Simon Lumsden

There is a simple story to be told about Derridarsquo;s relation to Hegel. He develops his core concepts such as diffeacute;rance and trace through an essentially negative relation to the central notions of the idealist tradition. Derrida has been particularly concerned to undermine what he takes to be the heart of the idealist projectmdash;the self-present subject. This paper examines the influence of Heidegger on the deconstructive critique of idealist subjectivity and presents Derridarsquo;s alternative to the metaphysical subject. It argues that his critique of idealist subjectivity does not accord with Hegelrsquo;s presentation of subjectivity when one conceives that project as a response to problems in the view of subjectivity developed by Fichte and Kant. br /

Hegel had taken the Kantian categories of thought to be merely formal, without content, since, he argued, Kant abstracted the conditions of thought from the world. The Kantian categories can, as such, only be understood subjectively and so are unable to secure a content for themselves. Hegel, following Fichte, tried to provide a content for the logical categories. In order to reinstate an objective status for logic and conceptuality he tries to affirm the unity of thought and being. The idea that this unity is established by reinstating a pre-Kantian metaphysics has in most of the recent Hegel literature been discredited. In the wake of this non-metaphysical Hegel there is a concern that the architectonic of concepts which is taken as the organizing principle of consciousness offers an account of experience which is too schematic. While Hegel disputes the intuition/concept distinction as it is played out in Kant and Fichte, he does nevertheless retain some residue of a notion of intuition in his theory of the Concept. This is central to understanding his notion of experience as it can't simply be equated with rule governed conceptuality. Satisfying the demands of reason for Hegel requires more than conceiving our experience solely as judgments.

The paper argues against those who interpret Hegel's project as concerned above all with reconciliation. These interpreters usually take reconciliation to be a historical achievement produced by thought moving along a self-correcting pathway. On this view, modernity is its high point, since here Spirit is at home with itself, its freedom realized. The paper argues that in Hegel's assessment of philosophy's role, Spirit's dissatisfaction is more fundamental than reconciliation, and hence philosophy cannot be considered as striving for an ultimate reconciliation and cannot be incorporated into a social theodicy.

In Totality and Infinity Levinas presents the 'face to face' as an account of intersubjectivity, but one which maintains the absolute difference of the Other. This essay explores the genesis of the 'face to face' through a discussion of Levinas in relation to Buber. It is argued that Levinas' account of subjectivity shares much in common with Fichte's theory of subjectivity. It is further argued that while the 'face to face' clarifies and opposes traditional problems in social ontology, the 'face to face' is unable to avoid the traditional problems of social ontology that it seeks to avoid

The argument of the book develops through four chapters, all of which are heavily reliant on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. There is little engagement with Hegel’s systematic works, the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. Instead, Hegel’s thought of god and religion is determined almost entirely by his lectures on religion, and the argument is largely constructed through a detailed use of quotations from these lectures. The first chapter is concerned to position Hegel in relation to the traditional defenses and critiques of the ontological proof of god’s existence. Calton argues that Hegel agrees with many of Kant’s criticisms of the ontological proof, though he transforms them to give his own critique of Anselm’s ontological proof, all of which is leading to his own formulation of the ontological proof, which is outlined in chapter 2. The form that this proof takes is the development of “a self-grounding concept of god”, which would demonstrate that being is necessarily entailed by the concept of god. What distinguishes Hegel’s ontological proof from earlier attempts is the development of an objective concept of god. The concept of an objective god entails being as our knowledge of the world is in fact knowledge of a “creative and self-communicating mind of which the world is an expression”. Being is a type of consciousness writ large of which we have experience and knowledge because we are participants in it. The next two chapters illustrate the nature of that participation. In the third chapter Calton argues that this ontology shows itself to have a Trinitarian structure, as only such a structure allows for knowledge of god, a knowledge which god’s self-expression requires. The fourth chapter discusses various forms of community required for such a knowledge and the developmental stages of human history required for this knowledge and ultimately for the reconciliation of humans with god.

At every point of transition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit each shape of consciousness becomes a seemingly irreconcilable contradiction. It is just at these points, however, that the shape of consciousness in question shows itself as a 'higher' or more adequate shape of consciousness that is able to suspend or move beyond [aufheben] these seemingly irreconcilable differences. The transitions in Hegel's systematic works are complicated and often bewildering. One element is constant in all of them, however: a type of one-sided abstraction which Hegel calls Verstand. It expresses itself as the unyielding manner in which the shapes of consciousness or categories of thought adhere to the certainty of their truth claims. This certainty inevitably expresses itself in antinomies; antinomies that the logic of Verstand itself is unable to reconcile; only reason can achieve this. Verstand cannot be conflated with the dialectical movement as a whole; nevertheless, Verstand has a central and important role to play in the dialectical logic of both the PhG and the Science of Logic. It is a limited way of thinking which abstracts and isolates, but it is powerful, initiating and sustaining the dialectical mechanic of conceptual development in Hegel's systematic works.

Kant's account of subjectivity is ambiguous: there is an implicit critique of Descartes in Kaaat, but this is in conflict with more Cartesian aspects of his approach to subjectivity. Fichte develops the critical elements of Kant and turns them against Kant's residual Cartesianism. Fichte, in the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, is the first to be aware of the limitations of the reflective model of consciousness. In those texts he presents his alternative model for subjectivity by trying to conceive of selfconsciousness such that the self-relation makes no separation between thinker and thought. While Fichte's insight into the limitations of the reflective model of consciousness is generally accepted, his own account of the character of the immediate self-relation, which he presents as the alternative to the reflective model, was never satisfactorily resolved. The exposition of Fichte will examine his theory of subjectivity in relation to the central notion of striving; it will be argued that the notion of a striving subject tries to reconcile the dichotomy of idealism and realism.