Hegel: Philosophy of History

A review of Etica, Politica, Storia universale. Atti del Congresso Internazionale (Urbino, 24–27 ottobre 2018), edited by Giacomo Cerretani and Giacomo Rinaldi.

Beginning with a survey of the shortcoming of theories of organology/media-as-externalization of mind/body—a philosophical-anthropological tradition that stretches from Plato through Ernst Kapp and finds its contemporary proponent in Bernard Stiegler—I propose that the phenomenological treatment of media as an outpouching and extension of mind qua intentionality is not sufficient to counter the ̳black-box‘ mystification of today‘s deep learning‘s algorithms. Focusing on a close study of Simondon‘s On the Existence of Technical Objectsand Individuation, I argue that the process-philosophical work of Gilbert (...) Simondon, with its critique of Norbert Wiener‘s first-order cybernetics, offers a precursor to the conception of second-order cybernetics (as endorsed byFrancisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Ricardo B. Uribe) and, specifically, its autopoietic treatment of information. It has been argued by those such as Frank Pasquale that neuro-inferential deep learning systems premised on predictive patterning, suchas AlphaGo Zero, have a veiled logic and, thus, are ̳black boxes‘. In detailing a philosophical-historical approach to demystify predictive patterning/processing and the logic of such deep learning algorithms, this paper attempts to shine a light on such systems and their inner workingsàla Simondon. (shrink)

Reading with and against Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and following his own account of the epochal shift from the Middle Ages to modernity, this chapter takes up the genealogy and the political theology of Blumenbergian modernity so as to reanimate its relevance for contemporary theory. Beginning with the shared opposition to Gnosticism found in both Christianity and modernity, we trace the emergence of modernity as creating a “counterworld” of possibility in the face of the alienation engendered by (...) medieval nominalist ideas of God’s absolute transcendence and hiddenness. In modernity, the world becomes sovereign: the modern world positions—and reproduces—itself as a sovereign and transcendent totality of possibility that its subjects must endlessly work to actualize, thus creating new operations and legitimations of domination. We conclude by outlining a programme of thinking what is constitutively foreclosed by Blumenberg’s modernity: an immanence alien to this Christian-modern apparatus of transcendence and possibility, a life for disorder and against the world. (shrink)

For a long time, the sections of the Philosophy of Right dedicated to the relations among states have been neglected by contemporary International Relations theories. However, especially since the end of the Cold War, this discipline has finally reconsidered Hegel’s theory, in particular by stressing two aspects: the thesis of an ”end of history” implied in it; and, more generally, the primacy of the state in international politics. This paper suggests a different interpretation. It argues that, in order to really (...) understand Hegel’s theory of international relations, it is necessary to consider how it is related to the momentous changes that occurred in the wake of the French Revolution and to previous philosophical developments in the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed, the convergence of these two aspects in his own philosophy of history should suggest that, according to Hegel, by the early nineteenth century international politics had finally entered a new era in which states would still interact as the foremost actors, but would be bound nonetheless by an unprecedented awareness of their historical character. (shrink)

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

I read Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as an attempt to reconcile two, seemingly conflicting, sources of authority and obligation. Some believe that persons are obligated by reason or God to promote just institutions. While others locate authority and obligation solely in the self. Rorty tells us that we need not choose between these sources of normativity, but can see each as applicable to two, non-conflicting parts of our lives. I contend that Rorty’s solution rests on a misunderstanding of the (...) upshots of contingency and of the conditions of personhood. I argue that Hegel provides a more compelling resolution of the tension between public obligation and private autonomy. (shrink)

Seyla Benhabib has presented us with the first English translation of a work of Marcuse which was published originally in 1932 as Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit, and was reissued in 1968 by Klostermann in an unrevised edition under the abbreviated title, Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit. Benhabib’s fluent and readable translation begins with a thoughtful and informative introduction and ends with a glossary which explains not only key terms, but also the relations between (...) them upon which Marcuse draws. For example, sich verhalten receives the following explanation on p. 342. (shrink)

