Replies to the Comments

A few responses, bearing in mind Anthony's comments below:

1. Rejection of predictive social sciences and acceptance of virtue ethics.

On reading Anthony's rebuttal, I briefly can't remember why we thought our objection worked, but I'll try one more time: doesn't virtue ethics require some claims about what human nature is like (i.e. virtues are virtues because they help us fulfill our destiny/nature/telos)?  I guess the laws of virtue that come from that are normative, not prescriptive, but this still seems awfully similar to what social sciences claim to know about us (and then know how to tell us how to act).

2. Roles in a virtue ethics society and democratic values.

I can see how MacIntyre seems like a Marxist, and I shall ruminate on that one for a while.  A side note though - I am really more concerned with our democratic values more than our democratic government, in this case.  I take MacIntyre to be rejecting the modern understanding of individualism in the strong sense, which he should given his proposal that (different, and hierarchical) societal roles made sense of virtue ethics in ancient Greece.  Currently strong individualism supports our idea or rights (which MacIntyre openly rejects) and our theories of the democratic worth of all people.  This is the very reason why, on a close inspection, Aristotle's Greece seems to us to be very oppressive.  I am worried that is we give up strong individualism, we won't have a basis for democratic worth, and I am not prepared to do that with MacIntyre. 

Having said that, I think there would be a reasonable argument for the successive fall of our theories of democratic government as well, but not necessarily to an authoritarian/totalitarian regime.

Comments on the Objections

Anthony gives the following replies:

A couple of quick comments on these objections: on the first one, MacIntyre is objecting to a social science that models itself on the natural sciences, and therefore thinks it can come up with straightforward predictions of what will happen in society.  MacIntyre certainly thinks his own Aristotelian approach (and his brand of philosophical history - though that is really more like Hegel than Aristotle!) enables us to better understand what is going on in society, but he doesn't claim to provide scientific-style predictions of what will happen.  Virtue theory is normative rather than attempting to be predictive (in the way most orthodox social science is); it aims to tell us what we should do, but (notoriously) it does not follow from the fact that we should do something that we will.  So I don't think MacIntyre is undermined by his own argument here.

As for how we should think about democracy, individualism etc if we are convinced by MacIntyre; in some ways he is an unreconstructed Marxist, and does I think, take modern liberal democratic theory as ideology in the Marxist sense - a nice disguise for the reality of an alienated society.  But he certainly does want any kind of authoritarian/totalitarian politics either.  Hence his recommendation that we withdraw from the whole spectrum of standard political options.  But it is very hard to work out what he ultimately wants to see, or how if at all he thinks it could happen.  But no doubt about it; it is a radical stance!

Anthony

Objections to MacIntyre

Below are a few objections that have been raised in our off-line discussions that I think ought to be kept in mind:

1. (courtesy of Jon) MacIntyre's argument against the social sciences as they are currently conceived seems to be that (a) they attempt to apply prescriptive generalizations to human behavior, (b) human behavior always has and will have an element of unpredictability (free will, development, surprise, game theory success, etc.), therefore (c) the sciences are wrong to be prescriptive or to give law-like generalizations.  MacIntyre also seems to be offering Aristotelian virtue-ethics as a positive and coherent moral/social theory.  How does virtue-ethics NOT fall prey to the same argument as above?  Virtues are generalizations, at least about what SHOULD happen, concerning human behavior.  Does MacIntyre offer a rebuttal later in the book?  Is there a possible rebuttal?

2. (courtesy of Meg) Clearly MacIntyre's suggestions about how society should be changed offer a serious obstacle to retaining the conception of individualism that we have today.  Are they also, and possibly because of this, serious obstacles to retaining our democratic (egalitarianist) social views?  What about democracy itself?

[Off to vacation in the mountains. I look forward to some discussion on these topics when I return!]

Emotivism

I would be remiss if I started this review of MacIntyre without a "discussion" on emotivism. Thus, an outline of points raised in a recent discussion with a fellow philosopher of After Virtue's first chapters.

First, why does this matter? MacIntyre structures his argument very thoughtfully. He gives us a succinct picture of what a faded discipline might look like in everyday language, explains that it would be difficult for "historians" to notice the problem, but gives us hints as to how we might carefully discern the problem. Then, he gives us examples of common ethical discussions of today and points out that they exhibit the same easy-to-miss but nevertheless telltale signs of having been built on a since-collapsed knowledge structure. We should be very worried, he says.

An obvious retort would be to acknowledge that there is an emptiness behind ethical discussion, but to disagree with the assertion that this emptiness is a problem, or that the problem is solvable. MacIntyre knows that if this position were true, it would deflate his argument, so he chooses to encounter the opposition on the offensive.

