Animality, Self Consciousness, and the Human Form of Life: A Hegelian Account (original) (raw)
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Self-Determining Animals: Human Nature and Relational Autonomy in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature
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The concept of autonomy, once central to the self-understanding of modern philosophy, is under attack from at least two sides: (1) on the one side, there is a reawakened interest in naturalist philosophy, questioning the hybris of human self-understanding as being “above nature” and essentially free and rational; (2) on the other side, there is the feminist critique of autonomy as the wrongful generalization of a certain masculine/western understanding of the subject as independent person. Both aim at the core of what the term “autonomy” normatively stands for: the capacity for rational self-determination. We inherit this concept of autonomy from Kant and encounter a variety of post-Kantian variations of it. In my paper, I will turn to Hegel in order to show that, although conceptualizing autonomy as rational self-determination, in his Philosophy of Nature, he incorporates elements of both naturalism and relational autonomy. Under revision, his concept of spirit provides us with a picture of the human as self-conscious animal or nature grasping itself. His notion of autonomy then turns out to be surprisingly fruitful for current debates, enabling us to understand our animalistic nature and our fundamental interdependency in a way that is not opposed to such concepts as rationality, freedom, and autonomy. As I will try to show, re-reading Hegel thus allows us to reconceptualize autonomy in a way that accords with its critics.
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Hegel conceives of human beings as both natural and spirited. On Robert Pippin's influential reading, we are natural by being 'ontologically' like other animals, but spirited through a 'social-historical achievement'. I contest both the coherence of this reading and its fidelity to Hegel's texts. For Hegel the human being is the truth of the animal. This means that spirit's self-production is not, as Pippin claims, an achievement that an animal confers on itself, but the realization of what the human being is. I end by specifying Aristotelian features of Hegel's account whose neglect by Pippin can help explain what goes wrong in his reading, and provide the outlines of a reading that is both coherent and faithful to Hegel's texts.
Hegel's Naturalism: Teleology, Life, Self-Consciousness and the Depiction of the Human Mind
2017
This article deals with the recent interest of the Hegelian studies around Hegel’s so-called naturalism and maintains that mind is possible by virtue of the relationship mind-life and that life and mind are mutually dependent. In order to understand the continuity mind-life the contribution accounts for both the Hegelian theory of self-consciousness and the chapter on life in the Science of Logic. Hegel’s peculiarity consists in investigating concrete issues such as life, nature, desires and subjective purposiveness by deploying a logical and formal analysis in order to attain a general comprehension of them. The result is that Hegel does not explain the mind as separate from nature but rather as the outcome of a crossed stratification between nature and spirit. The contribution also accounts for the interdisciplinary aspects connected with Hegel’s naturalism and his proposal about the continuity life-mind.
Hegel’s Naturalism, the Negative and the First Person Standpoint [Special Issue]
Argumenta - Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2019
In this paper I attempt to move the discussion of Hegel's naturalism past what I present as an impasse between the soft naturalist interpretation of Hegel's notion of Geist, in which Geist is continuous with nature, and the opposing claim that Geist is essentially normative and self-legislating. In order to do so I suggest we look to the question of value which underlies this dispute. While soft naturalists seek to make sense of value as arising from material nature, those who support the autonomy thesis propose that value is something inherent to human spiritual activity. Following McDowell's suggestion that value as neither inhering or supervening on nature, but is rather something we have been estranged from and hence something to be recovered, I suggested that we adopt the first person perspective as the starting point for an examination of the relation between nature and value. The first person perspective is to be understood as a position within value which imbues value to what it encounters and hence is a process of the reenchantment of nature. Seeing things from this perspective allows us to place the question of nature as external materiality (which both the soft naturalist and autonomy view seem to share) in its proper context as something which develops as the result of the self-unfolding activity of consciousness as it encounters nature as negativity. Understanding Geist in this way allows us to see value as inherent in nature.
THE DIALECTICS OF SELF-CONSCIOUS LIFE AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIAL PRACTICES IN HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY
Ethics&Politics, 2019
In this contribution I defend the thesis that Hegel's notion of species (Gattung) is not merely the name given to a group of self-reproducing living beings but rather it is at the basis of the Hegelian naturalistic conceptions of self-conscious life, sociality and world history. I maintain that self-reflection and self-referring negativity are the main characteristics of the self-conscious life and they determine the features of both the individual self-consciousness and the entire human species by shaping social practices and world history as acts of actualized freedom. Therefore, the definition of human species goes far beyond the description of its natural features and depends on the fact that self-consciousness is able to determine itself by negating external powers or conditioning. The main argument of this contribution is that human species and its historical evolution can be defined by means of this self-referring negativity and by self-consciousness' capacity to place the external reality under an order of values and concept autonomously yielded.
Hegel Bulletin, 2020
This paper attempts to show that an expansive normative vision can be drawn from Hegel's texts, one whose scope significantly exceeds the anthropocentric model presented in the 'objective spirit' parts of his system. This expansion of normativity is linked to an expansive vision of relationality underpinning Hegel's model of 'concrete freedom'. In order to put into sharper relief the links between expansive relationality and normativity, the late thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is mobilised as a heuristic contrasting point. In the subjective spirit sections of the Encyclopedia are found insights that anticipate key features of Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'flesh'. Locating these insights allows us to detect the underlying thread this paper seeks to mine. Hegel's own 'theory of flesh' culminates in the notion of 'constitutive attachments', the idea that the content of subjectivity is made up of all the bonds linking the human subject to her surrounding worlds and objects. Since freedom for Hegel is 'being with', and since normative demands arise from the different ways in which freedom is concretely realised, it would seem that Hegel's relational conception of subjectivity should lead to an equally expansive conception of normativity. Against the objection that Hegel denied any normative status to non-human beings, the paper points to passages in his work, notably his account of aesthetic judgement and natural beauty, which appear to suggest the opposite. This paper attempts to show that an expansive normative vision can be drawn from Hegel's texts, one whose scope significantly exceeds the model presented in the 'objective spirit' parts of his system. Hegel's texts allow us to construct a theory of responsibility that is not limited to recognition, to inter-human relations, but encompasses all kinds of non-human beings. The paper thus pursues a goal similar to Alison Stone's in Petrified Intelligence (2005). It wants to make a Hegelian case for 'the ethical status of nature', but by tracing a different route through Hegel's corpus. Rather than focusing on the way in which natural beings embody rationality and thereby
Hegel on Human Ways of Considering Nature
Ethics in Progress, 2024
In this article I aim to show the limits of certain "ways of considering" nature, as well as the intrinsic contradictions in their modus operandi, following Hegel's analysis in the Introductions to the Encyclopaedic Naturphilosophie and the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature. After framing the problem within the broader theme - already explored in Jena - of the relationship between nature and spirit, I will show that both the practical and the theoretical, insofar as they are founded in an original separation between man and nature, result in a subjection of the natural being to man. In order for this to be redeemed from one-sided conduct towards it, it is necessary to access through living intuition a philosophical consideration – both of the living being and of nature as a whole –, the activity of which Hegel understands as a rediscovery of the rationality of nature and its "liberation”.