At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of “plasticity,” and shows how Hegel's dialectic—introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy—is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful reader, and (...) allows her classic “maître” to speak, if not against his own grain, at least against a tradition too attached to closure and system. Malabou's Hegel is a “plastic” thinker, not a nostalgic metaphysician. (shrink)

This classic introduction to one of the most influential modern thinkers, G.W.F. Hegel has been made even more comprehensive through the addition of four new chapters. New edition of a classic introduction to Hegel. Enables students to engage with many aspects of Hegel’s philosophy. Covers the whole range of Hegel’s mature thought. Relates Hegel’s ideas to other thinkers, such as Luther, Descartes and Kant. Offers a distinctive and challenging interpretation of Hegel’s work.

Using Blanchot’s Heideggerian conception of “negativity,” this paper argues that the Hegelian conception of desire is defined by its pursuit of comprehension of the concept, but, because of the operation of negativity, the comprehension of the concept perpetually reproduces the desire for further comprehension. Desiring self-consciousness thus perpetually recreates its own opacity to itself, and the pursuit of the object of desire destroys its own fulfilment. The Greek mythical figure of Orpheus, whose gaze destroys the beloved for whom he longs, (...) is used to illustrate self-consciousness desire for identity. -/- . (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how concern with agency, expressed in the idea that history is the doing of agents, shapes both Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of history and, by extension, the roles they accord philosophical historiography.

Le procès de l'histoire signifie chez Hegel à la fois que l'histoire est un processus, et qu'elle est un tribunal où l'esprit du monde exerce son droit absolu.

Hegel’s contextualization of ethics in history has often been understood as implying the possibility of “world-historical” justifications for unethical actions. Critics have seen this as a category mistake that violates the authority of the ethical sphere; defenders have argued that it represents one of Hegel’s most revolutionary insights, the idea that customary morality should not stand in the way of human liberation. In this essay, I argue that both of these reactions are based on failure to properly distinguish between rational (...) justification and contextual justification. Properly understood, Hegel’s practical philosophy is restricted to the former task; the authority to determine whether norms are binding in any given circumstance is retained by context-sensitive ethical judgment. (shrink)

This review explores a recent trend in commentary on Hegel’s philosophy of history which owes much of its interpretive substance to the aesthetic modernism of the Frankfurt School. This modernist trend emphasizes the interplay of form and content, material conditions of rationality, and the temporal disjunction between experiencing and cognizing history. In so doing, it produces a deeply political, psychoanalytic, and musical reading of Hegel.

In addressing the immensity of Hegel’s system, books of brief essays by different authors often seem at once helpful and hopeless. Helpful because that immensity is often daunting and we must find ourselves inclined to localize, to seek particular points of contact from which we might begin fruitfully to engage with the system and find our way into it. Hopeless because Hegel himself seems to warn us against such an endeavor; for there is, he tells us, no “royal road to (...) science.” To grasp Spirit we must grasp its entire movement, and to know any part we must know the whole which is the immanent movement of those parts. The only place to begin is at the beginning and it is a long road. (shrink)

Brown and Hodgson present a new English edition of Hegel's 1822-3 lectures on the philosophy of world history. Here he sets out his vision of the development of reason, spirit, and culture in human history, as it advances inexorably towards the establishment of a political state of free, fully self-conscious individuals and just institutions.

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation.

“To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rational in return. The relation is mutual.” This emblematic sentence illustrates Hegel's philosophy of history as a hermeneutics of history which, opposed to the apriorism explicitly rejected, searches for its “empirical” verification in trying to “accurately apprehend” history. The much-celebrated “end of history” is not so much an empirical assertion about historical reality as a methodological requirement for an interpretative strategy founded upon the logical category of “true” or “genuine (...) infinity”. (shrink)

Montesquieu: politics and history.--Rousseau: the social contract.--Marx's relation to Hegel.