Second, what is emotivism? Our discussion identifies MacIntyre's definition of it as a theory that claims that the sentence "Honesty is right" is the same as "Yay, honesty." MacIntyre views emotivist theories as linguistic theories, that is, theories about the meanings of sentences. Perhaps there is room here for deepening emotivist theories to discuss claims, not sentences. Certainly there is room for a wide variation of emotivist theories, and MacIntyre does recognize his opponent as a family of theories, rather than a single school. If MacIntyre can succeed in convincing us that emotivism is false, he is one step closer to convincing us that there is some other reason ethical language is empty, and that this is a dire problem.

Thirdly, how prevalent is emotivism? Part of MacIntyre's urgency is grounded in his opinion that most people function as emotivists and that the ethical history we acknowledge as a society is perpetuates this by consistently recreated the ethical mood to which emotivism was a natural reaction. Therefore we are consistently steered away from recognizing the dismal state of the discipline of ethics while at the same time continuing to value it as if it were not empty.

How much do we agree with MacIntyre's opinion that mild emotivism is so prevalent? On the one hand, I tend to disagree that people would ever admit to recognizing emotivism in their own ethical convictions, even if they were pressed to the point that they could give no deeper defenses of those positions. Is this just denial, buried under MacIntyre's "desire to be rational"? Possibly, but quite possibly not as well. On the other hand, I have begun to think about whether we might be able to recognize emotivism on a cultural rather than personal scale. I would certainly agree that cultural relativism is prevalent in modern American culture. Could this be construed as emotivism on a societal level? We might not be willing to identify our ethical convictions as boiling down to "Yay X" or "I approve of X." We do seem more willing, though, to explain and accept that another person's beliefs could be boiled down to "my parents/community/religion/culture taught me that yay X." Might we even be willing to use such an explanation of our own beliefs? I would say, arguably yes. And if so, the very same problems that arise with personal emotivism regarding an emptiness in ethical communication would arise here. The very same arguments that MacIntyre makes against the emotivist trends could apply.

MacIntyre and Sci Fi

MacIntyre begins After Virtue with a picture of a world that, following some disaster, has lost the framework of knowledge on which our scientific language rests. No one agrees on the correct meaning of terms like "electron" or "gravity," but these words are integrated into the spoken language to such a degree that the speakers of the language are unable to identify these words as meaningless or ambiguous, and thus continue to use them. MacIntyre asks, how could an historian, living after such a disaster, identify or explain what had gone wrong here? Seemingly scientific terminology would persist in conversation, but in actuality these conversations would be empty and meaningless (both in the sense that the participants would not agree on the meaning of the terms, and that there would be no readily available expert source). Since the terminology would continue, the historian would have to identify some other piece of evidence that something had in fact gone wrong. This evidence would have to be the facets of the empty conversation: the lack of agreement on the meaning of terms by the participants and the failure to identify a culturally agreed-upon expert source.

Of course, scientific language is a metaphor for another set of terms - ethics - and the futuristic age is a metaphor for another time - ours. MacIntyre's claim in After Virtue is that we have reached a similar stage of the degradation of the meaning of ethical language. The disaster (in this case, the failure of the Enlightenment project) is not identified by society at large for the same reason that the historian in the metaphor struggled: the use of ethical language persists. We continue to use terms like "good," "right," "should," and "sin" without significant agreement about what these terms mean. We also fail to identify a consolidated set of experts (though MacIntyre admits some philosophers and religious leaders are used to support our various ideas, but that we do not accurately acknowledge their historical context, and thus we do not properly use them as experts). Chapter 2 opens with several examples of hot ethical debates. We can see in each that the participants in the "conversation" are talking at, not with, each other. At a very basic level, they do not agree on the terms, and so when it seems they are debating the issue, they are in fact taking turns asserting their positions. Further evidence that we are indeed in such a dire situation, MacIntyre contends, is that we (subconsciously) realize that we are asserting, not arguing. The participants in the conversation quickly become, in his words, "shrill" because they are unable to convince or rationalize with their opponent. Because they are unconvincing (which they undoubtedly will be with no agreement of terms), they begin to feel unconvinced themselves.


Obviously MacIntyre's intentions in the use of the opening metaphor were to show the reader the situation of the invisible collapse of a discipline before making clear the true subject of that discipline. Nevertheless, his picture of the collapse of science is an intriguing one on its own. It is reminiscent of so many sci fi and distopia works of fiction. (Let us get it out of the way now: Yes, I like philosophy AND sci fi. I am an embarrassingly enormous nerd. Moving on...)

