"Death Must Have Become Terrifying": The Social Conditions of Anxiety (original) (raw)
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Akademie de Gruyter, 2000
Despite Hegel's attacks on the natural law tradition, and especially on the doctrine of individual rights, his early writings can be interpreted as both the negation and the culmination of the principles that sustain that tradition. 1 They are their negation because Hegel rejected the idea of a state of nature as developed by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others, yet they are their culmination because his own view sketches a complex integrative model that includes the unavoidable reality of increasing individualism in modern societies-the basis of theories of natural law-and at the same time offers a new relationship between the individual and collectivity. The model formulated by Hegel in the System of the Ethical Life, the First Philosophy of Spirit, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Spiri fi lapses neither into atomism nor into an undifferentiated assimilation in a premodern polis, but rather it combines respect for the individual's freedom as well as its union with the political community. These texts have received recent attention by scholars as offering illuminating interpretations of the struggle for recognition, labor and capitalism. Lukács and Marcuse started this trend, which was then followed by J. Habermas and S. Benhabib, and the last generation of German Hegelians: L. Siep, A. Wildt, and, more recently, A. Honneth. All of them agree that Hegel had in these works in germ many of the intuitions that he later developed in his texts from the Phenomenology of Spirit. In this essay I will take He-gel's approach in the framework of natural law to show his criticism of four philosophers: Rousseau, Fichte, Kant, and Hobbes, and to show how he develops from it a theory of the social and political. My perspective will be the struggles for honor and recognition as constituting the dynamics of forces which shape society and politics. In the SdS we find an argument for the conclusion or dissolution of ius naturae: »the intuition [individualization] of [the] Idea of ethical life, the form in which it appears in its particular aspect, is the people.« This starting point challenges the very foundation of natural law systems, which defended the primacy of the individual over the whole. It also asserts a new dimension in practical life, that of the ethical life (Sittlichkeit), which was never conceptualized or even considered by the school of natural right. In turn, Hegel argues that the principles of this school are fulfilled or accomplished by the very concept of ethical life. Ethical life manifests for human beings a higher level in the order of the laws of nature. The order of nature develops into an ethical order of nature by the working on nature by men (here nature also means human needs and impulses). The people fuse nature and ethical life as a union of natural law and moral/political law, which interact and reinforce each other. Contrary to the classical tradition of natural law which deems the natural state a stage to be left behind, Hegel tries to show that this state is in itself ethical, that is, that the legal, political, and institutional moments in every community grow endogenously out of-or are immanent in-spheres of action which refer to the immediate satisfaction (Befriedigung) of material needs (Bedürfnisse). In other words, any conception of human relationships in an asocial state used to expound sociability and politics is wrong. In fact, the state of nature, instead of being ahistorical and universal, as Hobbes maintained, depicts the social relations peculiar to nascent seventeenth-century market societies. To understand Hegel's criticism of the natural law tradition we have to consider his own presupposi-tions, which become explicit when we analyze his early system. Hegel's rehabilitation of Aristotle's work is well known. In the Greek philosopher's view, practical philosophy is holistic, that is, there is always in-terpénétration of the various elements of social life-individual and community, morality and legality, economics and politics. However, Hegel introduces modern elements into this view, especially the autonomy of the individual, her self-relation in a process of reflection on her own subjectivity or on her life. There-Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 6/2/17 4:13 PM
Death and Disease of Spiritual Life: On Hegel's Diagnosis of Lordship and Bondage
The idea that physical and organic structures reoccur on the level of social life is central to the social-critical use of the concept of an “outer second nature” (Testa 2007, 488). In what follows, I will suggest that Hegel’s dialectic of “Lordship and Bondage” offers valuable insights for a critical social ontology of second nature and, in particular, for developing the idea of social philosophy as a diagnosis and therapy of social pathologies (Laitinen & Särkelä 2018). In this famous passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit, death and disease namely reappear on a spiritual level of life in novel, distinctively social shapes, namely, death as “Lordship” and disease as “Bondage.” A peculiar feature of Hegel’s diagnosis of “Lordship and Bondage” is that instead of taking social pathology as a dysfunction of a social organism, he expands the diagnosis by critically describing precisely the healthy organic reproduction as the death of a genuinely spiritual life-form. What on the level of organic life still was healthy in the sense of a frictionless self-maintenance, cannot mean anything else than death and disease to spiritual life. “Lordship,” I will argue, presents the basic form of spiritual or social death (2). Moreover, similarly to diseases in organic life, which Hegel in his philosophy of nature interprets as both tendencies towards and struggles against death, “Bondage” can serve both to reproduce and to transcend the relationship of domination; therefore, so goes the second claim, “Bondage” can be represented as the basic spiritual or social form of disease (3). First, however, the experiential story must be caught up with by briefly looking at the transition from the “Struggle onto Life and Death” to “Lordship and Bondage” (1).