This paper consists of an introduction to the life and work of Iring Fetscher by the interviewer, followed by a conversation with Fetscher, and notes. In the interview, Fetscher discusses his relationship to Marxism, Hegelianism, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, as well as his critique of Althusser. The contribution of Fetscher, an extremely well-known German specialist on Soviet and Marxist thought, is here discussed in greater detail than anywhere else to date in the English-language scholarly literature.

The historical background -- Epicycle and Telos : Hegel on history -- Schelling and the time(s) of the Weltalter -- Hölderlin and history : philosophy and tragedy -- Hyperion and history.

Introduction: Transforming Thought John McCumber The Story of Things According to an ancient story which (because of Hegel and Heidegger) we are now able to ...

CHAPTER ONE Hegel as Poet QUENTIN LAUER To anyone who is at all familiar with Hegel's explicit attempts to write poetry — and I presume that each of us has ...

Tis paper aims to understand how we reason from historical premises to normative conclusions, tracing this question through the work of Muhammad Iqbal. On our reading, he wavers between two views of history, one a kind of natural science, and the other akin to religious interpretation. These tell different stories about the lessons we draw from history.

Para Hegel, Asia señala el comienzo de la historia universal, mientras que Europa señala su consumación y final. La América precolombina, al igual que la África negra, están para Hegel fuera de la historia universal; en cuanto a la historia de América tras su descubrimiento por los europeos, Hegel sostiene que lo que ha sucedido desde entonces en el continente americano proviene, en rigor, del “principio de Europa”. Hegel contrapone a su vez la historia de América Latina a la de (...) los actuales Estados Unidos en términos del respectivo desarrollo económico y social. Hegel atribuye la brecha de desarrollo entre las dos Américas, por un lado, a que América Latina es católica y Estados Unidos es mayoritariamente protestante, y, por el otro, a que América Latina fue “conquistada”, mientras que Estados Unidos fue “colonizado”. Sobre la base del análisis de los textos pertinentes de la obra de Hegel, se reconstruirá su teoría sobre el desigual nivel de desarrollo socio-económico de América Latina y Estados Unidos y se evaluará la plausibilidad, actualidad y eventual deficiencia de la misma. (shrink)

In the following article we explore one of the central philosophical problems of the philosophy of history: re ections on the new consciousness of historical time in the light of two lead-concepts of Modernity: secularization and experience. Regularly we use the term "philosophy of history" without realizing that a fundamental ambiguity arises in the concept of history itself. On the one hand, it indicates the story as such, as the development of processes, developments and events throughout history; on the other (...) hand , the same term is used to refer to the science that investigates by those claims and those conditions of possibility of why stories occur, how they can be completed, how they can be told and how they should be studied and why. Thus, it is necessary to consider the secularization and experience in the business of historical processes and the way we look, we report and interpret philosophically that activity, particularly in the nineteenth century. In other words, besides the study of historical problems, the philosophy of history is also presented as a discipline, with its own history and with a particular epistemological development. (shrink)

This book proposes a new theoretical framework to move beyond the traditional tenets of modern international relations theory to investigate European integration and shed light on current events. -/- Based on contemporary analyses, Hegel’s political philosophy, and the fundamental role of historical interpretation, this book addresses the institutional dynamics as well as the discursive practices behind both the Eastern enlargement and the current critical situation. Looking back in particular at European integration in one of its most significant events, namely the (...) enlargement of the European Union to include former Socialist countries, it offers a unique conceptualisation of the nature and limits of European integration and for understanding the current crisis between Brussels and the Visegrád countries, 30 years since the revolutions of 1989. -/- This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, European politics and history, and political theory and philosophy. (shrink)

The book discusses a civilization approach to philosophy of history. Hegel's idea about "Reason in history" is exemplified as "Reason in civilization" to be justified ontologically the civilization approach in the works of Toynbee, Huntington, etc. together with the conception of "long run": the "longue duree" (the long term) of the French Annales School.