On such sci fi novel was mentioned in a review I read of After Virtue. The review suggested Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz as a novel with a premise of striking similar premise to that of MacIntyre's metaphor. I picked up the book and have been reading it alongside After Virtue, attempting to imagine it as a metaphor for ethical language also (though I have admittedly been drawn into reading the book for its own virtues and forgetting to "translate").

In the novel a world-wide nuclear war has wiped out most of the population, deformed many, and largely ruined all civilizations. As a reaction to the disaster, mobs of "simpleton" survivors take revenge upon the political leaders, the educated, and all learning (science, books, literacy in general), effectively erasing nearly all forms of the transference of knowledge. While civilization dwindles to roaming tribal clans, one organization has remained, drastically reduced in power. This organization is the Catholic Church (though not exactly as we would recognize it now). A small order has developed in the Church which quietly collects, copies, and memorizes any books, papers, or slivers of knowledge that seem scientific in nature. What is understood by the monks is at approximately the level we now guess at long-lost cultures like the Maya. Speculation and confusion abound, and the manpower involved is strikingly small. Still, the monks are diligent in their project, which they see as preserving pieces of information for "future generations," who will come after the rage against science has died. I think the same question is being raised here as is in After Virtue: once the knowledge and even the ways of obtaining the knowledge have been lost, is it at all possible for those future generations to piece together a discipline which was once so vast as to encompass a mind-boggling number of specialists, books, papers - a whole history of its own. We shall see if such a thing happens in this book, and if I am convinced it could happen with ethics.

Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

The next major adventure of this blog will be a more modern one: Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. The analysis will be based off of the original 1981 text, which does not include the Postscript and Prologue added in the two subsequent editions.

For a jumpstart on MacIntyre, check out the International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy, IEP's article on the philosopher, and First Things' Edward Oakes comments on MacIntyre's life achievements.

Absolute Knowing

VIII. Absolute Knowing (§788-808)

Envisioning unity in the indefinite future is a symptom of the Spirit still not quite identifying itself in the Other (in this case, the Divine). There are disadvantages to both identifying the self purely materially (as a manifestation) and identifying the self as purely abstract (the beautiful soul) (§795). There is still a break between duty and actions in the world. Forgiveness helps us to see past this division, and allow the Spirit to see itself as Spirit (§793). In this way, religion is the first way in which we can describe true Spirit self-understanding. However, philosophy is a more precise way to describe this recognition of Spirit by itself (§802).

Philosophy is able to more clearly grasp that opposites are unified; with it Ego is able to understand that it is, that it must accept, Nature as the various and true manifestations of itself. With it, Spirit can understand the notions that are itself, and transcend without denying these, into self-consciousness (§806). In this relationship with Absolute Knowledge, Spirit returns, in a more enlightened way, to the beginning of the processes - to sense-certainty (immediacy):

806. Absolute Knowledge contains within itself this necessity of relinquishing itself from notion, and necessarily involves the transition of the notion into consciousness. For Spirit that knows itself is, just for the reason that it grasps its own notion, immediate identity with itself; and this, in the distinction that it implies, is the certainty of what is immediate or is sense-consciousness – the beginning from which we started. This process of releasing itself from the form of its self is the highest freedom and security
of its knowledge of itself.

Still, Knowledge recognizes its limits, and understands that it, too, has an opposite. To join with its opposite, the Spirit passes into Nature. Flux exists here too: Spirit becomes Nature, Nature calls up Spirit (§807). In reaction to the limits of Knowledge, Spirit externalizes into Space.

Knowledge also recognizes itself, and must also come to terms with itself. It does so by externalizing Spirit into Time, that is History, the center of Hegel's philosophy (§808). Although he does not phrase it in this way, I think this explains why "original" creation by God (Divine Spirit) necessarily was, and necessarily was material (spatial) and changing (historical).

The Incarnation of God - Hegel's Theology

The Reality of the Incarnation of God (§758-787)

Out of its despair, however, the Spirit is driven to its essense: its knowledge of itself. It knows Spirit, thus it is a believer in Spirit, and recognizes Spirit as a "definite self-consciousness," as a reality, as the divine Self (§758) (critique of Descartes).

The incarnation of the Divine in human form, or Christ, is the obvious and natural revelation of the Absolute Spirit as a divine self. But the individual of Christ is in a way lacking, in a way not universal (as the Spirit revealed in government will). It must dialectically pass into the past (die) in order to synthesize a universal (Holy Spirit) that all of the believing community can participate in (§763-764). Concentrating religious belief on the individual (historical) Christ can stagnate religion (§766).

