Philosophy

In Hegel"s account of the French Revolution in Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit, i a particular, short-lived, and contingent historical event-an event that burst onto the scene abruptly, as if from out of nowhere, and which seemed possible only in the specific socio-political conditions of French society at the timecomes to be transfigured into an autonomous "shape of spirit." ii As such, this event lays claim to having a necessary place within Hegel"s systematic, dialectical account of the essential forms of human society: it is here conceived as a self-determining, comprehensive, and conclusive embodiment of what it is to be a community of human agents in the world, and in that sense takes itself to be the universal, absolute standard by which all other attempts at socio-cultural organization are to be measured. iii Part of what is at issue in the background of Hegel"s account, then, is understanding how it is that a finite historical event, marked essentially by the contingency and spatio-temporal singularity that characterizes all events in history, can take on such infinite, universal proportions, such that what happened then and there, to those particular individuals, is conceived as having in some sense happened to us all-as having happened to human history itself, as it were. Put in other terms, how can a particular historical event, situated within history and given determinate motivation and meaning precisely by its being thus situated, in effect come to transform the very character of what ultimately matters in history as such, such that, on Hegel"s account, we who live in its train cannot but relate to all historical events-whether those that come after it, or, indeed, even those that come before-in and through it? For, even though the Phenomenology ultimately presents us with a dialectical critique of the Revolution, and thus claims to demonstrate the internal tensions that propel history to move beyond the Revolution"s operative vision of what is at stake in the human sphere, the fact that Hegel here casts the Revolution as an autonomous shape in its own right-and not, for instance, as just a passing moment within the developing narrative of the Enlightenment in its struggle with Faith, or as a mere anomaly within the ongoing narrative of European absolutism iv -itself suggests that he takes something of universal proportions to have occurred in the Revolution, something that gives us a decisive, indispensable, and irrevocable insight into the nature of the human spirit generally. v This issue concerning the purportedly universal proportions of certain finite and contingent events is of explicit concern for Hegel in the context of his encounter with Christianity. Given the core doctrine of the Incarnation, on Hegel"s account Christianity cannot fail to grapple with the question of what significance to give to the fact that the birth, life, and death of Christ were actual events situated within the flow of human history. vi Though Christianity lays claim to being a universal religion, concerned with the salvation of all humans as such, and though it regards the conversion into faith as something every individual can and must undergo in order to be saved, this conversion and this salvation are possible only because of something that actually happened at some contingent point in time, and because to live now is precisely to live after Christ, in the radically new field of possibilities-the new world-that the events of his actual life and death alone opened up. Indeed, not only do these particular historical events make faith historically possible, they also serve to define a key part of the content of faith: conversion to Christianity seems to involve, not only recognizing the actual event of Christ"s life and death, but also recognizing that this event is like no other, in that it transformed the very import and direction of human history as a whole, in that it became the reference point in relation to which the overall contours of all historical events were from then on to be articulated. To live in Christ is, as it were, to keep the event of His life alive, to transform this singular event of the Incarnation into the universal medium-into an enduring historical epoch-in terms of which all other events get their ultimate meaning. vii So while we might think of Christianity as bound to maintain a sharp divide between this world and the world beyond-such that the finite world of historical events is dismissed as inconsequential and inessential in relation to an infinite, unchanging beyond viii -Hegel sees implicit in Christianity the seeds of a rich and far-reaching conception of history according to which certain events of this world are, in spite of their finitude and sensuous immediacy, themselves capable of taking on such universal, all-encompassing proportions.

That so-called philosophy which ascribes reality-in the sense of self-sufficiency [Selbständigkeit] and genuine beingfor-and-in-itself-to immediate individual things, to the nonpersonal realm, as well as that philosophy which assures us that spirit cannot recognize truth or know what the thing-initself is, is immediately refuted by the attitude [Verhalten] of the free will towards these things. If so-called external things have a semblance of self-sufficiency for consciousness, for intuition and representational thought, the free will, in contrast, is the idealism and truth of such actuality.

This paper shows that Hegel's ontology of living beings provides us with indispensable conceptual resources for making sense of his account of the ontology of human action. For Hegel, living bodies are ontologically distinct in that their objective presence is thoroughly permeated by the self-reflexivity characteristic of subjectivity, and as such they cannot be adequately conceived in terms of categories (mechanistic, chemical, or generally causal categories) that are appropriate to inanimate, " subject-less " objects. It is argued that actions are similar in this regard, and like organic bodies they need to be conceived as self-realizing, self-articulating, dynamic wholes whose various material parts cannot be thought independently of their internal relations and their place in the whole. It is argued, further, that the categories Hegel appeals to in conceiving how organisms develop through stages are useful for making sense of how the objective shape of an action unfolds over time.

