one whose content is particular. [End Page 77](PC) All divine volitions have particular contents; but a "general volition" is one which is in accord with general laws, while a "particular volition" is one not in accord with general laws. 2Andrew Black offers the following two schemata for volition contents, where (B) also provides the general form of laws of nature: A: Let c be F at t. B: For all created substances x and y and for every time t1, if x is G at t1and x bears relation R to y then there is a time t2 such that t2 bears relation T to t1 and y is F at t2. 3(A) is "particular" insofar as it represents a particular state of affairs, involving a particular substance in a mode at a time; (B) is general in making no such reference. According to (GC), then, when Malebranche's God acts by "general volitions," He has volitions whose content is of the form of (B) (specifically, a law of nature); when He acts by particular volitions His volitions are of the form of (A). According to (PC), both general and particular volitions are of the form of (A), while the former are in accord with laws of nature and the latter aren't.To simplify matters, I will focus on God's activity in the material world; the laws of nature in question will usually be the laws of motion. Further, to avoid terminological confusion, I will refer to volitions of the form of (A) as "particular content volitions," and those of (B) as "general content volitions." The issue before us then is: When Malebranche's God acts by "general volitions," are these general content volitions or particular content volitions? Proponents of (GC) support the former; those of (PC) the latter.Unhappily, almost everything Malebranche says directly on the subject can be interpreted either way. 4 (I'll speculate why at the end.) And admittedly, what Malebranche says more broadly about natural laws and divine volitions is often suggestive of (GC)—so it is no surprise that almost all recent commentators adopt (GC), usually simply assuming it without argument. Still, I shall argue that if one of the interpretations is correct, it is (PC). [End Page 78]My plan in this paper: (1) Offer some prima facie support for (PC); (2) Provide four arguments that (PC) either fits better with, or is alone consistent with, various Malebranchean doctrines; (3) Reply to some recent objections against (PC); (4) Argue that Malebranche's direct reply to Arnauld supports (PC); (5) Offer a conclusion and final thought. 1. Some Prima Facie Support For (PC) Let me first note that Steven Nadler offers various passages which do at least suggest (PC). 5 But that evidence, while strong, is not alone conclusive. For one thing, those passages can perhaps be accommodated by (GC); 6 for another, there are many passages which suggest (GC). So we must go further.Consider, then, Malebranche's primary concern in the Treatise, the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic by Karen NgMarina F. BykovaKaren Ng. Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. iii + 319. Hardback, $85.00.In her insightful book, Karen Ng defends the fundamental significance of Hegel's concept of life, which she considers "constitutive" not merely of his dynamic account of reason but also of his "idealist program" itself (...) (3–4), the very core structure that grounds his idealism (151, 291). Integrating this concept into his philosophy allows Hegel to resolve three systematic problems indicated in the subtitle of the book: self-consciousness, freedom or self-determination, and logical form.The book offers a systematic account of the logical concept of life by defending three interconnected claims, helpfully summarized in chapter 1. The first, rather general claim clarifies Ng's interpretive point of departure. She maintains that the "core tenets" of Hegel's philosophy can be understood through the "purposiveness theme" inherited from Kant's a priori principle of purposiveness in his Critique of Judgment (5, 43). Ng advances this claim in chapter 2, where she argues that it is working through Kant's concept of inner purposiveness of natural ends from the teleological power of judgment that leads Hegel to develop his own account of Concept, which is foundational for his entire philosophical system (61–64).Chapter 3 continues the examination of Hegel's immediate predecessors in relation to the interpretation of his "speculative identity thesis" (8), which constitutes the second claim. According to Ng, Hegel first introduces this thesis—which remains central to all his works—in the Differenzschift. In this work, Hegel, siding with Schelling, criticizes Fichte's subjective version of idealism, more specifically for his explanation of the relation between subject and object as constructed and facilitated by subjective consciousness itself, thus rendering "nature lifeless and dead" (88). Opposing this approach, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel interprets the identity of object and subject as facilitated by the relation and opposition between self-consciousness and life. Thus, the speculative identity thesis assumes a fundamental significance of life for self-consciousness. Unfolding this thesis is at the core of Hegel's absolute method in the Science of Logic as well. On Ng's reading, Hegel's speculative thesis along with his account of self-consciousness also have their roots in the purposiveness theme inherited from Kant. What is at work here is Kant's claim that the principle of purposiveness is a necessary condition for judgment, which Hegel develops into a claim about the concept of life as being constitutive for self-consciousness.In the rest of the book (chapters 4–8), devoted to a close analysis of Hegel's Science of Logic, Ng advances her third and perhaps most original claim: understanding Hegel's [End Page 527] Subjective Logic "as his