The dialectics of the Divine and the individual are procedurally the same, and are intertwined. The individual progresses from thought (logic) to material (Nature), then to self-consciousness (Spirit). The Divine progresses from essence (Father) to being-for-self (Logos, Christ), then to "self-knowledge in [the] other" (Holy Spirit) (§770).

Creation and the supposed fall of man is also a natural process, in which the pure thought of God becomes manifest in nature, then becomes an independent thinking Spirit of its own (§773-773). This independence is judged as evil (angelic or human) (§776). Hegel rejects, however, the theological view that evil is the absence of God. Instead, the big picture is that evil is a "distant" part of God (there is nothing outside God), and that in the individual (human/angel), an evil act is the beginning of morality, of self-ness. This understanding of evil characterizes it as disobedience, but not as unnatural, inhuman, or even entirely ungodly.

Disobedience and individual selfhood is our dialetical step "away" from identifying with God, and reconciliation is our step back, and salvation (unity with God) is the synthesis. Hegel explains that the reason believers see salvation as an occurence "something far away in the future" and reconciliation as "away in the distance of the past" is that the spiritual place inhabited by believers is still in the process, it has momentum between the antithesis and the synthesis (§787).

Religion

VII. Religion (§672-758)

Hegel's goal in this section is to run through the manifestations of religion, as the process relates to the process of the Spirit realizing itself in the individual. Like the individual consciousness, the process is a unity, with each religion/religious type represents one coil in the spring. Hegel sees history as bearing out this growth, as well as (more vaguely) the journey of the individual Spirit in religious investigation.

"Religion" as Hegel uses it is perhaps not what we mean by the term today. I would say we understand it today to mean an organized institution composed of believers, as opposed to spirituality (personal belief and experiences with the divine). Hegel seems to use it to mean something different than an institution or spirituality. His meaning is closer to understanding, that is, how the Spirit (individual) understands the Spirit (the Absolute and itself -- it is the 'and itself' that distinguishes this "Religion" from the religious impulses discussed in previous sections).

Hegel runs through historical examples of each of the coils of the spring: understanding the Absolute as energy, vegetable, animal, and man-made object; as man-made beauty, artists and participatory art (e.g. hymns), sacraments and traditions, and as language and drama. Like our experience of developing self-consciousness, history's experience of developing religion grows from a dimly perceived vague generalization to a entirely concrete (and controlled) object, and then from that to an increasingly dynamic and also increasingly self-oriented object. Religion begins pass "from the form of substance into that of Subject" (§748).

As the understanding of Religion becomes more self-oriented (the Spirit seeing itself in the Absolute), there is a temptation to reject the divine Absolute "and [bestow] on the spiritless self, on the individual person, complete existence on its own account" (the Roman Empire) (§750). The inherent emptiness of the self cuts short this temptation. Spirit despairs in its temptation.

Democratic Governments: Individual Will or Multiple Wills

Our recent discussion on whether Hegel's comment that governments must become individual in order to will one specific thing distilled into essentially (ha ha) this: in today's democratic governments, are there legitimately many wills in one government (as opposed to individual desires with diverse wants who alternately hold power)? My claim is that today's democratic governments are no longer what Hegel meant by "individual wills," and though they may tend that way during some periods of consolidation of power, they do not necessarily tend that way. What is more, we do not want them to become individual wills. That is, because they do not fit Hegel's individual will picture does not mean that they are not functioning governments, or at least, functioning near the level that we want them to be functional.

A little note in support of what I am trying to say, though it's a bit of a tangent, can be seen at Philosophy et cetera. The gist of this post is that institutions matter in terms of validating actions, which outside the institution might not be appropriate. I'd move that this is because the of will we recognize the institution to have. So a policeman can dole out justice and a vigilante cannot, just because we expect that the policeman is carrying out the will of the institution he represents and thus can be swayed away from his own opinion, should it deviate. A vigilante has no such institution whose will to be a part of. 

Small institutions like the police force can have a will (just like Hegel's government, but in a complete sense). Further, I think institutions of the government can have separate wills, and that indeed they must in order to act as real checks and balances. They must be able to at times pit their wills against one another in order to keep the government functioning (or, "functioning")  the way we want it to.

Conscience, Evil and Its Forgiveness

C. Conscience. The ‘Beautiful Soul’. Evil and its Forgiveness (§632-671)

In withdrawing from the impossible reconciliation of moral duties and Nature, self-consciousness rejects positions that draw contradictions between laws of duty and real action. Instead self-consciousness determines that what it is inwardly sure of must be the truth, the right action (§635). The surety is conscience. Conscience's judgements are individual, but the recognition of conscience as the right is understood by all conscientious persons (§640).