Para Hegel, Asia señala el comienzo de la historia universal, mientras que Europa señala su consumación y final. La América precolombina, al igual que la África negra, están para Hegel fuera de la historia universal; en cuanto a la historia de América tras su descubrimiento por los europeos, Hegel sostiene que lo que ha sucedido desde entonces en el continente americano proviene, en rigor, del “principio de Europa”. Hegel contrapone a su vez la historia de América Latina a la de (...) los actuales Estados Unidos en términos del respectivo desarrollo económico y social. Hegel atribuye la brecha de desarrollo entre las dos Américas, por un lado, a que América Latina es católica y Estados Unidos es mayoritariamente protestante, y, por el otro, a que América Latina fue “conquistada”, mientras que Estados Unidos fue “colonizado”. Sobre la base del análisis de los textos pertinentes de la obra de Hegel, se reconstruirá su teoría sobre el desigual nivel de desarrollo socio-económico de América Latina y Estados Unidos y se evaluará la plausibilidad, actualidad y eventual deficiencia de la misma. (shrink)

Although Hegel's philosophy of history is recognized as a great intellectual achievement, it is also widely regarded as a complete failure. Taking his cue from the third century Greek historian Polybius, who argued that the rapid domination of the Mediterranean world by Rome had instituted a new phase of world history, Hegel wondered what the rise of European modernity meant for the rest of the world. In his account of the contingent paths of world history, he argued that at work (...) behind it is an eternal human struggle over justice, and that it had led to a new conception of justice in which nobody by nature had authority to rule over anybody else. Moving away from the ancient conception of justice as ordered through a cosmic system, the modern conception is based instead on freedom. This is, so Hegel argues, not an accident of history but part of the necessary development of the institutions and practices through which humans establish and maintain their changing shapes of agency. Behind it is an infinite end, justice, which as infinite is neither something which can ever be finally achieved nor a goal to which we are getting closer but which requires an infinite effort at sustaining.--. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Kant's conception of the history of pure reason and its relation to his metaphilosophy as it is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft] (KrV). In particular, I will attempt to answer the following question: why did Kant conclude the KrV with the history of pure reason and why did he insist that, without it, a gap would remain in his system? In the course of attempting to answer this question, I (...) will argue that Kant chose to conclude the KrV with a sketch of the history of pure reason because he took his ability to provide the history of pure reason to be a mark of the adequacy and success of his own philosophical system, in so far as it is the system which comprehends the nature of human reason, specifically the teleological nature of human reason (i.e., the system that recognizes that reason has intrinsic, self-imposed interests and goals) and insofar as it is the only system which, as the culmination of all the past systems of philosophy, is in a position to identify and satisfy all of the interests of human reason. (shrink)

In the following article we explore one of the central philosophical problems of the philosophy of history: re ections on the new consciousness of historical time in the light of two lead-concepts of Modernity: secularization and experience. Regularly we use the term "philosophy of history" without realizing that a fundamental ambiguity arises in the concept of history itself. On the one hand, it indicates the story as such, as the development of processes, developments and events throughout history; on the other (...) hand , the same term is used to refer to the science that investigates by those claims and those conditions of possibility of why stories occur, how they can be completed, how they can be told and how they should be studied and why. Thus, it is necessary to consider the secularization and experience in the business of historical processes and the way we look, we report and interpret philosophically that activity, particularly in the nineteenth century. In other words, besides the study of historical problems, the philosophy of history is also presented as a discipline, with its own history and with a particular epistemological development. (shrink)

A review essay on Simon Lumsden’s (UNSW) Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject (Columbia University Press, 2014), assessing Lumsden’s Hegelian account of Self-Consciousness in comparison with Derrida’s in “The Pit and the Pyramid” (in Margins of Philosophy). Lumsden de-emphasises the teleology of presence in Hegel’s work, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit. Instead, he concentrates on how processes of intuition and concept for Hegel demonstrate the continued change of historical meaning. The result is an account that is very close to (...) Derrida’s work, fulfilling several of Derrida’s own comments of how close his work is to Hegel’s. (shrink)