own version of a 'critique of judgment'" (18). She demonstrates that this part of the Logic offers a positive account of the concept of life that Hegel develops in his critical interaction with Kant. The most illustrative in this respect is the "Subjectivity" section of the Logic, in which the form of life is presented as the ground and presupposition of Hegel's theory of concepts and judgments. According to Ng, such a reading makes evident that "life opens up the space of reasons" (234, 281).Chapter 4 takes up Hegel's immanent deduction of the Concept argument, revealing that the key to understanding it is the concept of reciprocity (Wechselwirkung) (127), most fully recognizable as an internal purposiveness of the Concept itself.Ng traces the purposiveness theme through the entirety of the Subjective Logic, establishing its significance for understanding the deduction of the Concept and for the transition to the Idea. In her analysis, she closely follows Hegel's division of the Subjective Logic and addresses Subjectivity, Objectivity, and the Idea in chapters 5–8, respectively. With chapter 5, Ng moves to a discussion of how Hegel finds judgment to arise from the "original judgement of life," the initial unity and division of subject and object within life (172). Chapter 6 extends this discussion by elucidating the tension Hegel... (shrink)

G.W.F. Hegel argues that a philosophy of history should engender comprehension of evil in the world. And yet some commentators have charged his philosophy with transcending mere explication by justifying the existence of these evils. In defense of his words, Hegel famously characterizes evil as a modal mismatch; namely, as the incompatibility between what is given and what ought to be the case. Unfortunately, some readers of Hegel’s grand narrative either continue to struggle with or overlook this fine (...) class='Hi'>distinction. Against such readings, I organize my paper into three sections that speak directly to these concerns. In §1, against the concern that Hegel’s view of the “actual world” justifies suffering, it is shown that his philosophy does not endorse the merely extant world, which is a whole world apart from the actual world. In §2, I articulate the premises of Hegel’s Doppelsatz to argue that the famous slogan is not, as some commentators take it, an endorsement of “things as they are.” And in §3, I expose a category error that mistakes an epistemological claim made by Hegel about contingency as a metaphysical assertion in support of evil. Ultimately, I argue that Hegel views evil as neither actual nor necessary nor justified. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Between Kant and Hegel. Lectures on German IdealismDaniel BreazealeDieter Henrich. Between Kant and Hegel. Lectures on German Idealism. David S. Pacini, editor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xliii + 341. Cloth, $62.00.As the author explains, the title of this work is intended to distinguish it from ordinary, Whiggish accounts of the development of German philosophy “from Kant to Hegel.” Instead, Heinrich treats the (...) positions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel as potentially viable alternatives, none of which must be viewed as aufgehoben by those that followed, and all of which deserve reconsideration by contemporary philosophers.Dieter Henrich is known for two things: first, for championing a minutely-detailed, revisionist approach to the history of post-Kantian philosophy; and second, for his insistence that the central problem of German idealism is that of self-consciousness. Both elements are well represented in this book, which is a revised version of a series of lectures delivered (in English) at Harvard in 1973. The text thus antedates many of the more recent discoveries and claims of Henrich and his student collaborators in the “Jena project,” though some of the results are alluded to in the useful footnotes and apparatus provided by David S. Pacini, who attended the original lectures and has expert knowledge of Henrich’s more recent work.Part 1 commences with a masterful overview of some of the distinctive features of German philosophy in the decades following the publication of Kant’s Critiques, with one lecture devoted primarily to Fichte, another to Kant’s concept of self-consciousness, and a third to the systematic role of freedom in Kant’s system.Part 2 focuses on the earliest reception of Kant’s philosophy and its social, religious, and philosophical context. A lecture on how Kant was criticized by and responded to defenders of direct intuition is followed by two lectures on Jacobi’s criticisms of Kantianism, which contain a wealth of information concerning the influence upon the idealists of Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Spinozism, Lessing, and the contemporary “theology of the spirit.” These lectures clearly show why the next generation of idealists saw themselves challenged to construct a “Spinozism of freedom.” Part 2 concludes with two perfunctory lectures on Reinhold’s “Elementary Philosophy,” followed by another on the skepticism of G. E. Schulze (“Anesidemus”), whose critique of Kant and Reinhold was instrumental in making questions of method of central philosophical concern.Part 3 is devoted to Fichte, whose importance for the development of philosophy after Kant can hardly, in Henrich’s view, be overemphasized and whose influence “derived from his uncanny ability to penetrate the intellectual life of an entire epoch, an accomplishment [End Page 330] that even Hegel did not rival” (184). The first of the eight lectures on Fichte provides a detailed analysis of Fichte’s Anesidemus review (1794), in which Henrich discerns evidence of the fateful transformation of transcendental philosophy into an explicit theory of mental activity based upon a method