In this paper, one of Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive contributions to the phenomenological conception of the link between time and agency is explored:  namely, his attempt to identify a form of agency—that of our standing dispositions—that subsists across and underlies our temporally individuated actions.  The distinctive temporal character of such general dispositions is investigated, and it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the cyclical temporality of nature, in distinction to the historical temporality associated with our episodic actions, provides a model in terms of which to understand the temporality peculiar to our practical dispositions.

Hegel's specifi c interpretation of burial rituals in the Phenomenology is an important part of his general understanding of the development of human freedom and of spirit. For Hegel, freedom is not something immediately given, but something that must be realized by way of the self's ongoing practical engagement with the world, and in particular by way of the self's transformation of the otherwise meaningless realm of nature into a vehicle for realizing a specifi cally human meaning. The practice of burial rites is construed as accomplishing such a transformation, and thereby as a crucial manner in which this dialectic between freedom and nature is played out. Attention is paid to Hegel's conception of the earth as the material condition for freedom's self-realization, and the symbolic dimension of burial rites is shown to have implications for Hegel's overall theory of human agency.

In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of embodied meaning and of intuition that Hegel appeals to in the Aesthetics anticipate some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights concerning the distinctive character of pre-conceptual, sensuous forms of meaning.  It is argued that, for Hegel, our aesthetic experience of the beautiful is such that we cannot readily differentiate in it the purportedly distinct roles that sensation and thought play, and so that the account of sensuous intuition operative here differs from the one appealed to in more familiar, “intellectualist” conceptions that are premised upon our being able to make such a distinction.  Some of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights are brought to bear to help support and illuminate some of the implications of Hegel’s conception of such sensuously embodied meaning.

It is argued that one of Hegel's main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of "spiritualized nature" that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that, though it is rooted in nature, must be understood in essentially historical terms. It is argued that for Hegel the activity of work is premised upon a commitment to the independent standing of such spiritualized nature and its historical character, and a detailed reading of Hegel's account of the slave's work in the Phenomenology of Spirit is developed to show just how it is that work transforms nature into something of historical import.

Emotion has often been conceived, both within philosophy and without, as a force that opposes itself to reason and, correspondingly, to one’s autonomy.  This impression that emotion is irrational and at odds with autonomy is, I contend, based upon traditional and problematic conceptions of what it is to be a self or subject, the agent of one’s actions.  One such problematic conception, still very much operative these days (if not in our philosophical treatises, then often in our practical lives), is the moralistic conception of a subject as inherently rational, and as actualizing her own autonomy through answering to her own rationality.  From this perspective, when someone becomes “emotional” and behaves in ways that, from an external perspective, appear inappropriate to the situation at hand, we tend to suppose that this person is “losing control of herself,” giving up on a rational way of considering the situation, and indulging in her irrational emotional impulses.  She has, we might say, chosen to indulge herself in her emotions, and thus freely relinquished her own freedom.  She is therefore fundamentally at fault for her behaviour. 
            This essay offers a criticism of this moralistic conception of agency and selfhood, and it does so through a consideration of emotion and the emotional metamorphoses that we can undergo—either towards increasingly compulsive, “mad” ways of being, or towards new epiphanies and a new sense of oneself and one’s place in the world.  Relying upon an existential understanding of the “subject as agent” as an achievement, or what one becomes, rather than as a pre-given, always present entity, I argue that emotion is not opposed to reason, but is rather an essential element of our rational development towards autonomous ways of being.  The moralistic conception of the subject, on this account, is wrong to think that a person’s emotional behaviour is simply her own fault, as if she had allowed herself to fall away from a rationality to which she has access; it mistakenly presupposes a fully developed rational self, and simultaneously fails to recognize the essential role that others play in a person’s emotional metamorphoses.  As a result,  the moralistic conception of the subject can, I suggest, be oppressive and destructive, actually helping to bring about “mad” and compulsive behaviour, instead of inspiring a greater rationality, as it hopes to do. 
To make these claims, I draw on the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, and especially on the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning.  Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation, and therein, that emotion plays an essential, internal role.  Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic, and that an individual can be propelled to increasingly rational emotional stances (her emotions can be educated) by the demands of the emotional situation itself, in the absence of any intellectual reasoning or rational training.  Appealing also to the structure and content of Socrates’ conversations, I argue that intellectual reasoning can lead to self-overcoming only insofar as it involves a particular emotional orientation towards the emotional challenges of genuine learning—insofar as it is “conscientious reasoning.”

Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant’s initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness.

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