Conscience is a way in which morality can be both individual, non-categorical, but also universal, befitting of the true essence of morality (§638). All of the acts of conscience for the good of the self could be defended as for the good of the universal, but the self is aware that not all consciences will determine them to be so. Therefore conscience, the very manifestation of surety of self, also wrestles with self-doubt (§648). An act must be made by a fully-conscious actor to be beyond the doubt of others. This criterion is so strong that it excludes the criterion of real-world consequences (§651).

Language is the means of relation between all persons, and thus it is the mode of relations between conscientious actors (§652).

Conscience, as the will that is not tied to real-world consequences is essentially empty; it is tempted not to act in the real world at all, to avoid compromising its pure will (§655-657). This is the "beautiful soul" - an uncommitted Spirit (§658).

This Spirit looks down on the active individual and judges it. The active individual is guilty of imperfect action, and is aware of this, but the beautiful soul is in turn guilty of judging without deigning to be involved in the action. Here again we see an opposition or juxtaposition of parts of the self. Hegel claims that this is an appearance of God (§671), but leaves any explanation of this claim to the following section, Religion.

Duplicity

B. Duplicity (§616-631)

The consciousness runs into contradictions about morality at every turn. It is not possible to make Nature/reality a moral utopia because this destroys the very notion of moral laws (as discussed the in previous section, below) (§620). It is not possible to fully divorce the self from Nature and exist in a moral realm alone (§622). Morality, then, is doomed to always be imperfect. It cannot, therefore, be connected to happiness or the desert of happiness, which must instead be obtained through grace (§624-625). A divine being is needed to make sense of the relationship of morality and happiness, but even in this being the duplicity of morality in the world remains a conundrum (§629). Consciousness retreats into itself qua consciousness to escape this duplicity (§631)

Morality

C. Morality (§596-598)
A. The Moral View of the World (§599-615)

The Spirit has now entered a world in which it understands its unity with a spiritual universal, and thus understands its duty (moral action). It understands and performs this duty; on a spiritual level it both gives the laws of duty and performs them (Kant). On a practical level, however, the moral conscience is a process, not an unchanging state of moral understanding. This is because the moral conscience must mediate, it must make decisions about how laws of duty apply to actual circumstances, and it must deal with the human question of the relationship of moral action and happiness (I take this to mean personal success and worldly consequences of actions).

In the practical sense the moral world cannot be perfect. The consciousness postulates a moral perfection - God - so as to make sense of its own imperfectness by describing a relationship: the sinner to God. However, there are too many questions inherent in the picture of God as a moral perfection (§608-612). Most problematically, comparing the morally imperfect world (the place where moral laws apply) to a morally perfect one is to suggest that the greatest moral perfection is a world in which moral laws are not necessary or do not apply. The paradox here means we cannot take the perfection of moral laws to be the true goal of Spirit (§613-615).

Absolute Freedom and Terror

III. Absolute Freedom and Terror (§582-595)

As the individual self-consciousness identifies with the whole, it understands itself as the universal. The individual will becomes the universal will. The goal of will is utility. The universal will, however, uses its utility because to will an action the will-er must be singular, unique. Even the government discovers this problem, as it must become individual to will one definite thing. As the universal will constantly dirempts into individual representations of it, class and function differences again arise, throwing Spirit back to the beginning of the dilemma. Again, the Spirit runs into a paradox of intention and the impossibility of carrying it out.

The Spirit leaves this realm of paradox for a world in which it is free: the realm of absolute freedom. The Spirit leaves behind the essential negativity of the universal will / individual action dichotomy, and enters a world in which it is sure of its will, divorced from specificity (therefore consequences).

A note on this section: Hegel's comments on the government necessarily becoming "individual" does not apply well to the kind of democracy we have today. Would Hegel say anything different now, with more evidence of functioning democracies, or would he say that the arguing voices in our government is exactly why we, as a country, can't will one definite thing?

Enlightenment

II. Enlightenment (§538-581)

Hegel explores the opposition of faith, as he has described it in the previous section (below), and pure insight, which at this point I would describe as rationality, or something akin to what we might today imagine as perfectly scientific thinking. This is possibly way off.

Enlightenment, as the goal of pure insight, is opposed to faith, the house of beliefs (esp. religious). What enlightenment opposes seems to be dogmatism and superstition, but at root this is mostly the fault of the power-hungry human failings of the priestly class. Faith is in turn opposed to enlightenment, since it seeks an all too-easy, undialectical (non-fluctuating) truth. I'd say of all the opposites, Hegel is harsher in his critique of enlightenment than he generally is, perhaps exposing some religious defensiveness himself. A rather pleasing summary of Hegel's religious leanings and defense are summarized well by Findlay:

549. The object of religion is rightly declared by enlightenment to be a product of the religious man’s thought, but it is wrongly supposed that this means that this object is a mere fabrication. The religious man’s trust in God is a recognition of the identity of God with his own rational being. The worship of the religious community is likewise something in which God comes to be as the spirit of that community, and does not remain blandly beyond it.