of internal self-awareness and description (“intellectual intuition”). The next two lectures are devoted to a close reading of Fichte’s unpublished manuscript from the same period, “Personal Mediations on Elementary Philosophy,” which, according to Henrich, is where the “dialectical method” first appears in post-Kantian philosophy. Henrich has little to say about the actual content and systematic structure of Fichte’s only full-scale published presentation of his system, in the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, offering instead a rather free “reconstruction” of some of its more important doctrines, on time consciousness and the hovering of the imagination. But he does provide an insightful analysis of Fichte’s theory of consciousness as a self-referring and self-explaining activity and a spirited defense of Fichte’s employment of the term ‘setzen’ (“positing”) to describe this activity. The final lecture on Fichte discusses some of the difficulties implicit in Fichte’s “dynamic monism” and how he tried—unsuccessfully, in Henrich’s view—to resolve them in subsequent, unpublished versions of his system, where he moved from his early, more “descriptive” theory of the mind toward a more “explanatory” account, according to which the ground of self-consciousness lies outside the mind itself (in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the IneffableDaniel Berthold (bio)KeywordsMadness, disease, the normal, the abnormal, the ineffable, Hegel, Kierkegaard, LacanI am most grateful to my readers, James Phillips and Louis Sass, who have led me to several new insights by suggesting ways of complicating my reading of a Lacanian approach to Hegel's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of madness. I am a Kierkegaard and Hegel scholar, with (...) very little pretense to expertise about Lacan and regrettably even less about the theory and practice of psychiatry. In submitting my essay to Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Philosophy, I was hoping to entice a community of practitioners and theoreticians I have great respect for to consider the musings of a philosopher on topics which engage them as thinkers and actors in their professions. I could not possibly have hoped for more intelligent and provocative replies than I have been given by my two respondents.Phillips' framing of his response in terms of the distinction between the "madness of the philosophers" and the "madness of the clinic" is very helpful. It is a distinction that is indeed central to the question of the possibility of dialogue between philosophers and clinicians—so central, in fact, that it is generous of Phillips not to reproach me for failing to mention it. On the one hand, the challenge for philosophers is to show that their descriptions are not merely metaphoric and that their preoccupation with the dark side of human experience connects in some way with the reality of disease, so that there is some way for clinicians to translate their language into the language of psychiatry. Otherwise, philosophers will have only poetic or literary interest for the psychiatrist or psychologist.On the other hand, the challenge for clinicians is the extent to which they are open to moving beyond a reduction of "mental illness" to a purely biological conception of disease. One needn't go so far—nor should we—as Thomas Szasz or Michel Foucault in seeing "mental disease" as itself merely a metaphor. But granting the evidence of underlying organic disorder, symptoms nevertheless display themselves as mental and behavioral states (what Hegel calls "shapes of consciousness") that, as Hegel argued, are paralleled in "normal" experience, so that the distinction between disease and normality (and hence illness and metaphor) is often elusive. Madness "has the healthy consciousness for its presupposition," Hegel writes, because the healthy mind is still grappling with the same sorts of contradictions and feelings of alienation, the same "infinite pain" which characterizes insanity. Madness is not the absolute "other" of rationality, but an echo of it (1978, 3:382, 408).Hegel himself accepted the medicalization of madness that began to occur in the late eighteenth [End Page 325] century, and rejected the metaphysical and theological categories of what was called "romantic medicine." But he also cautioned against the narrowness of the "somatic" school which he felt lacked sufficient explanatory value if not connected to a "speculative" (i.e., philosophic) framework (see Berthold-Bond 1995, ch. 2).It might even be argued that every person seeking therapy is first of all suffering from "philosophic" madness, at least in the sense that initially she does not understand her own suffering as "disease," but experiences her torment in the vocabulary of the philosopher. Thus the philosopher's descriptions are the closest to the subject's own self-understanding, and while the therapist must seek to rephrase these descriptions into the vocabulary of the clinic (just as Hegel, for example, translated his own philosophic description of the madness of his friend Hölderlin in the Phenomenology as the "lost soul" whose "light dies away within it" into the medical category of Wahnsinn—mania or frenzy, which today we would call schizophrenia—in the classificatory scheme of mental disorder he gives in the Encyclopaedia; 1977, 400; 1978, 408)—there is a real question about which vocabulary is a metaphor for the other.The second main point Phillips addresses, which is taken up in different ways by Sass as well, has to do with the relation between speech and silence in madness. Phillips finds that Kierkegaard offers a more complex and subtle view than... (shrink)