Hegel and Adler in the Introduction to The Concept of Anxiety
Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2001
This article argues that much of the polemic in the Introduction to The Concept of Anxiety is directed not, as is usually thought, at Hegel but at the Danish Hegelian, Adolph Peter Adler (1812-69). A common theme of Vigilius Haufniensis' criticism is that there has been a confusion between the abstract sphere of logic and the sphere of existence, which is concerned with religion. The paper tries to demonstrate that Kierkegaard believes Adler to be guilty of this in the latter's Popular Lectures on Hegel's Objective Logic (1842).
"The apotheosis of apotheosis: Levinas' 'On Escape,' Hegel's unhappy consciousness, and us"
The recent translation of Emmanuel Levinas’s essay On Escape complicates our view of his relationship to Hegel, and reopens the ontological question of escape. The impetus for Levinas’s essay was National Socialism’s effort to reduce subjectivity to being qua biologistic. To resist this, Levinas enlists idealism as an ally. He affirms the idealist subject’s effort to escape being, but denies that it makes good its escape. I challenge this denial by comparing Levinas’s phenomenology of escape with Hegel’s phenomenology of unhappy consciousness, paying special attention to the themes of shame and the will to escape. The similarity between treatments leads me to suggest that the urge to escape emerges at least as early as medieval Christianity, thus predating the historical predicament of mid-1930’s European Jewry. I conclude by interpreting space travel and the posthuman figure of the cyborg as signs that escape continues as an object of human aspiration.
'Community in Hegel's Social Philosophy'
Hegel Bulletin, 2020
In the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that modern life has primarily produced an individualised freedom that conflicts with the communal forms of life that was constitutive of Greek ethical life. This individualised freedom is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but it is in modernity seemingly resolved into a more adequate form of social freedom in the family, aspects of civil society and ultimately the state. This paper examines if Hegel’s state can function as a community and by so doing provide satisfaction to the need for a substantial ethical life that runs through Hegel’s social thought. It also examines why Hegel does not provide a detailed analysis of community, as a distinct sphere between the private and the public political sphere in the Philosophy of Right and why it is not a key platform of his social freedom.
The Object of Anxiety: Heidegger and Levinas and the Phenomenology of the Dead
janushead.org
In his reflection upon Dasein’s attempt to approach, understand and appropriate the possibility of its own death in Being and Time, Martin Heidegger makes an interesting side note on the phenomenological appearance of the dead body of another. Make no mistake; it is only a note – one made in passing en route to a much larger argument. But it is a note of interest nonetheless; for within it is contained the thread of a thought that, when pursued to its end, seems to unravel some of the fundamental elements of the Heideggerian analytic. It is the goal of this paper then to follow that thread to its logical end by engaging in an detailed examination of the enigmatic phenomenon that is the dead body of another and, in doing so, not only illuminate the curious nature of its appearance; but, more importantly, reveal some of the limits of the Heideggerian analytic. The paper will conclude by turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas in attempt to stretch beyond those limits.
Hegel and the Quality of the Modern Individual v2
In Hegel’s “theory of spirit” – differentiated and institutionalized in our contemporary disciplinary fields as psychology, sociology and political science – the initial conceptual moment in the development of individuality, before the subject can determine or give itself specific cognitive and social content, the individual takes an initial simple but also abstract appearance of “being-for-self”. This essay explores the "emergence" of the modern individual in Hegel's work.