The remainder of the Enlightenment sections are spent trying to resolve the fight between faith and pure insight. The Spirit is again left in a situation of flux between the two, unable to reconcile the abstract Supreme and the concrete, this time on a cosmic level.

Culture, Faith, and Pure Insight

I. Spirit in Self-Alienation (§484-537)

Hegel explores the reaction of the mind as an individual to culture at large. The State and the pursuit of personal wealth (in profit-incentive economic systems) are opposed, at least apparently, as the embodiments of service and selfishness. A person chooses either the noble-minded road of favoring the State, or the base road of favoring financial success. In practice, however, these two apparent opposites are like all of Hegel's dialectics: they merge and are in flux. Service requires flattery which is an endeavor in selfishness and the selfish pursuit of wealth is in fact an engagement in an end that is universally appreciated. Again, these two cannot be fully separated. The paradox alienates the mind from the world of culture.

The next level of the spiral is the realm of the religious. The naive faith imagines the world of the religious as a perfect world of "pictures," of projections of what is perfect in our world. But it seems the spiritual should be an ethereal place of un-understandable abstract infiniteness. These two opposites meld into what Hegel sees as the truth of religion, a truth borne out in the Trinity (finite touchable, perfected humanity in the Son; abstract infiniteness in the Father; and the dialectic result in the Holy Spirit -- in this case the middle term is dialectically and chronologically the Son) (§532-533). Hegel appears to think that this is what those outside the Church cannot understand: the dialectic joining of what looks like idol worship with what looks like fantasy yields a truth that is neither (§534, 552-554).

Objective Spirit: The Ethical Order

BB. Spirit
A. The True Spirit: The Ethical Order (§438-483)

Its essential spiritual being (Wesen) has been above designated as the ethical substance; spirit, however, is concrete ethical actuality. Spirit is the self of the actual consciousness...

Hegel identifies the ethical as the essence of Spirit and the Spirit as the inner self. It is the same, he claims, on the level of society, in which the Spirit is the human law. The human or practical law has its actualization in the government (§448). But the ethical is also actualized in the divine law, which is exemplified in natural "family" relations.

Hegel uses the traditional roles of women and men in their various relationships to discuss the interactions of the actualized human law, divine law; the personal and the universal. Ethical flux is the passage in to and fro between these extremes. In history this flux can be influenced by persons (§464). Justice is the force by which the balance of the two extremes can be restored - like the force of movement in the pendulum (§462).

I am not totally clear on the following paragraphs, which run through a quick discussion of the epic struggle between the two laws through history. Seems like the finiteness of the human law dooms it to lose, but the constant renewal of the human players keeps the whole process in flux: a history long spiral of the same kind as all of Hegel's processes.

Individuality: Action and Judgement

C. Individuality Which Takes Itself to Be Real In and For Itself (§394-437)

In this section Hegel attempts to fill the space left open when he rejected the physical sciences as a way to judge or determine the character of an individual. Hegel considers actions, or one action, and to what extent these can be used to determine the inner person.

Hegel's determination is that action arises from the inner self (desire -> will -> action), and so we can regard it as a more pure representation of the inner. He also holds that as each action comes from this inner self, so each action can be thought to represent the same inner self (§402). That said, actions can only be judged in an external manner, as their consequences occur in the external world and are contingent (§403-409).

A person is most concerned with his own action and circumstance, and is will to demand of others that they be so concerned. Each individual is like this, and so, in a way, universalizes their self-concern (§417-419).

Hegel challenges Kant in "Reason as Lawgiver" by attempting to show that reason cannot give us an ethical system born out of itself (universalized imperatives). Instead, reason can only judge systems as to the extent of their consistency (§420-428). However, we will soon realize that opposing theories can be internally consistent (§431). Therefore genuine effort must be expended in deciding what should be done. This is a continual process in the imperfect (and imperfectable?) practical laws of a society, unlike the true divine law (§437).

Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness: Society

B. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Its Own Activity (§347-396)

Hegel now moves to the level of society. The individual self-consciousness is discussed in a progression of roles/relations to society. In the first the individual lives within the socially acceptable - a shallow form of living in an ethical manner (§349). The self-consciousness may, at some point oppose some social customs (it seems, when his desire disagrees with them, and he realizes that the social customs are not within his nature but imposed on him). This individual chooses to act selfishly, or for his own good only, perhaps to knowingly obstruct the functioning of society (§360-363). The desire or will becomes a law of a kind, but is unfulfilling in its individualism (§364-366).