I provide a distinctively Wittgensteinian interpretation of Hegel’s Subjective Logic, including the parts on the concept, the judgement and the syllogism. I argue that Wittgenstein implicitly recognised the moments of universality, particularity and individuality; moreover, he was sensitive to Hegel’s crucial distinction between abstract and concrete universals. More specifically, for Wittgenstein the moment of particularity has the status of a paradigmatic sample which mediates between a universal concept and its individual instances. Thus, a concrete universal is (...) a universal that includes every individual via its paradigmatic sample. Next, I provide a generic account of the emergence of concrete universals through a series of negations that follows the basic structure of Hegel’s judgement—“the individual is the universal”—and the syllogism—“the individual is the universal mediated by the particular”. This development is illustrated with examples from Hegel (a plant, Socrates, Caesar, a Stoic sage, Jesus) as well as from Wittgenstein (colour samples, the standard metre, works of art). I take Wittgenstein’s argument against private language as implying that we cannot do without paradigms in our epistemic practices. If the conclusion of the section “Subjectivity” in Hegel’s Science of Logic is that the moment of particularity cannot be ignored or dispensed with, then it would mean that we cannot do without paradigms in our epistemic practices: that is, that private rules are impossible. (shrink)

RESUMEN A partir del examen de la noción de dialéctica ofrecida por Jean-Paul Sartre en “Cuestiones de método”, se identifican tres características propias de dicha noción presentes en la dialéctica de Hegel: el papel de la reflexión, la negatividad y la relación entre la dialéctica y la subjetividad. ABSTRACT On the basis of the analysis of the notion of dialectics set forth by Jean-Paul Sartre in “Search for a Method”, the article identifies three characteristics of said notion that were (...) already present in Hegel’s dialectics: the role of reflection, negativity, and the relation between dialectics and subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue, first, that Hegel defended a version of the analytic/synthetic distinction—that, indeed, his version of the distinction deserves to be called Kantian. For both Kant and Hegel, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be explained in terms of the discursive character of cognition: insofar as our cognition is discursive, its most basic form can be articulated in terms of a genus/species tree. The structure of that tree elucidates the distinction between analytic and synthetic (...) judgments. Second, I argue that Hegel has an interesting and so far unexplored argument for the analytic/synthetic distinction: Hegel argues that the systematic relationship between concepts expressed in a genus/species tree can only be expressed through synthetic judgments. Third and finally, I explore some of the implications that the arguments in the first two parts of the essay have for understanding the way in which Hegel differs from Kant. I argue that Hegel accepts Kant's point that discursive cognition cannot be used to cognize the absolute. However, Hegel thinks that we can, nevertheless, cognize the absolute. I explore the character of this non-discursive cognition and argue that we can understand Hegel's glosses on this form of cognition—as simultaneously analytic and synthetic and as having a circular structure—through contrasting it with his account of discursive cognition. As a consequence, I argue that we must give up on attempts to understand ‘the dialectical method’ and ‘speculative cognition’ on the model of discursive cognition. (shrink)

This book presents and evaluates the late philosophy (Spätphilosophie) of F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) across a wide range of issues, ranging from relation between pure thinking and being, to the philosophy of mythology and religion, to the philosophy of history, to questions concerning the philosophy of nature and freedom. Simultaneously, it discusses Hegel's treatment of similar issues, and systematically compares the two thinkers. This is the first time, in an English-language publication, that these two major German Idealists (...) have been compared in such detail along such a broad front. The book begins with three chapters exploring the development of Schelling's thinking concerning transcendental philosophy, nature and teleology, human freedom, and the theory of history, from his earliest publications up to his middle years. Against this background, the book then presents Schelling's distinction between "positive" and "negative" philosophy, the defining mark of his late philosophy. It explores his theory of pure a priori thinking (negative philosophy), and his account of the transition from negative to positive philosophy. The major components of Schelling's positive philosophy, including his conception of "un-pre-thinkable being", and his theories of mythology and revelation, are then discussed. Throughout, a comparative assessment of Hegel's approach similar issues is sustained. Schelling emerges as a philosopher who traced his own highly distinctive path through the thicket of problems bequeathed by Kant, and whose systematic responses to these problems still merit serious consideration as alternatives to those of Hegel. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This essay offers an interpretation of Hegel's theory of normativity according to which normative evaluation is primarily a matter of a thing's answerability to its own constitutive norms. I show that natural and spiritual norms correspond to two different species of normative evaluation for Hegel, two categorically distinct ways something can violate its own constitutive norms. I conclude with some general reflections on the relationship between normativity and ontology in Hegel's system.

By all accounts one of the most influential philosophical contributions of Duns Scotus is his distinction between intuitive cognition, in which a thing is known as present and existing, and abstractive cognition, which abstracts from actual presence and existence. Recent scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the role given intuitive cognition in the justification of contingent propositions and on the debates over certitude which arose from the critiques of Scotus's distinction by Peter Aureoli and William of Ockham.

In this chapter, I expound Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he first and most elaborately presented in his early essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), by focusing on the criticism that Hegel levelled against Kant’s (supposedly) arbitrary subjectivism about the categories. This relates to the restriction thesis of Kant’s transcendental idealism: categorially governed empirical knowledge only applies to appearances, not to things in themselves, and so does not reach objective reality, according to Hegel. Hegel claims that this restriction of knowledge to (...) appearances is unwarranted merely on the basis of Kant’s own principle of transcendental apperception, and just stems from Kant’s empiricist bias. He argues that Kant’s principle of apperception as the foundational principle of knowledge is in fact incompatible with his empiricism. Hegel rightly appraises the centrality of transcendental apperception for the constitution of objectivity. But he is wrong about its incompatibility with Kant’s empirical realism. By virtue of a misapprehension of the formal distinction between the accompanying ‘I think’, i.e. the analytical principle of apperception, and what Hegel calls “the true ‘I’” of the original-synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel unjustifiably prises apart the productive imagination, which is supposedly this “true ‘I’”, and the understanding, which is supposedly just a derivative, subjective form of the productive imagination; the latter, according to Hegel, is Reason or Being itself, and is the truly objective. This deflationary reading of the understanding, which hypostatises the imagination as the supreme principle, rests on a distortion of key elements of Kant’s theory of apperception. In this chapter, I show that Hegel’s charge of inconsistency against Kant, namely, Hegel’s claim that the principle of apperception as the highest principle of cognition does not comport with Kant’s restriction thesis, is the direct consequence of a psychological misreading of Kant’s subjectivism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ronald Shusterman IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM I One recent trend in criticism, starting notably widi die work of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels,1 has suggested diat literary theory is either useless, harmful, or bodi. This pragmatist line ofargument can be seen to go hand in hand widi contemporary attacks on the distinction between "high" and "low" art, claiming that a rap text deserves die same (...) attention or esteem as a poem by Eliot. My purposes here are predetermined by die polemical nature of this debate. I shall endeavor to show diat tiieory is useful and diat diere is a valid distinction between low and high. I intend to do so, somewhat negatively, notby giving examples—diough diis would be easy enough— but rather by underlining die contradictions inherent in some of these arguments. I shall also deal widi anodier debate, which may at first appear unrelated, concerning die limits of interpretation. I diink it can be noted that the criteria of judgment involved in distinguishing between high and low are connected to die criteria of interpretation which, though diey do not close die open work, do permit the identification of misreadings. If judgment involves refined analysis, then theory is necessary as an instrument of refinement. If misreadings exist, dien absolute interpretive relativism cannot be justified. One might expect me to begin by defining "literary tiieory," but one of my main points is that such a definition is futile. The dieoretical endeavor is myriad. The term theory can be fruitfully used to designate a wide continuum of discourses about literature diat range from pure explication to pure philosophy. I see no need to find a common denominator diat would bring togedier under a single description narratology, stylistics, deconstructionist criticism, and so on. Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 242-252 Ronald Shusterman243 Indeed, in dieir original attack on literary theory, Knapp and Michaels were careful to set aside the more "empirical" approaches such as narratology as not relevant to their criticisms (p. 11). Their basic complaint has to do widi theories of interpretation, and they conclude:... theory is nothing else but the attempt to escape practice... theory is notjust another name for practice. It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end. (p. 30) The point seems to be that criticism, as a practice, can and must be undertaken widiout die interference of a supposed realm of independent principles or axioms. That was ten years ago. Joel Weinsheimer has recently defended similar conclusions in an article entitled "Suppose Theory Is Dead."2 He invokes Gadamer to argue diat "understanding can and does succeed even widiout die imprimatur of theoretical self-consciousness" (p. 252). Weinsheimer refuses what he sees as the "first principle of the first