As the self pursues this goal of orienting itself to the "law of the heart," it is frustrated by the realization that not each individual's desires and wills conform. If the self then attempts to make its own law a universal one, it comes full circle, realizing that what it means to do hear is what societal customs also meant to do: attain universality (§376). Hegel then runs this same description, associating the "law of the heart" with virtue and the social customs with the "way of the world."

Physiognomy and Phrenology

c. Observation of the relation of self-consciousness to its immediate actuality. Physiognomy and Phrenology. (§309-346)

I'll admit right out that a little part of me died of boredom each time I realized there were another 10 pages about dents in a person's skull during this section so...I may not have caught it all. But here's what I imagine Hegel might have been saying underneath the incredibly long analysis of a forgotten "science":

Hegel rejects "sciences" like palm-reading, etc. just as we would, but he does not reject them for the same reason. We would reject these faux-sciences because they are inaccurate (they do not predict the personality, the future, etc.). We do not believe the lines in the palm to be in any way related to the personality. But Hegel rejects them after defending their ability to be somewhat predictive, after showing how he believes lines in the hand can demonstrate something about the inner self. The reason he rejects these "sciences," it seems to me, is that he thinks his philosophy can do better in predicting or determining truths about the inner world. And he should be claiming this, given that he is saying that we can know about the inner world but is aware of the apparent disconnect of the sciences and the inner world. Though we might scoff now at Hegel giving genuine consideration to things like skull dents and palm lines, I think he would make the same argument for rejecting the more advanced predictive sciences we have today. To disagree with him on this point, then, we must be prepared to give an argument as to why science has better access to the inner world than does philosophy. Though I am not a fan of this section, I can't say I am prepared to offer this profession-defeating argument!

Observing Reason

C. (AA) Reason
V. The Certainty and Truth of Reason
A. Observing Reason (§231-308)

In this long section Hegel shows how our reason observes and interacts with the inorganic and the organic. When observing the inorganic we naturally try to find physical laws that explain what we experience. In general these can be found, but at this point reason fails to fully distinguish what is in nature and what is in our observation of nature, and fails to see nature as emanating from a single essence.

When regarding the organic, Hegel identifies only a few "laws" that govern the living: instincts to sensibility, irritability, and reproduction. These relatively fewer limitations, and their more tenuous hold on living beings, are meant to leave room for genuine freedom:

...as regards law and necessity, when observation connects the organic with the merely given differences of the inorganic, the elements, zones, and climates, it does not get beyond the idea of a 'great influence.'

In my opinion this is the first real uphill battle Hegel has yet had to fight (the objections that we see him consider here are much more formidable than elsewhere).

Hegel proceeds to claim that the fuzziness of the connection between the outer world and the individual means that there are no laws connecting them in regards to the cognition of the individual. I myself am pretty fuzzy on how he gets to this claim. Does he need this to have freedom of thought? And thus will? What are the "Laws of Thought?"

Lordship, Bondage, and Forms of Freedom

A. Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (§178-196) & B. Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness (§197-231)

The natural reaction to our fear of the Other as a valid I is played out in the master-slave dialectic for which Hegel is so famous.

Hegel recognizes that the desire to abolish the Other first takes us to the life-and-death struggle. Hegel rejects this as a common actualization, however, because "trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self-generally" (§188).

Instead, we try to abolish the Other by fully subsuming the Other into ourselves. We assert our will on the Other as the master. This too fails to fully validate the self. The I is identified with the will, and the will naturally with action, or work. The master projects his will onto the slave, who performs the work. Eventually the slave understands that he has the validity of self by virtue of being the actor, and the master understands that he has lost the validity of self by divorcing his will with the performance of actions (§195). The unfulfilling nature of this situation keeps the process in constant flux, which I take Hegel to believe we can see in history.

Hegel then gives three pictures of possible reactions to the master-slave problem. The first, stoicism, is to withdraw into thought or the world of theory. This person is indifferent to the problem because he refused to engage in it with the Spirit, though he does so with his action (§199). The second, scepticism, is to withdraw into the world of doubt. This person is lost in the paradoxes of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding, and is unable to make sense of the flux of life (§203).

The third possibility is the Unhappy Consciousness. The Unhappy Consciousness finds a middle ground of sorts - it admits and embraces both the unchangeableness and the changeableness (unity/many, theory/doubt), but it cannot understand how to embrace both simultaneously. The flux of this situation is the reason for the unhappiness we experience at this stage (§216-230). Perhaps teen-age angst provides us with an example of this kind of dissatisfaction with the world. In fact, what it reminds me of most is Camus' realization of the absurd. Of course, the two philosophers move in very different directions from this point.