theorist of literature: that only theory counts as knowledge" (p. 263). This, of course, echoes pragmatist philosophy's new emphasis on praxis as a valid form of knowledge: The kind of knowledge involved in acting or story-telling or teaching or practical criticism is practical knowledge, and if it cannot satisfactorily explain orjustify from principles what it practices, that is not its fault but its nature—even its particular significance.... Literature is to be practiced, is the practice of it, its own practice, and in this light at least theory is merely the self-defeating attempt to abstract literature from its presentations, from the concrete practice diat is itself. (Weinsheimer, p. 263) To those who would argue that any practice presupposes theoretical principles, Weinsheimer retorts that such presuppositions need not be considered as tiieory: "Interpretation supposes a form of life, perhaps, but a form of life is not a theory" (p. 255). I admit to being somewhat confused when he writes that practical criticism "involves tacit knowledge, certainly, but such knowledge is not necessarily dieoretical" (p. 255). I do not think diat what we do when 244Philosophy and Literature reading critically can be assimilated to what we do when, say, riding a bicycle... (shrink)

This paper makes an effort to interpret the relationship between the concepts "Zuhandenheit" (readiness-to-hand) and "Vorhandenheit" (presence-at-hand), as they are analysed in §§ 15-16 of Heidegger's "Being and Time". These concepts are two modes of existence of the beings met in our surrounding world. So, they don't concern different things. Heidegger doesn't give the title "things" to the beings ready-to-hand; he names them "equipments" (Zeug). It's a concept relative to the Aristotelian "organon", which Aristotle exemplifies with the human hand (...) as a primary equipment. But Zuhandenheit isn't a quality of the things; the term has to do with the secret character of the equipments as the maining way of their disclosure. It's the Being-in-itself of the equipments, as long as they are useful. This Being-in-itself has nothing common with the Kantian Ding an sich, which is based on the presupposition of a cognitive relationship between subject and object. I posit also the question, whether Zuhandenheit can rendet the secretness and familiarity of our immediate approach to the environment, and my answer to this question is negative. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how 'Jewishness' functions as a scapegoat for the apparently unbridgeable gap between spirit and matter in Hegel's social and aesthetic theory. If Hegel accuses 'the Jews' and 'Judaism' of inhabiting a radical divide between the empirical and the spiritual - a divide that coincides with the one between body and body politic - he follows the trajectory of Kant's opposition between autonomy and heteronomy. Kant's notion of freedom describes reason's transcendence of the (...) material world, but this state of autonomy paradoxically depends on the heteronomous force of legal power that enforces a 'Mine and Yours' ownership and property distinction. In Kant's account 'Jewishness' embodies a social way of life founded on superstition (Aberglaube) that enacts the opposite of autonomy and is heteronomously bound to objects of empirical reality, whereas the 'Mine and Yours' ownership and property distinction of a Kantian civil society teaches the foregoing of material goods, if contact with them violates positive law. Developing Kant's idealism, Hegel accuses 'the Jews' of making immediate being absolute. By conflating 'Jewishness' and materialism, Hegel excludes 'the Jews' from his idealist conception of the body politic. Key Words: anti-Semitism • autonomy • body • culture • dialectics • German idealism • Hegel • heteronomy • immutability • Kant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are also (...) several commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal... (shrink)

G.W.F. Hegel offers a thorough, complex, and unique theory of free will in the Philosophy of Right. In what follows, I argue that Hegel’s conceptualization of free will makes the mistake of collapsing the possibility of organic freedom (the ability to act freely of causal determination) into the potential for moral freedom (the capacity to act in accordance with Reason). This article engages in three distinct tasks in making this argument. First, I provide a critical overview of Hegel’s conception of (...) free will – namely, how he envisages the movement from the abstract, incomplete, and undeveloped will, to that of a concrete, complete, and developed one through the unfolding of Reason. Second, I introduce the contemporary debate regarding nomological determinism between libertarians and skeptics, of both the in compatibilist and compatibilist variety. I suggest that, in the context of the modern free will debate, Hegel is best categorized as a compatibilist as he both accepts causal determinism but remains committed to the notion that certain persons can act in concert with their own volition. Third, I argue that Hegel’s compatibilist understanding of free will has important and problematic consequences for legal theory, particularly normative jurisprudence. Compatibilism, generally, and Hegel’s particular version, substantiates the idea of basic moral desert which poses a serious threat to the possibility of moral progress from a retributive justice system to a consequentialist one. (shrink)

In the multi-faceted trajectory of post-Kantian thought, Schelling—both the person and his philosophy—has always been a controversial figure. Popular historical accounts focus on his precocious interventions as part of the ‘Jena set’, initially building on Fichte's philosophy of the ‘I’, but quickly coming to challenge his predecessor's philosophical dominance. In the crucial period of the late 1790s, Schelling's most notable intervention was to develop a philosophy of nature alongside the Kantian and Fichtean theories of transcendental subjectivity, which caught the attention (...) of Goethe and led to his appointment, at the age of twenty-three, as professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. But Schelling's life and philosophical work continued well beyond this well-documented period, culminating in a late system in which he developed key ideas surrounding freedom, existence, modality and the history of human consciousness that all revolved around a distinction between what he called negative and positive philosophy. This distinction, and his insistence on the need for the development of the latter mode of philosophy, came to challenge some of the core assumptions of the largely rationalist German idealist project and it remains, to this day, perhaps the most powerful alternative to the Hegelian system that rose to dominance already within Schelling's own lifetime, but also well beyond it. (shrink)

This paper examines the development of the modern concept of substance from Leibniz to Hegel. I will focus primarily on the problem of the inner and outer nature of substance. I will show that if one considers Hegel’s discussion of substance against the background of the controversy between Leibniz and Kant about the inner and outer nature of substance, it becomes clear that for Hegel both Leibniz and Kant grasped the whole concept of substance only partially and in its (...) abstract moments. This is because they both concentrate on one aspect of substance and absolutize it. Hegel, on the other hand, not only overcomes the fundamental difference between the inner and outer of substance, but also develops the connection between the different moments of substance, causality and interaction from the rationalist concept of substance itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that one of the reasons for Hegel’s failure in consummating the project of “construct the absolute for consciousness” presented in 1801 in his Writing on Difference consisted in the patent mismatch between the negativity to which the determinations of finitude would be submitted and the conception of the absolute still substantially thought. Precisely, what we call here the archaism of substantiality would set the tone of this (...) mismatch that still entailed the heterogeneity between finitude, with its way of ascending to the absolute, and the absolute itself. Among other things, this will become clearer observing the formalism of the intuitionist proposal that Hegel presents at that time, aiming to safeguard the elevation of consciousness without its intrinsic negativity tainting the absolutity of the principle to which it was elevated. (shrink)

In what we might call its particularly Christian manifestation, “guilt” denotes the feeling or fact of having offended, the failure to uphold an ethical code. Under such terms, “guilt” connotes negative consequences: shame, punishment, and estrangement. Yet, penetrating further into its meaning and value, one finds that guilt extends beyond this narrow classification, playing a productive, necessary, and ineluctable role for recognitive sociality. This paper examines guilt as it appears in Hegel’s thinking. I find that Hegel’s understanding of Schuld (guilt) (...) in the Phenomenology , undergoes a crucial development over the course of the chapter titled, “Spirit,” culminating in a robust understanding of guilt that represents not a hopelessly broken bond, but a bond that awaits its fulfillment, its very incompleteness exerting a palpable pull upon the guilty party towards its fulfillment. I examine three key moments in “Spirit”: Hegel’s treatments of Antigone , the French Revolution, and the confession and forgiveness of evil. By comparing these moments, I distinguish between “abstract guilt,” guilt that only brings about shame and punishment, and what we might call “determinate guilt”: guilt that brings about action, reminds one of her/his indebtedness to the other. Understanding the development of guilt from the beginning to end of “Spirit” provides an entryway into a discussion of the social and political relevance of Hegel’s conception of the subject as—in a certain sense—always already guilty. I go on to argue that guilt as indebtedness and responsibility only exists as embedded within an already recognitive social structure. Re-thinking guilt as responsibility is not, therefore, a call to a new objective a priori moral system. Rather, it invites us to think through our recognitive being-together in a way that shakes off its metaphysical fetters. Such an ethics of recognitive intersubjectivity is an infinite task—not in the futile sense of the “unhappy consciousness”—but in the sense that we are responsible for constantly understanding, critiquing, and reforming ethical commitments that can only be (understood as) ours. (shrink)

In _Objektiver und absoluter Geist_ nach Hegel Oehl and Kok offer an extensive selection of papers by established Hegel scholars exploring the wide spectrum of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit from the viewpoint of the distinction between objective and absolute spirit.