The Truth of Sense-Certainty

B. Self-Consciousness

IV. The Truth of Sense-Certainty (§166-177)

To our sense-certainty, an object has being. To our perception, many properties and one unity. Our understanding begins to see objects as existing in the process of Force. In this next section, Hegel how consciousness understands objects as having being-for-self and being-for-another.

Our experience of other objects and our realization that the mediation that occurs between the I and the object (via sense-certainty, perception, and understanding) forces us to realize the uniqueness of the I in terms of it's position in the world for us. However, we immediately understand that as we see objects and other people as "Other," so they must see us, wrapped up in the world of their own I. So in this way, the I has frighteningly little uniqueness (§167).
Our fear of the Other as its own valid I results in a desire to abolish the Other (or the Otherness of the Other) (§172). We are frustrated in this attempt due to the very fact that we realize our own I in opposition to the Other. We are unable to abolish the Other because it exists in ourselves (§175)

Force and the Understanding

III. Force and the Understanding (§132-165)

Hegel defines Force as that process through which many disappear into unity and back again (§136). This reflects the flux of instances and indexicals in sense-certainty, and properties and unified objects in perception. Being-for-self and being-for-another will also follow this process.

Force as a process is inevitable and unending because of the nature of our mediated relation to objects and the dependency of ourselves and of objects on otherness (§138-144). Force also applies to physical laws (§150-153).

Hegel's system of opposites leads him to posit a supersensible world of laws and a second world that is an inverted version of the first. I am largely unclear on what this does for Hegel's claims, aside from keeping some sort of consistency of structure in his metaphysics. It strikes me as a bit arbitrary, though, to stop the repetition of this structure. The structure seems as if it could be an infinite regression, or rather an infinite progression in which more and more encompassing systems and their inversions could be discussed. If Hegel has found some way to stop this ad absurdum progression, why didn't he stop it before (or after) exactly two supersensible opposite-worlds?

Perception

II. Perception (§111-131)

After the immediate experience of an object in sense-certainty comes perception. Perception understands the sensible properties of an object beyond existence (§111) The seeming paradox of perception is that several properties seem to exist non-exclusively in one object. That is, an object's color and texture each exist in all divisions of the object, yet both can exist separately in other objects and are thus not the one property. Perception is able to conceive of an object as both one (unity) and a conglomeration (many) (§113).

Perception is able to understand that some mistakes about properties are the fault of itself, not of errors in the object (§116). Still, it is not willing to take responsibility for the many-unity paradox (§117). Consciousness re-evaluates the process of perception and understands that the paradox exists and makes sense when understood as a perception of an object whose Truth is then reflected into the subject (§117-123).

*Note: Hegel's view on properties as being coexistent but not dependent might be challenged by our modern understanding of atomic structure, which shows us that properties of objects do in fact arise from one essential structure and thus the white color of salt could be said to be more closely related to the cubical shape of salt than it is to the white color of a sheet. I'd say that if that challenge stands, Hegel's method of the dialectic might be in trouble, but then again, we're still talking about an essential "inner" truth here so...maybe not.

Sense-Certainty

A. Consciousness

I. Sense-Certainty (§90-110)
Hegel ascribes to our senses the ability to affirm the existence, the be-ing, of an object. Though sense-certainty is unaware of this, we can discern from the process of the senses an essential subject-object relationship in which each requires the other. The truth of an object's reality is not dependent, however, on this mediation process (§90-93).

When we inquire into what "This" (object as existent) the sense-certainty understands, we discover that the "Thises" are essentially indexicals, as illustrated by the "Here" and "Now" examples (§94-109). The universal rather than instantial understanding of being is dependent on the mediation provided by sense-certainty. Hegel appears to be claiming here that our minds do and must use this framework to build an understanding of the world.

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Starting this blog mid-text clearly won't result in the most comprehensive coverage of the Phenomenology, but backtracking extensively in this dense text is far too daunting of a task for Post #1. Instead of attempting such a project, I will provide below a bare-bones summary of the broad moves I take Hegel to be making in A. Consciousness - BB. Spirit (§90-438), and then continue with more in-depth postings thereafter. Constructive comments elaborating on the early sections of the book will be highly appreciated. All analysis is done from the A.V. Miller/J.N. Findlay publication. If you do not have this version check out the text and Findlay's commentary, as well as tons of other helpful Hegel info at the Marxist Internet Archive.

For quick starting points and references on Hegel and the Phenomenology, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia, EpistemeLinks' recommendation - an introduction by Prof. Eric Steinhart, or the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.