In this paper, we will question Heisenberg’s claim that the unpredictability of the experimental findings of quantum physics also affects the self-evident attitude about the universal and necessary nature of the principle of causality. We will try to answer the aforementioned problem by confronting Heisenberg’s criticism of Kant’s position on the universal and necessary/absolute nature of the principle of causality with Kant’s distinction between perceptual and experiential judgments. The distinction between perceptual and experiential judgments reveals (...) that even in Heisenberg’s experimental results that indicate the smallest degree of expectation, predictability, or uniformity of natural events, universal and necessary conditions of knowledge to which Heisenberg denies absolute value still preexist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 31, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 123-144 Laws Not Men: Hume's Distinction between Barbarous and Civilized Government NEIL McARTHUR 1. Introduction Hume uses the adjectives "civilized" and "barbarous" in a variety of ways, and in a variety of contexts. He employs them to describe individuals, societies, historical eras, and forms of government. These various uses are closely related. Hume thinks that cultural and (...) political development are intimately connected, and are mutually dependent. Civilized government goes together with civilized society. A wise ruler cannot emerge before "refinements have taken place" in the society at large and "science [becomes] known in the world." At the same time, the policy of a monarch who is "ignorant and uninstructed... for ever prevents all improvements."1 This intimate connection, however, is not an identification. A civilized government is not simply that which produces, or results from, a civilized society. When discussing forms of government, Hume uses the terms "barbarous" and "civilized" consistently and somewhat narrowly, to describe governments that possess certain specific characteristics. It is striking that these characteristics are explicitly divorced from the abilities or characters of the rulers. While a nation requires wise and refined leadership to achieve its civilized status, Hume thinks it is a crucial feature of civilized government that, once established, it depends Neil McArthur is at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2M8, Canada, e-mail: [email protected] 124 Neil McArthur entirely on its institutional structure, and not on the talents or intentions of any individual or group. To understand Hume's distinction between these two kinds of government, it is useful to abstract away from his discussion of more general issues of cultural development, and to lay temporarily aside the causal question of what social and economic conditions are necessary to produce a civilized government. I propose to explain Hume's concepts of barbarous and civilized government just in terms of the institutional characteristics possessed by each. Hume's choice of adjectives is not, of course, accidental. The complex causal questions of how a civilized government comes about, and what is its relation to civilized society, are large and important ones. However, 1 do not propose to take them up here.2 The crucial feature dividing civilized and barbarous government is their relation to law. In his essay "Of Civil Liberty" Hume says: "It may now be affirmed of civilized monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of Laws, not of Men."3 "Barbarous government" are thus "governments of men"—he also calls them governments "of will."4 Scholars of Hume's political theory have noted the importance of the rule of law in defining "civilized government. "5 However, they have not made clear precisely what Hume thinks precisely defines a "government of laws. " I submit that such a government must (for Hume) possess three characteristics. It must have: 1. A clear separation between the legislative and magisterial "powers" of the state; 2. A rigid subordination of the magisterial to the legislative power, such that the "discretion" of magistrates is restricted by "general laws"; 3. Self-sufficient laws and institutions, such that they are able to operate regardless of the intentions or abilities of individual rulers or officeholders. To this end, a government of laws must possess fixed rules governing the succession of officers, including (in a civilized monarchy) succession to the throne. Hume thinks specific governments may meet these criteria to varying degrees through time (with regression also possible). His use of the term "civilized government" nevertheless implies that it exists as a distinct, and achievable, ideal. An examination of Hume's theory of civilized government shows his understanding of the rule of law to be more subtle and complex than has previously been acknowledged. Hume moves beyond traditional Whig panegyrics on the rule of show to show how the law must operate if it is to protect people from oppression in the local theatres in which it is most acute. He articulates a theory of "civilized monarchy" that provides a middle path between republican and absolutist theories of government, and that is consistent his philosophy as a whole. Hume Studies Laws... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)